Great Day With Zack

I'm cheating, since this picture is not from today.  This is Wes and Zack playing in the park last week.  Coupla' dudes, just hanging out.

Zack was spacey and feverish yesterday and took a two hour nap in my lap.  Yep, that's not exactly sleep training, but I got to watch the inauguration and whole bunch of other TV.  He woke up with a slight fever again this morning, so I kept him home and stayed home from work.  He was a lot better by mid-morning, and then we just had an excellent day together.  Playing, reading, walking, eating.  It's amazing to me that he can be so much fun.

He's doing a couple things that blow my mind:

--If I say, "Zachary's nose," and touch his nose, and then, "Mommy's nose," and touch my nose, he will also touch my nose.  For real?  I still can't believe he did that.  He's all sentient and everything.

--He turns the pages of books now.  He is just imitating the motion; he doesn't really know when to turn the page.  And he needs a tiny bit of help, because he doesn't have quite enough dexterity yet and he will just close the book unless you hold the page for him.  But still, people, he turns the pages.  I mean, come on, he's obviously a genius.

--He loves going outside so much, so we go for a walk every day.  Around 3:30, he gets antsy and whiny.  But when I put him in the stroller, he is obviously soooo stoked!  He will wait in the stroller for 15 minutes while I get ready.  He just totally, totally gets that we're going outside, and he is so happy.

--We're pretty sure that he consistently says, "Nay nay," when he wants to nurse.  I don't think it's a word, exactly.  It's more primal than that.  It's just what comes out when he wants that thing, but it happens with some regularity, so we've started asking him, "Do you want nay nay?"  I'm also trying to do a few signs with him, since they use baby signs at daycare.  I think he might understand the sign for milk.  It's impossible to say at this point for sure.  But if he is whining and I make the sign and say, "Do you want milk?" he will wave his arms around excitedly.  Since he waves his arms excitedly in response to almost all kinds of stimuli, this is hardly a controlled experiment.

Today on our walk, we almost lost Leopard, but we retraced our steps and rescued him.  Then we retraced our steps from another walk and found the Jungly Tales book, which was a stroller casualty several days ago.  So we have had very good stroller recovery rates.

Zack ate more food today than usual.  I am quite anxious for him to eat food, since nursing him takes quite a toll on me.  He ate two full meals.  And I also mashed up some avocado for him as a snack and just let him feed himself, which was a fun experiment but did not result in very much actual ingested avocado.

He went down for two naps very, very easily, and just now I put him to bed and it was like nothing, really.  Like he'd been doing it forever.  I'm pretty sure having a bedtime ritual really helped us out with our sleep stuff.  We started that back when he was six weeks old.  So all we really had to change was that he now does the final falling asleep on his own, and he's been a champ.  It is so much less stressful for me that I feel like I found my old self, dusted her off, and I get to take her for a spin every evening.