Little Sebastian turned seven months old when we returned from our trip to New York. Since then, he has shifted into high developmental gear with many changes coming fast and furious. The week after we returned home, his first tooth broke through. The week after that, his second. The next week, his third. That’s two on the bottom and one on the top, for all you fans keeping score at home. I’ve graphed these numbers and, according to the chart and given his current rate of tooth growth, by the time he is one year old he should have 21 teeth. Now that’s science! An unfortunate side effect of all this dental augmentation is that the poor little guy is waking up every hour all through the night. Poor Sebastian. Poor Jan.

I believe I mentioned that Sebastian started crawling while we were on holiday. Mostly backwards. Well, there’s no more of that. Now we’re all forward all the time. Except when we’re sideways. Nothing is safe any longer around the house. If you don’t believe me, feel free to ask the potted plants, electrical outlets, and Emily’s drawings. They all have sad stories to tell. While he enjoys being an upwardly mobile quadruped, he is never happier than when he’s standing tall on two feet, jumping up and down, and walking around the house (with the guiding support of his friends and family, of course). It’s only a matter of time before he’s jumping off the couch.

And after milking it for the first seven months of his life, Sebastian has finally started with the hard stuff. Well, if you can call oatmeal cereal “hard”. We try to give him some cereal every night. It usually goes like this: I try to feed him a spoonful, he tried to grab the spoon, I pin his hands down and insert spoon into his mouth, he makes the Yucky Face, eventually swallows it, and then giggles and asks for more. Repeat. We were very diligent when Emily starting eating solids, making all of her foods from scratch at home, making sure to not introduce a new food until numerous days had passed and we were sure she didn’t have any food allergies, and never letting her eat anything with gluten in it. We were having lunch at a restaurant today when Sebastian grabbed a slice of bread off the table and started chewing on it. Jan and I both freaked out for a split second, looked at each other, and we both calmly said, “Fuck it”. He gnawed on that slice of bread for half an hour and loved every minute of it. Then he went nuts on the lettuce. There might have been a bit of olive oil on it. Second child syndrome in full effect.