Sorry for the Day Off

I apologize for taking a day off from blogging yesterday. It wasn't that I had nothing to say; I just chose to nap during the few seconds free to blog during the afternoon. I probably could have blogged later last night after he went to bed, but it made more sense to me to just wait until this afternoon to blog instead. For that reason, though, this is probably going to be a monster marathon post. Sorry!

One thing I didn't think about with feeding Patrick so much more is that more food equals more poop...and more spit-up. I'm ok with the more poop thing. I can handle poopy diapers much better now than a year ago. The problem is the more spit-up. I'd been working on slowly weaning him off his reflux meds as the spitting up got better over the past few months. One medicine is known to have some pretty crazy side-effects, and I worry some having Patrick on it, even though he hasn't shown to have a problem with the medicine at all. And our co-pay for the other medicine just doubled the last time we got it refilled. We would all be happier for Patrick to not be on any medicines any longer.

Unfortunately, though, the increased food in his belly is forcing him to spit-up a little more again. It's still not anywhere near as bad as it was a few months ago, but it's enough that I'm slowly working my way back up to his allowed dosage of the medicine right now. And as he gains more weight, he will be allowed more and more of it. I'm hoping his belly gets used to being more full soon and stops with the spit-up again. I'm so ready for this reflux thing to be in the past.

I could swear that yesterday Patrick said, "Dada." We were in the car, but Matt was distracted at the moment and didn't hear it. Now I'm questioning myself whether that's really what I heard. Patrick hasn't repeated it, so it's hard to know for sure. He did spend the weekend trying out all sorts of new sounds. He can say s's, t's, d's, h's, n's, and of course the usual b's and m's as well as any number of vowel sounds. It's all babble right now, other than "mama," but it's getting more decipherable every day. My favorite is that instead of merely screaming to express frustration, he has started yelling at us using his made-up words. It's hilarious to hear. I wonder what he thinks he's saying to us. I'll work on getting a video of it because it's too cute not to share.

Speaking of him expressing frustration, though, he did plenty of that this weekend. I hope Heather is right in her comment on the last post that Patrick truly is in the terrible twos already. I have no idea how I'll cope if this is supposed to just get worse next year. Already he screams at us non-stop when he doesn't get what he wants--even though most of the time we have no idea what he wants--or when we make him do something he doesn't want to do right then. Where'd my compliant, snuggly baby go?

Ok, I need some help from more experienced parents out there. Patrick is quickly approaching full mobility, which means that it's about time for Matt and me to finish baby-proofing. First of all, is there anything you other parents found to be crucial in that area that you wouldn't necessarily think about ahead of time?

Our next problem has to do with baby gates. We are hoping to turn one room of our house into a baby-proof play area, and we need to somehow block the room off to keep Patrick in the room. It doesn't have a door, though, so the simple baby gate solution won't work. Here's what we're working with:

(And no, I didn't vacuum for the picture. It always looks this nice...really!) The first picture is taken from the hallway by Patrick's room. The second picture is taken from the hallway you see all the way to the left in the first picture. We're debating between two options for baby-gating it. We can either:

1. put a baby gate at the end of each hallway as you enter the room. This means they cannot be pressure-mounted gates because they're not in doorways. We're reluctant to install gates permanently because of how new the house is, but we'll do what we need to do. We also can't use the standard size gates because the hallways are somewhat larger than doorways.

2. put a long cage-like baby gate all the way across the front of the room, making a "hallway" in front of them, connecting the two true hallways. (Does that make sense?) This would be a more expensive gate option, but it would most likely be more flexible, as it might be able to be moved to other areas of the house, depending on which gate we get.

So which option seems to be the better option? And what kind of gate should we get? Have you had success or failure with any kind of gate in particular? We've read reviews about all the different gates, and they are all mixed. Someone always hated every gate, claiming the plastic was flimsy or it was too difficult to install, and someone else swears by it and wouldn't dream of ever buying a different one. It makes it difficult to know what will work for us and our situation. We could really use some advice here!

And to finish up today, how about a few pictures of Patrick from the weekend?

Is it just me, or does that face look much rounder than just a few days ago?
He loves this gear toy. If you push a button, it lights up and sings and rotates all the gears. Patrick loves playing with the gears too. His favorite thing, though, seems to be turning the toy over and dumping the gears on the floor. The other day we thought we'd lost one of the gears after he did that, and we searched everywhere to find it with no luck. Finally I checked under the toy one more time. The missing gear was fit tightly on a peg on the bottom, which means it had stayed hidden when we just lifted the toy enough to peek under it. It nearly drove us crazy searching for that gear; we couldn't believe that it turned out to be in such a simple spot.
Ok, so he didn't exactly get this one for his birthday. Like father, like son! He's fascinated with the computer. It will probably be another year or two before he's building his own, though.