TateSpace: Weddings and Rice Cereal

Your 18th week was a big one, little man. You attended your first wedding on Saturday and on Sunday, you tasted your first (semi) solid food—rice cereal!

Here you are at the wedding, goofing off (and eating—your favorite thing to do!) with Daddy.

We even lucked out and got two family photos taken by Aunt Lauren. I don’t think we’ve had any photos of Daddy, Mommy and Tatum together taken since you were born, so I’m happy to have them.

As much as you’ve been sucking on everything in sight, including your upper lip, we were just sure that you were going to eat up some rice cereal! More of it ended up on your bib than in your mouth to be sure, but you thought it was somewhat interesting. I may try again sometime later this week. Your nutrition is still coming from mommy’s milk at this point, so I’m not too worried about getting you to slurp down mass quantities of cereal any time soon—it was an experiment more than anything, just to see if you were ready for solids. I’d say maybe in a few more weeks!

You continue to love movement and automatically pop up into a standing position when anyone lets you hold their thumbs. You pull yourself up into a sitting position, then get your feet under you and up you go! You’re still wobbly at this point—as would be expected, given that you’re not even five months old yet—but I think you’ll be standing up early. You also try to crawl, and this weekend you succeeded in getting one arm out from under and enough in front of your body that you were able to pull yourself forward a bit. Not a true crawl exactly, but very very close!

You’ve taken an interest in the taggy book our friend Marissa gave you, and enjoy looking at the pictures and holding onto the tags. Mommy and Daddy can’t wait until you become a reader like them! We read to you every day, and though you aren’t totally enthralled with books just yet, I know it’s just a matter of time. Right now your favorites are “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See?” and “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you Hear?” I think I have each of those memorized by now, sometimes I recite them to myself as I’m falling asleep.

Speaking of falling asleep, you’re doing better and better at falling asleep on your own. You’re still in our bedroom, but I’ve started putting you down in the Pack n’ Play bassinet right next to my side of the bed. This way I can still hear you at night and feel that you’re near me, but you’re not necessarily right in our bed with us (though sometimes you end up there during the night to feed). This is working really well for now, and it lets me start our bedtime routine earlier and get you into bed a decent hour (while I’d love for bedtime to be closer to 7 PM, it’s usually between 7:30 and 8 PM and closer to 8 by the time you settle in). You fight sleep like crazy, but once this week you actually went down without even crying! Someday I’ll get around to moving you into your lovely crib in your very own nursery… :)

Here are your 18-week pics with your monkey:

Things start off well: