Greetings to you all.

Xavier experimented with his first pureed food tonight: carrots. We let him self-feed, handing him a spoon and a glob of carrot puree. How much he actually swallowed is unknown, but he got quite a bit in his mouth. At one point he made a face which suggested he did not like the taste.

After a while, he grew bored with the spoon. Once he had coated every part of it with carrot, he tossed it to the floor. He advanced to finger painting, then to carrot pies, then to splashing. At one point he found a tiny lump of carrot which required him to pick it up on his fingertip for a careful and intense examination. Every so often he would press his fingers into his mouth and suck them clean.

After this course he needed a bath, but that is another tale.

Hello to everyone.

Xavier's inquisitiveness is directing him to explore more and more things. His being much more mobile now has made us examine the house for "dangers" at his level of reach. Already he has shown us he can remove dresser drawers with a single push, and adjust the volume on the surround sound system.

Now, we have these all over the house.

Apparently, the sockets call to him, like a siren's sonnet. "What might these slots be? And what is this bigger hole my finger easily fits into?" He has swung doors out of the way to gain access to them.

Greetings to everyone.

Xavier has grown strong enough and wiggly enough to make diaper changes difficult should he decide to become active during the process. Fortunately, he goes active about one time in three, rather than three times in three.

As soon as the diaper is loosed, even if his feet and legs are held up in the air, he will flip over to his stomach. Once on his stomach, he'll reach for and grab anything he can. If the attending parent is not careful and lets him escape before "the cleaning," things can get messy.

A couple of days back, Xavier filled his diaper with Herculean effort. As soon as the diaper was free of him, he took his first stab at self-cleaning. Wondering what his hand just scooped, he proceeded to investigate with his fingers while Dad was working to get the overflowing diaper into the trash without staining the carpet.

During this two seconds, Xavier grew bored and instantly moved to count his toes. After all, he hasn't seen them all night. Want to guess which hand pulled his foot toward his face?

So, now it's an emergency! Forget wiping his little bum, the underlying clean diaper may need replacing, but that's less work than bathing a baby and wiping down walls and flat surfaces. After that hand! Xavier giggles and thinks it's a game. To make it more of a challenge (Xavier doesn't do anything half way), he decided to change the rules. However, Xavier is not yet faster than Daddy, and that hand got cleaned before it could do any more mischief!

With clean hand, and now a clean bum, Xavier's hand found another item to explore. Fortunately, that anatomical item was cleaned before the hand found it.

As parents, it's a rite of passage to take the required "baby butt shot" photograph. We finally initiated into that rite, and when Xavier is a teenager with a serious girl friend... Well, some payback for being so squirmy at diaper changes.