Letter to Jarom: Month 6

Dear Jarom,

Today you turn 6 months old! Happy half birthday! Sometimes it seems like you just got here and other times it seems like you’ve always been here with your daddy and me. You are becoming such a character. You giggle and chatter away all the time and it’s so fun to watch you. You love to play peek-a-boo and sometimes you’ll cover your face with your bib. Then I’ll say, “where’s the baby?” and you’ll uncover your face and I’ll say, “there he is!” and you think it’s so funny.

This month you got your first two teeth! They make you look even more adorable than you already did. Now that you have a couple teeth you think you can eat whatever you want. You’re getting really good at reaching for things and you especially like to reach for whatever food is on everybody else’s plates! To date you’ve tried oatmeal and rice cereals, carrots, sweet potatoes, squash, peas, green beans, applesauce and peaches. You gobble up everything we give you. You didn’t really like the peas the first few times we gave them to you but just this past week you decided you really did like them. Next on the list to try – pears.

This month you also got pneumonia, which was a little bit scary. You were more irritable than usual and just not quite acting like yourself. Then we noticed you were really wheezy so we took you to urgent care. The doctor gave you a breathing treatment which you screamed all the way through. You finally wore yourself out toward the end of the treatment and started falling asleep. Then you would wake yourself up and cry a little, then fall back to sleep. Maybe we shouldn’t have, but daddy and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was pretty funny. You started breathing a little bit better but the doctor was still concerned so they took an x-ray. You did NOT like that at all and cried through that as well. The results came back that you had pneumonia so just as you had fallen asleep the nurse came in and gave you a shot of antibiotics. Your eyes shot open the second the needle went in and you screamed. I felt so bad for you.

For the next week we had to give you breathing treatments at home. You had to wear this mask that looked like a fish and while you liked the mask itself you were not a fan of the breathing treatments. Some days you would sit there just fine but other days you were wiggle and squirm and fuss through the whole treatment. It wasn’t much fun for any of us. But your breathing is fine now and we’re all really glad about that.

You are becoming more independent and more mobile. Sometimes in the morning we hear you fussing and we go in your room and you have moved from the middle of the crib, out of your blanket and stuck up in the corner! I don’t know how you do it! Sometimes when you’re laying on your belly you’ll maneuver around so you’re rotating to face a different direction. You’ll be crawling in no time. You’re also getting really good at sitting up by yourself. I’ll sit you on the floor in front of me so I can catch you with my feet if you start to topple over but you can sit for quite awhile at a time all by yourself, playing with your toys. And you LOVE your toys. You’ll sit in your exersaucer and play with that for 30 minutes at a time, usually. Or you’ll play with all your floor toys for quite awhile too. It’s nice that you can occupy yourself so I can get other things done and not have to entertain you all the time. But we do love to entertain you and watch you giggle and make silly noises at us.

Love, Mommy