Such are the immortal words of Mo Rocca, and such is Wesley’s forehead. He’s starting to accumulate a collection of bruises on his forehead from all his bonks. Today alone he bonked his head twice–once at home against the coffee table and once at Tucanos (a Brazilian restaurant) on the table edge. He had a hard time recovering from that last one because right after he stopped crying over his traumatic head injury the Brazilian singers trounced in with their drums and loud voices to sing happy birthday to three tables of people. And Wes wasn’t much a fan of the noise. He didn’t cry again, but his lower lip kept pouting out like he was certainly thinking about it. So John took him out to let him recover a bit more.

Also, we have a potential jailbird on our hands now. Wes learned how to pull himself to standing in his crib. Sometimes we’ll sit him in his crib to play, leave for a minute, and come back when we hear a loud thumping noise to find him standing up and hitting the wall with his hand. Mostly I think he pulls himself to standing to get a better grip on the crib with his mouth so he can chew on it.

Lastly, and I know this is heathenish to include in a post essentially about Wes, but I am so darn proud of my newly reorganized pantry. Just look:

I should have taken a “before” picture because it would have made you pass out from horror. Imagine the shelves of your local grocery store after an earthquake, except with the boxes and cans intact on the shelf but at odd angles and in no particular order. Also with expired freshness dates. And a few weevils wandering around.

I am a fan of these under-counter baskets that I use to store my plastic wrap and storage bags.

I feel so empowered by my new pantry. Last night I went grocery shopping and instead of standing in an aisle staring at an item and wondering, “Do I have any of this at home?”, I could clearly picture the organized shelves and know for sure. Few things give as good a high as getting organized.

Today we went to the park.

Wes swung on a swing.

And didn’t crack a smile once.

I guess he must’ve been a little tired. But we had fun anyway.

A neighbor brought us a squash, which Wes quite liked. In its natural form, anyway. I haven’t steamed and mashed it yet for him to try in its actual edible form. Maybe tomorrow.

His therapist dropped off a baby food grinder for me to use to prepare grown-up food in baby form for Wes (veggies, pasta, meat, etc.). I probably get a C as a mom in the eating department because I have to force myself to feed Wes food besides milk. This is mainly because whatever Wes eats you always see again in the form of spit-up. I’m not sure how long it will take for him to outgrow that. It gets tiring, always cleaning it up. At least milky spit-up is somewhat a neutral color. Last week I gave him lasagna (stage 3 baby food, and he did great with it, even without teeth), but then I had to do a whole load of laundry of shirts, bibs, blankets, and burp rags covered in reddish-pinkish spit-up. And it was three days before I felt like giving him solids again after that. I know. C-mom for sure.

Wes is eleven months old now. I remember when he turned six months John and I came to the surprising realization that we were parents of a kid half-way to one year old. And now we’re parents of a kid less than a month off from one. Kind of crazy.

He is progressing well enough in his own ways. He can crawl backwards, but he only scoots back just far enough to push himself up to sitting. He doesn’t seem to realize he could be cruising around the house if he wanted, as long as he doesn’t mind moving backward.

He’s into size 3-6 month clothes. I realized today that we’ll get to reuse his Superman costume from Halloween last year (which he absolutely swam in as a 4-pound baby), because the costume is made for babies up to 9 months. And even though he’ll be over a year old by October 31st, we’ll be lucky if he’s wearing size 6-month clothes.

Wes is a super-happy kid. He smiles a lot, and giggles a lot when he’s tired but happy. One of my favorite things to do is lie next to him on the floor or on our bed when he’s winding down for a nap and is in a good mood. I can baby-wrestle with him, pull him on my tummy, tickle him, throw him in the air, and he laughs and laughs. It’s so fun being a mom sometimes.

It’s official: Wes can push himself up from all-fours into sitting. And he can do it well!

The downside of this is that putting Wes down for a nap, unless he’s already passed out or practically so, is basically pointless. I lay him down on his back and leave the room; a few minutes later I hear him making noise, and his voice sounds like it’s being projected OVER the crib wall. Because now he’s sitting up. And once he’s sitting up he can’t get back down to the lying position, unless he falls over. (Except that his balance is actually quite good, so he’s usually stuck upright.)

I keep having to go in and push him back down and tell him to go to sleep . But a minute later he pops himself right back up again. I come in and find him like this, looking all pleased with himself:

He seems to enjoy his new trick. Whenever he pushes himself up he gets a gigantic smile across his face and is truly happy.

Video of Wes pushing himself to sitting.

For my birthday some of my family came over and we played a game of croquet in the backyard. It’s one of my favorite games ever, but it was about 100 degrees outside, so we pushed through the game as fast as we could. I took some photos of us playing, but the little guy on the sideline stole the show.

Today I handed Wes to John so I could make some dinner. When I came back upstairs Wesley’s eyes were glued to the computer screen. Like daddy, like baby.

It was my birthday yesterday, and I decided to treat myself with a mini photo shoot with my baby.

Right after the camera captured the photo above Wes spit up all over my face. I have a picture of that, too, since the camera was on 10-second delay, but it’s a little too graphic to post. Suffice it to say that I’m visibly grossed out and Wes has his hand on my cheek like he’s trying to calm me, and he has a look on his face like, “What’s the big deal, Mom?”