Our silly little boy

I don't know how it is possible that Ben and I, who are generally pretty serious, no-nonsense people, could have a little boy who is all about the silliness. 

So, we have been fake sneezing at Finn for pretty much his entire life since he finds it so consistently hilarious. [Wow, that was a dreadful sentence, but since I can't figure out how to punctuate it or make it better and still say what I want, I'm going to leave it.] Anyway, our fake sneezing routines have gotten quite elaborate as Finn's sense of humor has evolved. Well, a couple days ago at breakfast, Finn started noisily sucking in air through his vocal chords and then making a soft, whispery "shufflebubble" sound. It took us a while, but we figured out that he was fake sneezing at us! The sucking in air noise was the "ahh" part and the whisper noise was the "choo." It was just too funny and it felt so good to laugh that hard. I really need to get a video of it the next time he does it.

For some reason, when Finn was first born, I decided that I was going to need A LOT of Q-tips in my day-to-day care of him. So I went out and bought a big tub of them and to date, I have used 2. Its mostly been used as a distraction for Finn while he's on the changing table. But yesterday he brought it out of the bathroom and started playing with it and managed to get the top off. At first he would just pull out one at at time, which I thought was pretty cute, but apparently he was just making enough room so he could get his entire fist in there and pull them out by the handful and throw them in the air. Yes, it was a lot less cute when I had 298 Q-tips strewn across my living room floor. So I thought I'd try to make a teachable moment out of the situation and show him how to put the Q-tips back in the tub. And I succeeded, sort of. He did actually start putting Q-tips back in the tub, but apparently 2 was the maximum number that could occupy the tub before the urge to throw them in the air overtook him again.

Ben and I took Finn to a new park this weekend. It's small park but it has lots of green space and trees and a nice children's playground. Once we got into the park we put Finn down and he just took off. Ben wanted to wait and see how long it took him to notice that we weren't with him. He never did. Didn't even give us a backward glance. Finally, we decided we'd better catch up with us before someone called Child Protective Services about the baby wandering around the park alone! I think it's safe to say that he's an independent little guy (in the daylight, at least).

We've been trying to teach Finn to play "Where's your nose?" for a long time now. I actually read in a magazine that babies can/should be able to do this by 5 months. At the time I took that as gospel and promptly set about teaching my son this simple game. Here I am 10 months later and I now wonder in what alternate universe are 5 month old babies able to do this?! So, I decided to switch things up a bit and play "Where's your belly button?" instead, since we were going nowhere fast with the nose. Just like with "Where's your nose?" I would ask the question, point out his belly button, ask the question again, wait, when nothing happened (no surprise there) I decided to ask where Mommy's belly button was and show him. This he finds hilarious, so when I ask him where his belly button is, he lifts up my shirt and sticks his finger in my belly button. Success, sort of. I still can't get him to acknowledge that he has any body parts to point to, but its a start.

I don't know if I've written about Finn's breastfeeding acrobatics before, but he's has recently taken them to new heights...literally. For a long time he enjoyed nursing in a position best described as downward facing dog - head pressed into the bed, butt up in the air, legs straight. He had to carefully coordinate his breathing while he nursed in this position, because if he didn't, milk would come shooting out his nose. You would think this would deter him, but it didn't. From there he tried to progress to nursing in that same position, but with only one leg supporting him on the bed and the other leg and one arm raised straight up in the air, however he wasn't able to maintain the latch in that position and he gave up.  But he has apparently started feeling creative again and somehow got his feet up on top of me while he was nursing so that he was essentially in a head stand position with his torso straight up in the air. I do not know how it is even possible that he could stay latched, much less swallow in this position, but he managed it quite nicely for some time.