Linnaeus 9.1

Sprout now weighs exactly 19 pounds (8.6 kg) & seems to be staying around the 40th percentile for weight. In the past, he was more of a 15th percentile skinny-baby. As long as he's following that line on the growth chart or skipping up a percentile, rather than dropping into a lower one, I don't care where he's at. On a related note, people keep commenting on how tall he is, or guessing his age to be 6-9 months older than he actually is. He's always been above average in height, sitting at the 75th percentile at the moment. If he keeps growing like he is, he might end up taller than his Auntie Sarah (she's a hair under six feet).

Still no crawling yet, but he's sticking his bum up in the air a bit sometimes & is perfecting his belly-spinner routine. I am definitely happy that he isn't precocious in this regard. I see other mamas chasing their lightning-fast babies around & despite the extra calorie-burn they're probably getting, I'm not jealous.

Tooth #5 popped through Monday after much drooling & gnawing. He keeps chomping cloth things like his sleeves, socks & blankets, then pulling them out between his clenched teeth. So now he's got upper & lower central incisors, plus one lateral incisor. Which, according to a chart I got from the dental presentation at the baby group, is exactly the usual order. He's on the early end of the age ranges given, though.

Sprout has really started to enjoy books. He points to things in the pictures on each page & loves the sound effects I make when reading Farm. When nursing him before bed he kicks up a fuss if he sees a book on the table beside the 'mimi chair' & won't quiet down until I read it to him. I hope to continue reading books to him before bed for a long time. :)

Sprout's fine motor control continues to improve. He can now easily pick up small, slippery bits of fruit & get them into his mouth almost all the time. He ate an entire pear cut into pieces of various sizes Monday.

He's also gotten fairly adept at pulling apart the pieces of his play mat, then gnawing the hell out of them. I love the design of it, the colours & shapes are great, but the fact that it's made up of so many small pieces makes it more of a toy than just flooring. I recently heard that there are higher-than-advisable levels of formamides in some foam play mats, prompting a total recall on them in several European countries. After a little web research, I discovered that Skip Hop says their mats "...received the lowest possible score,<2ug/m3 (less than 2 millionths of a gram per cubic meter) for Formamide emissions, the lowest measurable result with this testing method.  These tests show that – within the limits of the test – its presence is essentially not detectable." So I'm not going to pack it up & chuck it just yet. I would like to come up with a solution that prevents Sprout from disassembling it daily, though...