Two Months or Nine Weeks

On Thursday Timmy turned 2 months! To celebrate we took him for his first vaccinations. Poor baby - he got a jab in each upper thigh and then on top of that a syrup to drink. He did really well though. He calmed down pretty quickly after the injections and was pretty happy afterwards. The doctor put two bandaids shaped like soccer balls on the injection sites (see pic below) ... very cute. This was also time for his fourth checkup. In Germany kids get altogether nine checkups (ger. Untersuchung) up to the age of 5, and they call them U1, U2, ... 'till U9. So yeah - Timmy just had his U4. He's developing well for his age and the official weight on Thurs was 5250gr.

and a closeup

To make things a little better for him we went to a baby massage course. A little while back I decided that it might be nice to "do" something with him, and out of various options (like PEKIP and baby swimming and, and and...) I picked out baby massage, 'cos it seemed the most fun and relaxed. There were about 8 women with babies in the group. Babies ranged from 7 weeks to 5 months. I gotta say - Timmy was by far the cutest. Of course, I'm a little biased :) The massage itself was fine, but the teacher I didn't like so much. She started off by giving a sheet of fairly detailed instructions that teach me (as a mother) how to ask my child permission to give him a massage. The instructions were very specific about how to do it and involved a little song that all mothers then had to sing prior to massaging their babies. It went on something like:

Klein klein Kindchen
Klein klein Kindchen
Darf ich dich massieren?
Ja oder nein? Ja oder nein?
Erlaubst du es mir?

roughly translates to English:

Little little baby
Little little baby
Can I massage you?
Yes or no? Yes or no?
Am I allowed to do it?

The teacher then went on for a little while that the importance of asking a child permission for doing something is a way to prevent sexual assault later in life. Apparently because this way "they learn that they're allowed to say 'no' to adults". Phoa! Really? I mean it's gotta be a really polite rapist (like in that anecdote...) who's going to ask permission. Anyhoo.... thus, unlike Timmy, from that point onwards I wasn't _as_ excited about the whole thing. But he was _REALLY_ excited. He kept looking around at all the other babies and was very very curious about the goings on. I don't think he actually noticed me massaging him very much, 'cos his attention was completely elsewhere. He was very well behaved, even when all the other babies started crying at some point (kind of one after another, as if it was contagious) he just wanted his dummy, and continued looking around.

In the evening unfortunately he got a little temperature (38.3) because of the vaccinations and we had to give him a 'Zäpfchen' (suppository). For some reason Germans are really big on giving medication to children into the rectum. I've never heard of anything like this either in Russia or in Australia, but here it is the absolute done thing. I think it comes from the whole thing that doctors here don't really trust parents to do the right thing (which requires a complete separate rant). That was late at night before his bedtime, and thankfully at his first early morning feed he was fine again.

Today is also 9 weeks. Record sleep from this week (and so far) is 8.5 hours at one stretch. In general he sleeps now anywhere between 5 and 7 hours, which is great for us - parents. Up until now we've been giving him his bath at 9:45pm, and then he'd get his last feed for the day and asleep by about 10:30-10:45. Now that he's sleeping longer, we're going to try and move the bath time to 8:45pm and see how that goes. Some photos from the last couple of days:

Looking at his mobile...

Being curious with Daddy...

With his teddy bears - courtesy of Tim's godfather Tim D and wonderful Michelle...

Yesterday auntie Marlies came by for a quick visit passing by on her way home, and tonight Grandma Nina is arriving from Russia. Thus Timmy is getting to see his first set of relatives.

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And here are some photos of the sunsets and sunrises that Jack has been making. Now that the days are the longest, we're seeing some very pretty skies.