Colin is 10 Months Old!

Colin is 10 months old today! I feel like I just wrote the post saying he was 9 months old! It's amazing how fast time goes by!

Unfortunately, Colin's day was overshadowed by a quickly moving stomach virus that hit us yesterday and is lingering around today. Fortunately (knock on wood), Colin has been ok so far aside from less of an appetite the past few days. Let's hope it stays that way! So, Colin and I went for a quick walk around the neighborhood because fresh air always does good when there are pesky germs around.

As Colin is nearing his 1st birthday, we have been trying to transition him into more "adult" and solid foods. To be quite honest, this is not going well at all. He is having trouble with textures including puffs, yogurt melts, cheerios, fruits (occassionally he does ok with banana, peaches and pineapple), vegetables, etc. I think we jumped too soon into trying feeding him actual chunks, so I started putting vegetables and fruits in the food processor and leaving them with texture but not as much as if you were to give him a piece. He will do better with this, but still not great.

When he doesn't want something, he blows raspberries so hard he spits it right out of his mouth. Let me tell you, this gets old real fast.

We are also transitioning him into drinking from a straw and practicing with the honey bear cup.

Colin does not like this either and will often complain and push it out of his mouth. We also started trying a small juice box (with a smaller straw) and he will do better with this. Practicing this only lasts a few minutes at a time but we are working on it.

Other things we are working on:

- Getting Colin to start rolling from back to tummy again.

This was a skill he did months ago, but one of those skills he never really did again after a few days. We find so many different ways to motivate him and have seen him do it more often the past week, but it still occurs pretty sporatically.

He loves this ball that Meredith, Mo and Tim got him. It's the "crawling" ball, so it's supposed to be motivating to get the baby to start crawling to it. For now, it's been helping to motivate Colin to roll towards to it.
- Getting Colin up onto all fours so that he will eventually be able to crawl.

This is something that Colin is still lacking the strength to be able to do efficiently, but we find as many moments as we can to "lift" him under his pec muscles onto all fours. We find that a lot of times, we get him to do this if he is on our chests looking at our face. I am hoping this is a skill Colin will accomplish by his 1st birthday, but I will not feel too upset if it doesn't happen because he is trying and working towards it.

You can tell that Colin wants to go and start moving, but he just doesn't have the strength. His attempts at crawling actually resemble a fish out of water...flopping all over the place. I'll have to get a video of that one of these days.

- Imitation

We try to get Colin to imiate as many things as possible. Examples of this include sounds, mouth movements, kissy faces (we LOVE that he will "kiss" us now when he looks at us), tongue clicks, clapping hands, clapping blocks together, "making music", etc. Here is a video of Colin imiating "shaking". He loves to do this with his new "music making rattles" that make different sounds. In this video, he is using his octopus tamborine to imitate sounds.

Here we all are making "music" together shaking our instruments.

- Practicing fine motor skills and pincer grip

Even though Colin won't necessarily eat these kinds of snacks, we still practice with them so that he works on picking them up with his thumb and index finger.

Colin enjoys moving things around his tray or picking them up in the palm of his hand, but occassionally, you will catch him picking them up the correct way.

It cracks me up when a cheerio will get stuck to his finger and he will just sit there and inspect it.

- Identifying facial features

Colin enjoys pointing to 3 main features on our faces right now: eyes, nose and mouth. Every time he does, we make sure we say the feature clearly and then help him point to that feature on his own face. Here you can see Colin pointing to the frog's eyes.

- Reading

Miss D told us that she learned you should read to your child for 30 minutes every day. Colin enjoys books and recently we pulled this one out. It's called Olivia and was given to us as a present when Colin was born by a local elementary school.

We are working on pointing to specific things on the pages with his index finger and emphasizing different sounds when we do that.

- Identifying people in pictures

One night I was sitting at the computer with Colin trying to get Daddy on skype. Colin looked up and saw the big picture of Chris and I that our guests signed on our wedding day. Colin was getting so excited squealing and making noises. Now, if I hold Colin up to the picture and say "where is daddy?", Colin will put his finger on Daddy. If I ask "where is Mommy?", Colin will point at me! It's so exciting to watch him do that.


We are working on a lot of things, but most especially, we are showing Colin how much we love him.

Happy 10 month birthday Colin!