6 Months!!!

EH celebrated his 6 month birthday this past Saturday, and he even got to experience his very first balloon at my niece's birthday party that same night.  He was so fascinated that he got to take a balloon home.  It was so adorable.

It's hard to believe that he is already 6 months old!  He has his 6 month well visit yesterday, and his stats are as follows:
Weight - 16 pounds - 25th percentile
Height - 26.5 inches - 50th percentile
Head Circumference - something really huge - 81st percentile

Our kid has a huge head.  No wonder he doesn't want to bother with lifting it up when we force him to do tummy time.

Speaking of tummy time, we are apparently major failures when it comes to encouraging our infant to roll over and crawl.  He is behind developmentally in this area, and our doctor was about thiiiiis close to recommend that we bring in an early intervention specialist, but for now he told us to put EH on his belly at least 20 times per day for two minutes at a time.  Do you know how impossible that's going to be?? He's only awake for about 10 hours per day. Twice per hour, every waking hour?? And 9 of those hours are spent at day care, where they may put him on his stomach once a day, if that.  He hates it so much that we didn't want to make him miserable during the brief time in the evening that we could spend with him, so we never pushed the issue either.  And now he's behind.

Bad parents, we are.

We are also failures at starting our child on solid foods.  At his 4 month visit we were supposed to start giving rice cereal.  Well, we succeeded at giving that to him about 6 times in the entire two months between his doctor visits.  Again, major fail.  He hates solid food about as much as he hates tummy time, and since we - once again - didn't want to torture him by forcing him to eat rice cereal or oatmeal which makes him gag and cough, we chose instead to spend fun, quality family time instead of encouraging him to get used to solids.  Now he's over 6 months old and still hates rice cereal, oatmeal, apples, avocados, and beans, which are the five foods we tried to give him so far.  He hates them ALL. 

Oh, and he also has an ear infection. AGAIN.  Yes, another ear infection. I can barely believe it either.  We now have to make an appointment with a pediatric Ear/Nose/Throat specialist to have him evaluated for tubes.  Although I know tubes are not the end of the world for an infant, we're hoping that with our new day care situation that he'll be healthier over the next few months and hopefully we'll notice that the instances of ear infections decreases dramatically.  Let's hope. 

The good news is that on Monday of next week he starts at his in-home day care place.  He'll have much more one-on-one attention, so we can ask her to do more tummy time with him and also start having her give him some solid foods if we decide that we want to push that more.  He'll also hopefully be exposed to less germs, so we're hopeful that he'll be healthier. 

As soon as he is well we're going to push hard on the tummy time, solid foods, sleeping through the night unassisted, and pacifier weaning (which might be a nightmare).  We certainly have our work cut out for us!