First Halloween!

Odin is damn near crawling! He gets his knees under him and just starts to move!

Also, today he climbed up a step! There was a raised platform and he got himself up onto it, and just before that he was actually trying to get up some stairs.

We had him in a monkey suit for his first Halloween all day, and he go so many "What a cute baby!"s all day. We're gonna take him Trick-or-Treating in a few minutes.

Teeth! Again!

Yesterday we noticed that Odin is getting one of his front, upper teeth on his left side, and today the other one is coming in as well. He's doing pretty good with the pain, considering. So add these to his bottom, front two and he looks like a gopher.

Crawling!

We just watched Odin crawl for the first time! He isn't using it as a method of travel, but he is capable of it, and he can even get up on his hands and feet with no other part of his body touching the ground.

Raspberry

Odin can blow a real raspberry! Not just the baby kind with his lips, being silly, the real kind with his tongue, like we do. It's so funny.

Also, my Physical Therapy instructor also teaches a "Baby Movement" class, and she asked me if I could bring Odin by to be filmed. She wants him to crawl around and play for a bit and film how he does it, so she can show it to her class.

Sleeping

Odin has been sleeping all the way through the night, without waking up even once. We've been having a little trouble with sleeping in the same room as him; if we do, sometimes we wake him up a little, whereas if he's on his own, he wakes up for 5 minutes if at all and then goes back to sleep.

He's also got some mommy attachment; he starts crying immediately if he watches her leave a room, and he gets angry after a little while if he doesn't see her for a long enough time. Sometimes he'll whine and crawl over to her, and she's frequently the only person who can make him feel better. It's actually a little depressing, because he doesn't seem to care about me at all. But his cousin, Mikey, went through the same thing and now he can't stop following his dad around, so I think Odin might eventually become obsessed with me too.

First meal

Odin ate with us for the first time! We made Lentil stew, which is basically lentils, diced potatoes, diced onions, and tomato paste simmered for half an hour. We woulda put carrots and peas in it if we'd had 'em. It came out pretty good, and we put some in the blender for Odin and he loved it. It's the first meal we've shared as a family.

Doctor visit

Poor Odin had more shots today. He's so pitiful when he gets them. He's had a hard time all day as a result. It's been difficult listening to how miserable he is. We've been having a hard time calming him down.

Ritual

So now we've got a really comfortable system down; we give Odin a nice meal of baby food mixed with rice cereal so it's filling and he gets the iron in the rice cereal. That fills him up and gets him messy, so we all take a calming bath, and them we sometimes give him a massage if he's in the right mood. Then he plays for a little bit if he's still awake and we sit on the floor with him. When he starts to lose steam, around 9 to 10ish, but sometimes as late as 11 depending, we put him down and he's lowered his average crying time to about 20-30 minutes. He maybe wakes up once during the night but he's asleep again after 20 minutes, and he gets up at 7 or 8 and comes into bed to cuddle and nap for another hour with a morning nursing.

It's working out great; he's learning to sleep, and we get some rest as well, and it's perfectly timed for our school schedule.

Sleep!

Last night, Odin wanted to stay up forever, but we finally nursed him to sleep at about 11:30. It defeats the purpose of teaching him to fall asleep on his own, but we put him in his crib and he just cuddled up with Sleipnir and nodded off, barely woke up. So he's still getting good sleeping skills in there. The amazing thing is, he didn't start waking up 'til about 7ish this morning. We got uninterrupted sleep!

Standing!

Just a few minutes ago, Odin pulled himself up to standing all on his own! He proceeded to collapse as a giant tree is cut at it's base, which scared him a lot, but it was really cool to see him have no trouble standing like that.

Sleeping

Well, Odin has been sleeping on his own the last two nights. It's been working great; the first time we put him down he cries for an hour, and the second time (after he gets up in the middle of the night to eat) he only cries for a few minutes. We've eliminated all his nighttime feedings except for one, and that one is almost gone too.

So, a few days ago some guy in our apartment complex just walked up to us and gave us a beanie baby. He said he works for Ty and he gets boxes of them all the time, and he'd been meaning to give it to us since we had Odin. It was a little horse and we've been using it as Odin's comfort object instead of Alyssa. The funny thing is, in mythology, Odin had a horse named Sleipnir, which sounds like "sleep near."

Pain

Right now I'm doing one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I'm letting Odin cry himself to sleep.

I want to cry along with him. It feels like I'm torturing him, like I'm the one who's causing him all this pain, I'm the one who's scaring him so much and showing him I don't love him.

I know it's for the best, but it's just intolerable.

Doctor visit

We took Odin to Dr. Dzubay to tell her about how much Odin eats and how often he wakes up during the night. She collaborated with other information we'd received that giving him solids more often than we do now would help him feel full, and that we should just be tough and try to let him get himself to sleep. We'll try tonight.

Happy "birthday"

Odin is 6 months old today, and we think we see tooth #3 coming in....

Pix

The professional photographs came in a few days ago, we're gonna sort through them and scan them so I can post a few of them. We're gonna enter some of them into a contest for "cutest baby" run by the company that owns the photography place we went to.