5 month jabs

This week has been a little disrupted by Dom's 5 month jabs. He hasn't reacted too badly, but he's been a little out of sorts, and definitely had a bad night's sleep on the day he was stabbed in the thighs. It's amazing how quickly he recovered after he was injected, given how understandably upset he was by the process. I think he cried for about 2 minutes? Then was smiley and happy again (and very clingy).

The 48 hour film contest is on this weekend, and while we'd love to be involved I don't think Dom is up for too much activity this weekend (and I'm pretty shattered too). I think we'll try to make it down to visit the JA team, probably on Sunday, but may not even manage that. We shall see - it would be cool to catch up with people and see what the team's up to :-)

Dominic versus Solids

 So as a strapping 5 month old baby, Dominic was sent forth by the Plunket nurse to start the adventure of eating solid foods. Apparently this generally starts as an experimental stage where babies try to discover how much mashed up and pureed food they can spread over their face, hands, clothes and other surfaces.

I dediced to start Dom on banana as he had already grabbed a banana I was eating and tried to suck on it, so I figured he would probably like the taste.

Well, he loved it. As with most things in life he pretty much immediately seized control by grabbing the spoon and sticking it in his mouth for himself. He actually hoovered down a fair amount of the mashed banana goo happilly chewing and slobbering away on his cow spoon and making grumbly noises when there was no banana left on his spoon.

Anyway as the photos show, Dominic definitely conquered the banana, and was surprisingly quite neat and tidy in the process.

Solids tally to date:
Dominic 1
Banana 0

Early morning photography

Well, not that early in the morning really. Dominic stayed in bed until 5.45 this morning, making it a sleep in. This photo was taken some time later - around 9am or so? Dom was in his exersaucer, but was fascinated by something outside - possibly a branch moving in the wind?



Weight Loss Tip For The Day:
If Matt wants to lose weight, the cunning plan appears to be:

1. Eat a lot of junk food all the time so you gain an extra 3 kilos
2. Realise you're 3 kilos over your already too-high former weight
3. Stop eating junk food, start having weetbix for breakfast instead of leftovers

Uh, that's about it really. Seems to be working so far :-)

Timing is everything

 This interesting series of photos was taken exactly 1.2 seconds after Dominic did a cute Dr Evil pose. Baby photographers have to be fast :-)

In which I get misty-eyed and clucky.

Aw, the little one is 5 months old today. I decided to look back over his newborn photos and found it has filled me with enough soppiness that I could probably start composing squishily sentimental poetry for Hallmark cards.

I'm already starting to panic that he is growing up too fast. While today he may be content to play, gurgle and blow raspberries, I have the very real fear that any day now he'll be asking for the car keys, staying out late and threatening to move out of the house.

However, in the interest of not becoming some smothering maternal nightmare out of a Hitchcock film, I shall embrace his development and celebrate his growth rather than sob into a tissue that my little boy isn't smaller than the cat any more.

Behold the following photos and witness the wonder that is 5 months of Dominic:

 

Here is Dominic at only 10 minutes old being weighed.

This is Dominic on Day 2 being held by me. Aw, back then even in newborn size clothes the little sleeves had to be rolled up.

By Christmas he was proving to be quite the inquisitive little baby.

At about the age of 5 weeks he declared himself Caesar and ordered a triumph to be held in honour... well, not really but he did start to really enjoy showers...

... after a vigorous workout on his swiss ball.

At three months his love of the Guitar rattle and listening to music was clear...

... as was his enjoyment of hamming it up for the camera.

Now at 5 months he still grins if he spots his dad creeping up on him with a camera.

I suspect he also fancies himself as a fashion model. Not only does he 'look fierce' for the camera, he also tries to draw attention to his clothing by pointing out features of interest in the garments.

5 months old!

Dominic is 5 months old today :-)

And just for comparison, here are his previous milestone photos (starting at 2 weeks when we had the idea):

4 Months



3 Months


6 weeks


2 Weeks

Game Chef sketches

Here be the sketches I did for the Game Chef competition - someone on the forums asked about them, so I took a cellphone photo and uploaded them, even though they're terrible:

Dominic composes poetry

Whilst gazing wistfully at the trees outside...

Depth of focus

One of the things I like doing with our cheap Sony point-and-click camera is trying to convince it to take pictures where the subject is nicely in focus, and either foreground or background details are out of focus. An art teacher at my school referred to this as depth of focus once, and the term has stuck with me whether it's right or not. I would quite like to win a fancy camera one day in a competition - I don't feel I can justify the expense or would use one often enough to be bothered buying one, but it'd be neat to have a digital slr camera with a couple of lenses to play with :-)

Here's a shot I took of Dominic recently with the aforementioned focus thingy I like - achieved by pointing the camera at Dom, depressing the take-a-photo button half way to lock the focus then moving to a position the same distance from Dominic, but with something interesting between us. I quite like this one:

Dom at the Mount

 During our holiday Dom got to walk all the way around the Mount!

