growing baby

Little Mateo is already eight weeks old!  He’s discovered his hands recently–he keeps trying to squish his entire fist into his mouth and spends a good part of the day just licking his hands, hee hee.  Once I even saw him suck just his thumb, but I think it was accidental since he doesn’t have the coordination to do that regularly yet.

And of course he’s still cooing and gurgling and smiling and pseudo-giggling.  He especially smiles a lot when I put him in his bouncy chair on the dining room table while I eat breakfast or lunch.  For some reason he thinks I’m a riot while I eat.  Maybe it’s because I keep making delighted yum yum sounds and toss my head from side to side as I model eating delight.  Mateo’s sure going to have funny dining room manners if he mimics me once he gets to solid foods!  Mateo might also like it because I compliment him all through the meal, telling him (in Spanish), that he’s adorable, loving, handsome, intelligent, generous, kind and so forth.  I pretty much exhaust my entire Spanish vocabulary for compliments. 

We also play other games (all in Spanish) like “King of the Mountain” where I sit Mateo on my knees and tell him he’s the king of the mountain and everything he sees (big wobbly circle on knees) is his terrain (yes, how imperialistic, I know) and then I steal the king for tons of kisses.  We also play horsy on my knees where I punctuate the “William Tell Overture” (theme music for the Lone Ranger) with kisses.  Mateo gets kissed a lot because he’s so fabulously kissalicious! 

Mateo’s also starting to learn to play with his toys.  For a couple of weeks Mateo’s tracked his toys with his eyes, last week he started holding his toys (but not looking at them), and yesterday for the first time he held a toy and looked at it at the same time!  He’s got skills!  He only did it once, but I’m sure there’s plenty of toy playing yet to come! 🙂

Also, last night was the first time that Ilya and I slept in our own bedroom instead of Mateo’s room. It actually worked out really well…we didn’t sleep more hours, but I feel like the quality of my sleep was much better since I wasn’t constantly interpreting Mateo’s various rumblings and groans. We were happy, Mateo seemed just as happy and the cats were extra happy. So all was well!

Me and my rattle

Mateo & kitties

Nakedy!

Sleeping on Grandpa Mike

Mateo and Nathaniel celebrating Inauguration day!

Mateo for President!

Great-Grandma