Baby Gabe

Despite the sleep troubles Baby Gabe has had, it’s impossible to feel victimized when he wakes up like this from naps.  It just goes to show what a blessing he really is.

Baby Gabe just keeps on going.  He just learned to crawl properly a few weeks ago, and now he’s on to standing.  Whenever he gets his hands on a raised platform, he tries to lift himself up.  We admire his ambition and determination, but this all comes at a cost — sleep.  More precisely — parents’ sleep.  When he went through his “Learning to crawl” stage, he had difficulty sleeping for any stretch longer than 2-3 hours because he would inevitably wake himself up sleepcrawling.  Now, he’s sleepstanding.  It’s been a rough week for mom and dad.  There have been several occasions when he found him standing straight-legged holding on to the vertical bars of his crib.  Hopefully, he masters standing quicker than he did crawling.  Then again, at this rate, it won’t be soon before we find him pacing in his crib at 3 AM.

Despite the risk of overdoing it on the crawling videos, here’s another one:

The picture on the left was taken Tuesday when he was still in the middle stage of the virus.  The picture on the right was taken on Thursday.  He’s got his appetite back and is back to sleeping soundly.  We even returned him to day care Friday after confirming that he’s no longer contagious.  His providers said they wouldn’t have been able to tell he had been sick.  They said he had a great time playing and laughing all day.  Welcome back, Baby Gabe!  We missed you.

Gabriel just hasn’t had much luck with viruses.  He has been waylaid by Herpangina, a particularly nasty little virus that causes sores in the soft palate and back of the throat.  He had a fever as high as 102.5 last night.  Although it’s nice to know what’s wrong, it’s cold comfort because there’s really nothing we can do about it besides giving him some motrin to control the pain.  He has the most expressive eyes and mouth so it’s really heart-wrenching to see him in pain as he clutches his throat.  Still, he’s been a trouper.  He’s playing right now.  Expected recovery is 5 days.

After a week, Gabriel has gone from a tentative, uncoordinated crawl (same hand and knee forward) to the sure, coordinated crawl.  He’s even maneuvering around blockades we put up to keep him from getting to potted plants, surge protectors, etc.  That whole “out of sight, out of mind” theory?  Doesn’t work.  He knows what’s behind the pillow and just knocks it down to get to those power cords.

Baby Gabe has graduated to sitting up in shopping carts and high chairs. We get double-takes all the time in markets and restaurants.

He’s actually been crawling for a few days now, but whenever we tried taking a video, he would get distracted by the camera.  So then we decided to try having him crawl towards the camera since he likes it so much.  He looks like a lion stalking his prey with his quiet, deliberate steps.