Nom nom nom

Have you ever slept on your arm wrong and woke up in the middle of the night without the ability to use it? I imagine that is how Luca viewed his extremities over the last 4 ½ months. Big, heavy flesh lumps that occasionally smash him in the face.

Well, good news for Luca. He finally figured out that his arms and hands actually have use: Cramming stuff into his mouth.

I woke up the other morning to the sound of, “Nom nom nom nom.” I peeked into Luca’s crib and found him busily gumming his pajama front. I whispered, “Good luck with that. Keep working and you too can be nude like your brother.”

I forgot how much I love the “Hungry Caterpillar” stage. It’s not like the kid needed a lot of attention before. But now he is content with sitting in his bouncy chair hour after hour, eating anything within a half foot radius. His clothes, toys, fists and pets are all covered with a thin layer of drool. Whenever I carry him in his Baby Bjorn, the entire front is covered in drool within five seconds. “Nom nom nom.”

The only watch out is Elijah is starting to become entertained with the eating machine. I caught him handing Luca Star Wars guys yesterday to see if he’d shove them in his mouth. He did.

But glass houses. I used Luca’s newfound grabbing technique to hold my beer at Eli’s birthday party over the weekend (more on that later this week). It was a neat parlor trick until he tried to tip the bottle into his mouth. It’s not the potential drunken baby-ness that bothered me, it was the potential waste of precious beer.

He’s now old enough to start eating baby food. I don’t know what that makes me weepy, but it does. Diana is planning a big eating event soon and bought a new camcorder in preparation. So we’ll be able to add that to the growing pile of unwatched footage in the office (Our wedding, Eli’s first steps, Eli’s first two birthdays, that drunken night in Cabo San Lucas).

p.s. This isn’t the same photo as the last entry. The angle is slightly different.