2 mos

week 9 observations:
- His vocal development: louder cries and some new sounds.
- His crawling. Andy has very strong legs as doc confirmed from the beginning. He kicks a lot. In our new tummy time routine, we keep a hand at his feet as a kick board, he propels himself with a couple of strong kicks to move forward. His head is turned sideways and slides forward with the kick. His hands try to help but still a bit weak. He often crosses the entire width of a full size bed this way if we cheer for each step. I call it his little worm movement (especially fitting in his green stripes outfit). Pictures here.
- He stands. He can stand up straight for a good few seconds on your lap.

Andy and I went for a walk yesterday, and got a picture of the winter sunset by the lake.

Sunday Drawing
It's his 2 mo birthday today. Dad really loves his grandpa babysitting job; he's been taking Andy out for walks and holding him a lot. Too much that his back is hurting again (even after the expensive massage yesterday). So I took Andy to the drawing session with me again while he rests up. Old timers commented how much he's grown. Yeah some outfits that used to be dangling with empty leg holes are now fitting almost too tight lengthwise. He behaved well again grooving to Lyle's classical music (slept through the first half, ate and stayed awake curious eyed for the other). Pictures here.

Snuggler classes
Last week we talked about holiday traditions. It was quite interesting to hear lots of stories, conflicts of couples having different views and the resolutions. I think I'd like to adopt the one of filling a shoebox with gifts for the less fortunate kids; I think it'd be fun to involve Andy in such holiday tradition early on. But I think this holiday has gotten so commercialized that people look to the mall mad house as the way to express caring. I'm so glad my family isn't part of that. We usually just have a nice home cooked meal to gather family and friends together. Another tradition I started in the last few years is to see the lights at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. Some classmates already took babies there and said they liked it so we'll continue that this year.

This week we had a yoga instructor came in and demoed some yoga movement. They created new mom sessions where you could do with baby by your side (and even involve the baby in some poses).

One thing I love about the class is that we get to ask questions (and each time I seem to have new ones). Andy always had so much sleep in his eyes that sometimes he couldn't open his eyes. When I asked about that, clogged tear ducts turned out to be a common problem. One remedy a classmate said was to squirt breast milk into the baby's eyes. She was skeptical about it, but it kept the baby's eyes clear all day when she tried. So I tried that a couples times and his eyes definitely been much better this week. From time to time I read about new literatures about benefits of breast milk popping up. Almighty the breast milk! It makes me feel all the work was worth it.

Breast feeding
I made some progress on that. I'm nursing and pumping very frequently so he's taking much less formula and I can get close 6 oz a day from pumping now (we've been keeping detailed feeding log as part of my scientific experiments on milk production). But the lack of sleep from that and the slow flow of milk is still frustrating. I thought this article resonates to a lot of what I'm going through.