Rock and Roll

I'm blogging while monitoring again and have just watched Liam roll onto his tummy, and then roll himself back onto his back! Although he could roll onto his tummy already, I think this is the first time I've seen him do the reverse, which is the more important skill considering the extreme warnings about letting your baby sleep on his/her tummy. Although my entire generation always slept on our front, it is now considered a dangerous activity to be avoided at all costs - including not letting mom and dad sleep because they must constantly monitor baby.
Just as I finished writing that sentence, he rolled onto his tummy and got stuck. I had to go up and roll him back, so I guess we're not "out of the woods" yet!

Moving and Talking

I'm currently watching Liam on our video monitor as he "sleeps" in his crib. His head is now where his feet were 30 minutes ago. He keeps curling up and rolling onto his side, then uncurling. He always does this on his left side and it always rotates him a little bit counter-clockwise, so he just keep spinning around in the crib. His eyes are definitely open and he keeps sticking his hands in his mouth, so we'll see when he actually goes to sleep...

Liam is also doing a lot of "talking" recently. He seems to especially get talkative when I am around. He usually says some combination of "Lah" and "Rah" but has a few other cute sounds in his repertoire. I've been trying to capture these phenomena on video to post here, but as soon as he sees a camera, he is fascinated by it and stops everything he was doing. He smiles more each day and sometimes lets out a joyful little shriek and that always makes us happy and laugh.

Since Liam is now able to roll himself over on to his tummy, but is not quite 3 months, our doctor directed us to not let him sleep in the crib over night while we sleep, until he is at least 4 months old! So, now he sleeps in the papasan chair Mariel gave us over night.

OK, he seems to have fallen asleep while I wrote this (30 minutes of moving and then 3 minutes to fall asleep). Good thing we have this video monitor - thanks mom and dad!!

Monitors

My parents came over tonight and made us a delicious dinner and brought us a slew of baby monitors to test out. We ended up keeping a cool wireless video monitor with a hand-held monitor that we can carry around and infrared night-vision for dark rooms. The video monitor also has an audio component so it can be used for both duties. We also kept an audio intercom system that my parents used when I was a baby - they still work better than the brand-new intercom they got from Radio Shack (which is where they got the originals 30 years ago)! So now we will feel a bit better when I return to work and Annika is left here alone with Liam. Now we can also use the intercom to talk to each other between basement and top floor without yelling which is convenient in general. Can you tell I like gadgets?