Almost 8 Weeks!

As Noah closes in on the 8 week mark, I realize how negligent I have been about this blog. So much has happened in the past two and a half weeks!

Noah turned six weeks old on the day of my Penn graduation ceremony. He attended the event with his dad and his aunt Katie, and tolerated all but the last 10 minutes of what was a very long event. (He did better than his mom. I was fussy and restless by the third "greeting" speech.) By the time we all arrived home, it had been nearly 4 hours since he had seen me, and the first thing he did was to give me a huge grin--his first ever truly social smile, and the best graduation gift anyone could ask for.

Over the past couple of weeks, he has radically expanded his range of communication. No longer does he just fuss or cry to indicate that he needs something. Now he has a whole conversational register of vowel sounds--"ahhs" especially. When he really gets going, he can approximate the pattern of conversation too, filling in "answers" to questions and taking turns vocalizing when he is spoken to.

His motor skills are growing daily as well. He can push himself up on his forearms now and bat at things with relative accuracy. He's a master at pulling my hair. Sometimes when he is especially hungry, I will pick him up to put him to my breast and he will grab a hank of my hair and yank me towards him, as if to say "don't even think about doing anything other than feeding me Mama!"

We have had some wonderful family adventures these past couple of weeks also. Most notably, we traveled to Kansas City for Tom and Kelly Boling's wedding and Noah got to meet many family members, including his uncles Michael and Ryan, great aunts, cousin Maddie, and great grandfathers on Trey's side--his great-Grandad and his Opa. This past week we also drove down to Delaware to visit his great-Grammy and great-Grandpa Bowman. Noah delighted in meeting so many new people, and proved himself adept at both plane and car travel from the start.