Monday September 28th, day 265

Tomorrow Luca will be 38 weeks old. Not that that really means anything to me! In a couple weeks he'll have been a land creature for longer than he was a water creature! We've spent the last couple weeks dealing with colds that Luca's bringing home from the daycare. As I'm still breastfeeding, I'm able to give Luca the antibodies he needs to fight these colds. I think that's so cool!

Luca has learned how to pull himself up to standing. He's really quite good at it - if there's something interesting worth doing all that work for! I have 22 minutes of video as I was trying to catch him doing it, but he's generally too lazy! Same with crawling on his knees. He's totally strong enough, but I think he finds his current method effective enough!

We've been sleep training him so that he'll learn how to sleep through the night. He would like to be fed every 3 hours or so during the night. The method we're attempting now is that he goes to bed around 7:30, I go down and wake him for a feeding at around 11:30 and then he'll sleep through to 6am. It works except with the colds - they're keeping him up a bit. I also find it pretty hard because if he does wake up, I have to just listen to him cry which is heart breaking for me. He needs to learn how to comfort himself.

Monday, Sept 14th, day 251

Yes that's a swiffer tied to him. My plans to have him clean the floor were foiled by his bladder. Serves me right really . . . but it was a good plan!

Today was Luca's first day of day care!!! I was very lucky to find a place here in Montreal, and on top of that, a government subsidized one. It's meant to be a temporary spot while a kid is away on vacation, but I'm hoping it will last or it's likely to take me another 2 weeks to find another one. It's run by a very nice woman and her daughter, out of there apartment. It's right between our neighbourhood and the area that Fabien and I work in. There are 6 kids there ranging from Luca's age to 3 years. Today he stayed from 9-12. I'm hoping to leave him there from 8:30-2 on average - after the initial week or two of getting him used to it. He seemed to not mind the experience but he has to get onto their schedule for naps and they seem to take fewer naps than he would like. He would have liked to sleep at 11 I think but he made it another hour until I picked him up and then he crashed really hard! I can now take some ballet classes to prepare for Nutcracker in November and do a few hours work at the pilates studio. It's great, I'm really ready to get my life back a bit.

I also started French classes again. I'm really enjoying them. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights from 6-8. Great teacher, and it's a block from my house, super convenient.

As you can see in this video, Luca is on the edge of crawling. We went to a party on Saturday that was full of kids his age that could crawl. The crawling part of this video was shot on Sunday when he was practicing all the moves he saw the other kids do! Another reason I want him to spend time in daycare. He just obverses so much from other kids. It's crazy the connection they have.

Luca also LOVES to stand as you can see in the video. He'll stand against the banister for 1/2 and hour! He just holds on for dear life. He's moving more now than when I shot the video a couple days ago. Now he can move a couple bars either way. I am wondering where I'm going to put everything that he'll be able to reach when he can walk or pull up to standing!

Also, Luca is experiencing more and more bumps and bruises. He almost always has a red mark on his forehead from bashing a toy into himself! He's fallen off our bed once (which was scarier for me than for him) and somehow got a nasty looking scratch on his chin. Sometimes he crawls under the coffee table and cracks his noggin trying to look up! Little monkey! I know, I know, it's only the beginning!

Wednesday, September 2nd, day day 239

Another busy week has flown by! I think Luca would be crawling but he slips too much on our hardwood floors to get his knees under him. He can get around pretty quickly now. I have makeshift gates all over the place to keep him where I want him - he loves to lick the wheels of the stroller which I'm trying to keep to a minimum. Tooth number 6 came in today. 4 on the top now and 2 on the bottom. He's babbling all the time now and sometimes mimics the noises his toys make, I'll have to hide the camera and try to get a video of it as he never does it when I'm around! He's eating anything we put in front of him. He especially likes chicken or turkey. I fed him 8 grain hot cereal for breakfast which he seemed to really like. He also really enjoys oatmeal, which is good because I'm trying to keep his cholesterol down!!!

This video is fairly long and unexciting. Near the end you can hear Luca grind his little teeth together! It drives me nuts!