Dinner and Dance

Feeding Oscar at the moment is, I suspect, rather like having a ferret down your trousers.
His new-found alertness to his surroundings has turned the baby I once knew with immaculate table manners into a wriggling, fidgety little thing that would give a Debretts editor palpitations. Feeding time is a bizarre mix of amusing and infuriating behaviour - he bicycles his legs around, grabs great handfuls of my clothes (he's fascinated by the prints and texture of the fabric), and swings his head wildly round every few seconds to give me a heart-melting gummy grin (which is 50% delightful and 50% excrutiatingly painful - he really needs to learn to let go of me first before he gets teeth!)

Slightly Rattled

Oscar has spent the last couple of weeks learning to hold things, which has had its ups and its downs. I watched him excitedly shake a plastic rattle in front of his face, then promptly clonk himself square on the forehead with it. Two or three seconds of shocked silence was predictably followed by lots of crying, and days later he still has a little green bruise, poor pumpkin. So I've been sourcing lots of soft things for him to play with until he's recovered from the incident.

His toy of the moment is definitely Ollie the Octopus. Now it may have said 'octopus' on the box, but Ollie is a confusing specimen with only five legs (one of which is much longer than the other as Oscar has been pulling on it), multi-coloured cloth 'feet', a green pear-shaped body, enormous eyes and an inane grin. Despite Ollie's dubious appearance, our son gazes at him lovingly as he attempts to get most of his feet in his mouth at once. I suspect Oscar currently prefers Ollie to his doting parents, a fact that I'm trying not to take too personally.