Turtle Monkey

Mark took a bunch of videos of Elias yesterday. Unfortunately, they’re all pretty dark because the lighting in our apartment sucks, so turn up your brightness if needed.

These in particular show Elias and Leah (our cat) interacting. It seems he likes Leah at least a small bit more than Teyla (Leah is softer and bigger, so that might have something to do with it.) Leah is so gentle and patient with him and loves hanging around him even though he likes grabbing her paws and fur; I wish she liked us as much as she does him.

You can view all the videos uploaded today (one is from late last month) over on the Flickr Video Set.

Elias started crawling like a pro yesterday. He’s so adorable and into everything!

Videos up on Flickr.

One of him crawling:

Another cute one:

There are twelve videos up total, some from 8/3 and some from today. I recommend starting here on Flickr and scrolling through the Videos set as they are somewhat in order that way.

Elias’ daycare is confusing me, to say the least. Every other month or so, they have me fill out a sheet that goes over his normal schedule, behavior and diet. They never had a conversation with me to explain how meals and snacks are handled at the daycare, so I wrote that we were primarily feeding him at home, but I found it acceptable for him to be given fruits, vegetables and grains.

Several weeks later, the room teachers in the morning talked to me about giving him snacks in the afternoon and I reiterated what he could be given and specified NO MEAT, NO DAIRY, NO EGG. His take-home sheets started including some food they gave him, such as rice cereal (we don’t use it at home, but I’m not highly opposed to it for practice) and mashed veggies. All was great.

Then they fed him yogurt. I am not sure what the afternoon teacher was thinking as it seems the daycare center does not have a habit of feeding yogurt before 9 months. So maybe the room teacher thought Elias was older than he is. He does have a “baby buddy” there who was born a month before him and they’re around the same size, so maybe she legitimately was confused about his age. I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident the yogurt mix-up is not going to happen again.

Last week, the early morning room teacher (who is actually the morning room teacher for the toddler group so she’s only in the infant room for 2 hours) asked me, “Did they talk to you about jarred food when you picked him up yesterday?” No. Apparently the morning room teacher felt he wasn’t taking the rice cereal very well, so she wanted to know if I could bring in jarred food for his afternoon snack. Uh, sure…. I guess. So I brought in jarred food this week.

Yesterday, the morning room teacher went on and on about how much Elias loves rice cereal mixed with the jarred food and asked me if I could bring in some rice cereal.

Okay, look now… I don’t feed him rice cereal at home. You started feeding it to him, I find that acceptable for practice, but now I’m the one who needs to provide it? I was flabbergasted and a little dazed (being in a room full of infants will do that to you) so I didn’t really think to discuss it with her. This morning I see the morning snack bowls prepared on the counter. They contained rice krispies and cut up bananas. Elias can have this! Why am I bringing food in for him when the center is providing foods that are perfectly acceptable for him to eat? So I asked the early morning room teacher which foods the center provided and which foods I needed to bring in. She told me I could get a menu from the front desk, but no one was there when I left and again, I was in a hurry.

So. All of this was brought about because I can’t stand talking to people, so I never bothered to figure out how the daycare usually handles introducing solids and how to handle them with Elias. I guess I figured their questionnaire and follow up questions were enough, but obviously not. Mark’s going with me to pick him up tonight so I’ll feel a little more confident talking to them about it. I know that sometimes the prepared morning meal contains hard boiled eggs, but otherwise, the prepared meals I know of are perfectly acceptable for him. I would prefer him to get their mashed up vegetables than providing babyfood vegetables for obvious reasons. At the same time, I want to be sure they’re not feeding him foods I don’t want him to have.

I don’t blame them for all the confusion because I am sure my wishy-washiness with regard to food did not help. At the same time though, I would expect someone to initiate a conversation with me since it was clear (and I made it clear to the early morning room teacher) that I don’t know their practices in that regard. Something similar, but completely unrelated happened with regard to poor communication when one day I was told that I could not park under the carport to drop off Elias because the lane was reserved for a bus. What? How am I supposed to know that? Is it always, or just during certain hours? I see parents parking under the carport ALL the time for pickup and drop off. So now I never use the carport under any circumstance. I know I should probably ask, but if the carport is reserved during certain hours or during certain parts of the year, this should be common knowledge.

Anyway, enough of my daycare babble.

Last night we got a fruit pack at the store, so I offered Elias some apple wedges and grapes. We cut the grapes in half and smooshed them a little, but after researching it a bit today, I realize I should have cut the grapes into quarters so they wouldn’t be a choking hazard. I knew there was a reason I felt a bit paranoid with his grape offering last night. I was watching him very closely when he was chewing on a grape to make sure he swallowed it. Anyway, this video shows him gnawing on an apple wedge. He went to pick up a piece of grape, but it never made it into his mouth anyway. There are also a couple other videos on flickr showing him eating Cheerios. He’s gotten a lot better at it since then.

Elias started wildly bouncing around in his exersaucer. I think he’s even banged his head on the keyboard a few times, but he seems to be having fun.

Please ignore my big fat self. This is the ball drop/ring stacker toy we recently got for Elias. I don’t know how long it will be before he starts stacking the rings, but we honestly didn’t expect him to get the hang of the ball drop so quickly. He loves holding the balls and jingling them. Here, he definitely seemed to be deliberate in his action to drop the ball in the hole.

There are two more new videos on Flickr, one showing Elias playing with his new train toy here and one showing him banging on everything in sight with his red cup here.

Also, I created a new set specifically for Elias’ videos, which can be found here.