Saturday 19 January 2013

Forward motion

When Lady was the only dependent in the household, it was not unheard of for her to get a bit spoiled. We would spend time researching special toys, bought lots of natural dog treats and occasionally the fancy 100% meat dog food, and even sometimes cooked her rice and chicken if she looked off colour. As a comparison, for dinner tonight (which was late as we got waylaid with Jack-Jack's tea) she had leftover strawberry baby cereal (pink mush), leftover baby penne with ham (orange mush) and half a pot of petit filou, topped with plain dog biscuits and a dash of salmon oil for a glossy coat. I didn't hear any complaints, but I do wonder what she thinks sometimes!

Something had definitely unsettled Jack-Jack yesterday. Whether it was the long trip out to contact, the fact that Esmeralda has been on night shifts this week, surfacing trauma from moving away from his mum, teething or coming down with something, or the beginning of a developmental leap (or a mixture of all of these), he really had trouble sleeping last night. He wouldn't be put down to sleep in his cot at nap time in the afternoon as he just wanted to be held, and this continued on into the evening. After going up to resettle him several times after he'd gone to bed, I ended up rocking him to sleep in his buggy downstairs so that I could finish the bits and pieces I needed to do, and even once I'd gone up to bed myself and settled him in his cot we had a rather rocky night.

Today has been much better. Esmeralda stayed up until mid-afternoon, and we went on a trip out into town for brunch which was lovely. I'm really glad she was home (and awake), because this evening we had an exciting moment! We were watching Jack-Jack playing with his toys on the floor in the living room before his bath. He was getting up on his knees every so often and rocking as he does, when he suddenly shuffled one knee very slightly forwards! Esmeralda and I got super excited, and both got down on the floor with him, crawling around to show him what to do (Lady was looking at us like we were insane and it probably did look a bit odd if you were a fly on the wall!) We noticed that he was focussed on a space rocket plaster I had on my finger, so I tried crawling slowly backwards in front of him, giving him lots of praise and encouragement, and after stretching and reaching (at which point I felt rather mean), he moved forwards! Ok, it was more of a commando crawl than one on all fours, but it was forward motion none the less and continued across the room! We're so proud of him! This feeling may pass once he's racing around getting into mischief...

No comments:

Post a Comment