-18 lbs, 13 oz. (15% for weight)
-29 in. (25% for height)
-18.5 inch head circumferance (78% for head size)... Holy Head!
Ryder's one year check-up was pretty uneventful, which is a good thing. Dr. Friedman thinks he looks great. Poor little guy received four vaccines, but his tears were short-lived. So far (knock on wood), Ryder has tolerated all vaccines well without any lasting effects beyond the initial tears from the poking.
Dear Ryder Spider,
I quite frankly don't know where to start. Overall, this year has flown by even though parts of it felt like an eternal hell (ahem... those first three months). You've tripled your birth weight and more than quadrupled your weight from the day you were admitted into the NICU. You aren't exactly big (other than your head, of course), but you are most definitely growing like a weed and catching up with all of your friends.
As far as appearances go, you still get tons of comments/compliments about your big eyes. A lot of people say that you have my eyes, but this is hard for me to believe since I've never thought of myself as having big eyes. People also love to comment on your long, beautiful eyelashes. You definitely did not get those from me. Your daddy and I are still a bit baffled by your bright blue eye color. Because babies eye color often changes in the first year, we've assumed all along that yours would too. But after a year, we're starting to finally believe that we have a blue-eyed kiddo. Besides your eyes, you get the second most comments about your hair. You have a lot of it! In fact, your mommy and daddy are going to have to pull the trigger soon and take you for your first haircut. Your curls in the back are plenty cute, but your bangs hang close to your eyes now and the curls around your ears are becoming unruly. Your Ro doesn't want us to take you for your first hair cut too soon because apparently your Uncle Aaron was traumatized by his first hair cut experience and was petrified of hair cuts for years. I'm not going to make an appointment quite yet, but it's definitely something that may need to be addressed sooner rather than later.
One of your most shocking characteristics as of late is your appetite. Your teachers at school, Ms. Peggie and other friends and family who have seen you eat are absolutely stunned when they see the amount of food that you consume in a single sitting (especially for such a little guy). For example, we took you to Mellow Mushroom a few nights ago, and you polished off an entire kids meal. You downed a heaping plateful of macaroni and cheese and broccoli, a meal that was clearly intended to serve a kindergartner rather than a one-year old. Considering the challenges we faced in transitioning you from baby food to table food, it really is amazing that you've transformed into such an eating machine. With a mix of Halpern and Moses blood, I suppose it should be less than shocking that you are a food lover. Let's hope that you have inherited your daddy's metabolism.
Bananas are still your favorite food. If you spy a banana before it is being served to you, you'll immediately refuse to touch anything else on your plate and you'll whine frantically until the banana is offered to you. You shove the pieces into your mouth so quickly, that we have to dole it out to you a couple of bites at a time. Banana-rationing. Ms. Peggie is convinced that one of your banana-tantrums can be triggered by the mere mention of the word "banana." She is always careful to hide bananas from your site, make no mention of the word "banana," and waits for you to finish the rest of your dinner before removing the banana from hiding. You also still adore mandarin oranges and all other fruits, for that matter. Beyond fruits, it's hard to identify other favorites since you hardly meet a food that you don't like. You do, however, still act funny when introduced to brand new foods though. Without fail, you always make a face and spit a food out upon first taste. It takes quite a bit of time and encouragement to convince you to actually chew and swallow something new, but once you do, you're officially sold. Even if we offer you something sweet and delicious, like a bite of a cupcake, you put on a huge production and act repulsed before you finally give in.
Towards the end of November, you started sprouting a bunch of new teeth. As of now, all of these new teeth are still slowly making their way through, but from what I can see, it looks like you'll have two more on top and two more on bottom once they are all finished coming through. This will add up to four total on top and four total on bottom. You were toothless for so long, and now suddenly you are teething machine. The teething process itself hasn't been awful. You have had some nap-regression (i.e. inconsistency in nap frequency and length), but you did also have a double ear infection, which was diagnosed a couple of days before your birthday party, so it has been difficult to know the source of your sleep issues. Your ear infection has been gone for a week or so, and your naps still aren't stellar, so it seems that either your mouth is bothering you or you are simply going through a less-than-spectacular napping phase.
Recent nap issues aside, you generally still take two naps a day. Your naps usually range from 1 hour to 2.5 hours. You seem to nap better at school these days than you do at home. For the past several weekends in a row, there have been numerous occasions when I was only able to get one nap out of you instead of two. I hope you are not already trying to cut out one of your naps... I'm not ready for that! Your night sleep is still tremendous. You sleep 11-12 hours per night, pretty much without exception. You are still VERY clear when you are ready for bed, and it is impossible to try to keep you up any later once you have decided you are ready. Typically your self-imposed bedtime is between 6pm and 6:30pm, but on rare occasion, you'll stay up until 6:45 or 7. On the one hand, your early bedtime is still hard for me because I have to rush home from work and only get to spend a short amount of time playing with you before putting you to bed. On the other hand, by now I am used to having a long evening to unwind, watch tv and hang out with your daddy once you are asleep, so I know that it will be equally difficult if/when you start staying up later. I definitely know that we are lucky to have such a great night-time sleeper and I try never to take it for granted. Keep it up baby boy!
You now are pulling up on anything and everything, and you are starting to cruise. Do I think you'll be walking in the next month? No. But I am also starting to think that you may not be as late of a walker as I once thought. You cruise the most in your crib (which we watch on the monitor), mainly during naptime. You still drive me and daddy completely bonkers by throwing your pacis and lovey over the crib railing and then pitching an absolute fit. You sometimes do this over and over again when you are fighting a nap. There are times when I have re-entered your room a dozen times to do a paci/lovey retrieval. I've tried to ignore your fits to teach you that daddy and I won't always come to retrieve your paci and lovey, but you proceed to scream your head off until we give in. You don't seem to nap without your lovey and paci, so for now, it seems that the absurdly repetitive retrieval process is necessary. You do typically lose the battle, eventually falling asleep once you tire out from the process.
You haven't added any new words to your limited vocabularly as of late, but I'm hoping you'll grace us with some soon. You still only say "hi," "hey," and "uh-oh" with regularity. You also still bark on a regular basis. We think you have recently started to say "Gaudi," which comes out as "Geeee" (with a soft "g" sound). But just when we are 100% sure that "Geeee" means Gaudi, you'll say it out of context (when Gaudi is nowhere in sight and we aren't talking about or looking at pictures of dogs). The jury is still out, I suppose, but I'm reasonably certain that this is the newest addition to your vocabularity. You say both "mama" and "dada," but you do not regularly say these words with purpose. I'm not going to give you full credit until you are clearly calling your mommy and daddy by these names.
Now for the mushy-gushy stuff... You truly amaze me, baby boy. You are so sweet and loveable and perfect in
XOXO,
Mama (and Dada too)
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| Awesome (See below for original photo) |
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| New Favorite Activity (climbing in and out of Gaudi's kennel) |
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| Big Blues. |
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| Ryder's First Chanukah! |
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