Being in exciting places like the Mount means that Dominic wants to be carried the whole time, rather than ride in his stroller. Despite fighting the urge to nap he did eventually fall asleep in the last five minutes, allowing his mother to have a punishing arm work-out :-)

Exersaucer

After extensive test-playing in various models at the Baby Factory, Dominic now has his very own exersaucer. He loves it!

 

Value = 2,015 words

Believe it or not, I am not actually punching my son in this photo. Really!

Too exciting to sleep

One small problemette with the holiday was that being somewhere new, with cool people and lots of new stuff around, meant that Dom fought going to sleep just about every time.

Fantastic Holiday

Debbie, Dominic and I managed to get away for a wonderful holiday at the end of last week. We made plans near the start of the year to attempt a journey northward in the school holidays, and as the time approached we felt much excitement and trepidation. Dom had previously been to Lower Hutt and Wellington many times, up to Palmerston North once, but this trip was going to be a comparatively epic 7 hour journey up to Tauranga. Given that he had previously cried and been very upset in 2 of 3 longer car journies (the drive back from PN, and one trip back from LH when we got stuck in traffic for an extra 45 minutes) we were more than a little nervous about how the journey might go. On top of that, it was also his first time staying away from home (that I can remember, anyways). It went brilliantly. We left at 6.10pm Tuesday, and Dom was awake until about 6.45 or 7. Debbie sang to him, and he was pretty happy despite being in the car seat. He then slept for an hour or so, waking up near Bulls. We had a brief stop to feed Dom and use the scummiest public toilets ever to have fancy SF automatic doors, then got moving again. He was very happy to feed in the back of the car when we stopped, and look out of the windows at the headlights whizzing by. He was less keen on going back into his car seat, but after 20 minutes of serenading he drifted off to sleep for another hour and a bit. We had a similar stop in Hunterville, with nappy change, then managed to get through the desert road and Turangi before stopping when he woke up in Taupo. A last speedy dash through Rotorua and on to Tauranga saw us arrive just before 1am, completely exhausted but safely at our destination, with less than an hour of grumpy Dom in total for the trip! The holiday itself was lovely - Dom really likes being fussed over, and he got a lot of fusses from his grandad, grandma and uncle. We walked around the Mount, taking turns to carry Dom. We went shopping, but didn't end up paying for much thanks to generous parents. We were given a snazzy 3G phone which is video-calling capable thanks to my big brother, and we ate delicious food and had our car cleaned courtesy of my dad. He cooks a mean Chinese meal - in quantities that allow it to be the next day's breakfast and lunch :-) The drive back was even better, with Dom hardly grizzling at all. We left a little earlier, and so were home by midnight. And we now have a heat pump / air conditioning unit in our lounge, so we can be warm on crazy early winter mornings when Dom decides that 5am is play time. And, I have another week off! How lucky am I? Real lucky. Word.

My Game Chef art

These are the pics I drew for the artists first bit of Game Chef this year. So far 3 people are trying to write games based on these pictures :-)

Classroom poster?

Dominic 'volunteered' to help promote literacy in my classes this morning.

Friday's dose of Dominic cuteness

Before Aunts try to marry you off or embroil you in their cow creamer stealing schemes, they make very good chew toys :-)

 

And during a recent photo shoot, Dominic decided to randomly flash his tummy for the camera. Cheeky little man...

Baby photo goodness

Dominic hasn't quite figured out how to put the pieces back into his shape/hole toy, but he does often enlist Humpty to help (usually by bashing Humpty's arm or head into the shape toy repeatedly). Their success rate hasn't been high to date, but they do seem to be enjoying themselves.




Is it just me, or does it look a little like there's a Penny Farthing bicycle missing from this photo?

I pwned Y10 debaters

I was the first negative speaker in an impromptu debate today. I ripped up the opposition. I can totally out-argue a 14 year old. Victory!

Sneaky reader

I saw a very cute thing in detention the other day - a student sneakily reading a novel. It's a common sight to see a student hiding a cellphone under their desk and trying to low-key text, but this was the first low-key novel reading I've seen. I suppose the youngster in question was worried that someone would look through the window and see him reading, and his lackadaisical, devil-may-care badass loner who plays by his own rules (BALOR) image would be blown. He had permission to read the novel (it was for English), but he was being sneaky about it anyway... It was an amusing sight :-)

Redrafted and caramel sliced

Today Debbie and I made caramel slice using a recipe my sister sent us, and it's really, really good. It's a fairly simple recipe too, which is neat. It does make a huge batch though, which leads to me eating too much caramel slice and getting a sore tummy. Yesterday I finished reading through the first draft of my kiwinowrimo novel, and today I typed up the last few changes for the second draft. I'm getting a few people to read it (just people who've volunteered - I'm not inflicting it on any unsuspecting passersby), but I'll also be sending it off to Random House this week. After them it's on to Scholastic, then I'll need to look around at other NZ publishers. On the whole, I'm pretty happy with it - it's a solid NZ teen novel that would be entirely appropriate to teach at a Y10/Y11 level. Here's hoping a publisher agrees with me :-)