Playtime

I've admitted here before, I have absolutely no clue what to do with a baby. Sure, I've figured out feeding, burping, swaddling, diapering, etc. My question is, what do you do in between? Do you just sit there and stare at each other? How many times can you try to convince him to stare at his mobile?

We did get into a little routine with reading stories, tummy time, and chilling in the happy place when he wasn't sleeping, eating, or crying. Since we were on a pretty regular three hour schedule, with napping taking up over an hour of that cycle, fortunately there wasn't a lot of that time to fill.

The past week or two though, he's been taking shorter and shorter naps. He also seems to not be hungry when the three hour mark rolls around, so we've had to reevaluate our schedule. We decided to try larger feedings at four to four and a half hour intervals. You know what that means?

That's right - larger chunks of time to fill between naps and feedings.

Luckily I'm still getting my weekly emails from BabyCenter. I noticed on the one for this week that there was a link to a page with a weekly activity. I clicked it and holy crap - am I ever thankful I did! There are a whole bunch of ideas for ways to play with your infant! I'm saved!

The first one we did was to play "Airplane" on my knees/shins:

He loved it! He was all smiles and drool. (That's an action shot right there) I had a nice little puddle on my belly when we were done. (kinda gross, actually) I'm guessing it's probably good exercise for me too, because I was tired afterwards. I finally had to pick him up and set him on my stomach.

He's looking at his dad here, like "what's with the camera already???"

We also tried one where you sit the baby back on the Boppy and then, holding both hands, slowly pull the baby into a sitting position, hold it for a bit (we chatted!) and then lower him back down to the pillow. I did it with him on my lap as we sat on the couch. He chatted and made little motorboat sounds the whole time. He's getting so big, and alert and aware of what's going on around him! My husband read him a book when we were done with the sitting up game and he was actually looking at the pages.

He is so flipping cool.