It's been a busy few weeks for Monster Pants (AKA Moriarty). We had a visit from Pip's parents. They were only here a short time on their way to Brazil to help Pip's sister and family prep for moving to the area. Moriarty will have 3 cousins moving to town, including 2 boy cousins 5 weeks younger than him. We went hiking with Pam and Kent and Moriarty did great. He was fascinated by the trees and smells and all the people we saw fawned over him. Then last week my family was in town for a nice long visit. We went on walks, to the aquarium (that he slept through), and played and read and had a lovely visit. Then Monday he started daycare. SO many changes. He has 2 very nice teachers and 5 classmates. I was worried about how he'd adjust but things seem fine. He's napping OK. He can mostly put himself to sleep at this point but I think the nursery is more loud and interesting than he's used to so he's only sleeping for about 30 minutes per nap. I hope he'll get better at connecting his sleep cycles with time. They read books and sing songs and he seems to be having fun. The first day an older baby (~8 months) crawled over his head so I was worried he'd be traumatized, but he'll be crawling over heads soon enough. In fact, in just the last couple days he's started getting his knees under him. He's doing full superman style arm/leg action and sometimes props up on 2 elbows and a knee for a few seconds. He's getting so strong. It's so exciting to watch. The last big adventure of the month was taking the ferry out to Seabeck to visit our friends Frank and Marcella (and their girls). Thus far we haven't found any outdoor activities that Moriarty doesn't like.
I am getting confident that Moriarty is allergic to cats and dogs, and possibly some pollen. We took him to hang out with Ben and Kim and their 3 dogs. Gizmo, my first dog, has bladder cancer so I wanted to spend some time with him and introduce Moriarty. The puppies were very curious about the baby, and he was curious about them. There are some great pics of them trying to figure each other out. But his face got very red after some time near the dogs and the same thing happened when he was near cat hair. We'll be talking to his pediatrician about it at our next visit.
Now either he's extremely brilliant, or I read a little into the situation (or both), but I think he did his first baby sign. We've been using the signs for 'milk', 'all done', and 'diaper' pretty consistently. We'll add 'more' and a couple others once he starts solids. He was playing in his bouncy chair and looked down at his diaper and moved his hand in a way that is sort of the sign for 'diaper'. I'm convinced he's a baby sign prodigy, though he hasn't repeated it yet so maybe I'm just being that mom. :-)