Meal Time & Earaches

Andy is slowly working his way into eating! We tried rice cereal a week or so ago, but he just cried and cried and begrudgingly "ate" about three bites before completely melting down. Of course we also tried this at a normal bottle time, so he was probably just hungry and not in the mood to try something new right then. The little bit that he did have, however, seemed to constipate him, so we waited a while and switched to oatmeal cereal for the next attempt (supposedly easier on the stomach - seems to be thus far). He's been doing pretty well the past week. Here are some photos from one of his first successful meals earlier this week. :) He prefers to take the spoon from you and "feed" himself...



He hasn't had any "real" food yet (veggies or fruit) - we'll probably wait until after his 6 month appointment on 8/26. He'll be 6 months on the 15th - just 11 days from now! He'll also just be 1 day past his last dose of amoxicillin. :( The past few weeks he's been tugging at his ears (first the left, then just this week the right one, too), but he never "complained" about it, so we sort of shrugged it off as just him having figured out he has ears. However, the past few days he's been taking shorter naps and has been fussier than usual (he's normally pretty happy unless he's really hungry or tired), and yesterday and today had a couple super loud, couldn't calm him down, screaming fits. Today about 30 minutes before his morning nap I gave him some Tylenol because he'd been pretty fussy all morning, and chewing on his hand, not taking his bottle easily - I thought maybe he was teething - ?? We never knew Kaylee had teeth coming in until one had popped through, but every kid is different. He woke up after just 30 minutes asleep and fussed for a bit in bed before I got him. Once I did bring him down, he started another screaming fit, after which we called his pediatrician and took him in. He has an ear infection in his right ear (surprisingly not the left, since he'd been pulling on that one longer). So now he's got a 10 day supply of Amoxicillin. Poor little guy. I gave him some Tylenol before bed and will probably do so a couple times tomorrow - the nurse practitioner we saw (who was great - love our pediatric office!) suggested we do that for a couple days until the Amoxicillin has a chance to work, to help ease the pain. Here's the little guy before bath tonight. I love his big baby blues!!