Well, Finn is an eater now. About a month ago, I wrote that he’d nibble on a carrot if one was offered, but at the time, he still wasn’t very much into eating spooned food. The last couple of weeks have seen a lot of progress on that front. At first, I could jam a spoon of rice cereal into his mouth and he’d sort of gag but keep most of it down. This past weekend, he really turned a corner and started opening up his little bird mouth and even moving his head (like a cobra?) to get to the disgusting purees I offered. So far, his favorites are brown rice with peas (shudder) and sweet potatoes. He’ll eat a medium jar of the former in two meals, which still doesn’t represent too hearty an appetite, but it’s a big step forward. We also have these barley teething biscuits that are, post-teething, the nastiest thing I’ve ever voluntarily touched. They dissolve pretty quickly into a light brown sludge that coats his chest and hands. I’m not terribly squeamish, but even I wince a little to pick one of these slimy things up for him when he drops it. Once we’re through this box, I think we’re switching to Zwieback toast.

Finn is also a full-on crawler now. M and others wanted to allow that he was crawling long before I would accept his movements as crawling (I mean, c’mon, wallowing and spinning around on your butt to get to things within a 3-foot radius is impressive for a little tyke, but crawling it ain’t). Finally, a couple of weeks ago, he started doing real crawling, and now he gets around without any trouble, often making a bee-line for the cat’s water dish, which he delights in turning over. He also pulls himself up on things and can stand up assisted. This weekend, he woke up and crawled out of our bed and fell to the floor (which is a 3-foot-plus drop). We installed a gate at the top of our stairs and are trying to decide now what to do about his out-of-bed crawling, whether we can think up some sort of preventive measures or whether to see how long it takes him to learn a valuable lesson on his own about depth perception and exploring a bit more carefully.