The Small Family   

April 12, 2009: Happy Easter!

Well, now that Theo is a year old and so we can stop counting his age by weeks, I think I’ll just date these entries instead of listing them as “Week xx.” Seems to me it’d get a bit cumbersome to have “Week 763: Theo Starts High School” or something like that!

Well, the big event for this week was Theo’s one-year appointment at the pediatrician. If you didn’t already read the midweek blog post about it, scroll down to the entry before this one if you want all the exciting details. Very quick summary: He’s a healthy, happy boy.

The main thing the pediatrician said was to work on transitioning him from formula to solid foods and soymilk or regular milk. Given his problems with dairy in the past, we’re going to wait to introduce regular milk until after he’s had all his one-year vaccines and after we’re back from Texas next month. We figure no reason to potentially throw his system into a tizzy when there’s a lot else going on. So, this week has been spent getting Theo to eat more solid foods and regular soymilk. And it’s going...decently. The dr. also wants us to start weaning him off the bottle and onto sippy cups, and that part isn’t going so well. He’ll take juice or water from a sippy cup, but he throws it on the floor the minute he discovers there’s milk in the cup. So, that may be a rather slow process. But some switch must’ve tripped in Theo right before he turned 1, because Mr. I-Hate-Solid-Foods is suddenly a lot more amenable to them. The doctor advised us to feed him from each of the four main food groups at each meal, so he generally gets a serving of steel-cut oats, some sort of fruit pureed, some sort of veggie pureed, and protein from his milk (unless we happen to have a bit of turkey or an egg on hand in what we’re eating for our meal). So far so good. He doesn’t like oatmeal plain, but he’ll eat it mixed with fruit, no problem. As for finger foods, he’s still not into those. He likes to hold a cookie (baby cookie) or baguette and gnaw on that, but he doesn’t like picking up pieces of cereal or small pieces of fruit and eating that. All in due time, we figure. For the moment, it’s actually easier for clean-up purposes that he doesn’t like finger foods...so that’s one silver lining.

Our other big outing for this week was a Real Date on Saturday night!! Grandma Diane came to babysit Theo for three hours so Chris and I could go downtown for dinner and to our friend Suzanne’s art opening. Downtown Sacramento has an event called Second Saturday where the second Saturday of every month, a bunch of galleries and boutiques and street vendors and such are open in the evening for people to stroll around and enjoy. We’ve never gone before, but because Suzanne had 50 pieces in a show at one of the galleries, we wanted to go see. And what fun! I wish we’d had a bit more time, as I would’ve enjoyed seeing some more of the galleries. We may try to go again next month, when several of our friends are planning to go. We’ll see whether Grandma Diane is up for a bit more babysitting!

We didn’t do much of anything on Easter due to exhaustion. We had thought to go to a small zoo in Stockton that I went to years ago and that we thought Theo might enjoy, but we both got lousy sleep Saturday night (2 hours for me, about 5 hours for Chris), so we figured driving for an hour each way probably wasn’t our best idea. So, we just went to a local bakery for breakfast and then Chris did yard work in the afternoon while Theo and I visited with Auntie Jeanette, who came over to bring Theo a very cool birthday present of a little outfit and a nifty wooden pounding bench. Theo loves, loves, loves to pound things, so he is going to have lots of fun with that!

Speaking of gifts, Theo got another slightly belated one this week—his birthday present from Auntie Lisa and Uncle Chris arrived. It’s the adorable monogrammed chair you’ll see in a few of the pictures this week. Two chairs and a new play table and a new toy box for his birthday. It seems our boy has better furniture than we do!

We don’t have a ton of pictures from this week, but we do have a new video! Click on the Videos page in the navigation bar on the left side of the page, and you’ll see that I’ve posted several old videos as well as a brand-new one: Theo from six months to one year, set to music.

Happy Easter, everyone!