A few more "Firsts"

We've had a few big "milestones" the past couple of days.  Three, in fact.

The first occurred last Thursday night.  Mr. Cob rarely has to travel for work, but last week he had to fly up to Philadelphia and cover two hearings for one of the partners in his firm.  His first hearing was at 9:30am Friday morning, so he had to fly up Thursday night.  Which meant Lukas and I would be here alone.  Which meant I would have to spend the night alone with Luke for the first time.  As I've mentioned before, I'm a little bit of a wimp when it comes to being by myself.  I've gotten better the past couple of years, but I still am usually a nervous nelly when Mr. Cob is away and I get a horrible night sleep.  So you can imagine how I felt the first night alone with Lukas would go.  My sweet dad offered to come into the city and stay with us, but I decided I needed to be a big girl and stay alone with the babe.  And to my surprise, I honestly didn't get scared once and slept the entire night (and by entire, I mean in 3-4 hour increments...my little man didn't magically sleep for 10 hours in a row).  So milestone number 1 was more of a mommy milestone than a Lukas milestone.

The second milestone to occur has been in the works for a few weeks now and finally came to a head this weekend.  Lukas' first pearly white tooth cut through the gums!  (I am much more excited than he is about this.)  His bottom middle two teeth are coming in, but so far only one of them has broken through.  He's been drooling like a madman for weeks now and constantly has either his hand or some toy in his mouth to relieve the pressure.  I think his gums are quite swollen and he's in some serious pain, but we're trying to manage it as best we can by switching between Tylenol, Ora-gel and as of today, homeopathic teething pellets (which seem to have worked better than anything).  I'm hoping we get through the worst of it quickly.  I do not like seeing my little man in pain.

And our third big milestone happened on Saturday.  Lukas had his first taste of solid foods!  After much internal debate, we decided to go ahead and feed him some organic brown rice cereal mixed with breast milk.  He LOVED it and kept banging his hands on the high chair demanding more.  I now feel silly for worrying so much about starting him on food.  He ended up with about half of the cereal on his face and bib, but I think he did swallow a little cereal as well.  We followed up with an encore performance Sunday morning and evening and again tonight, thickening the cereal a little each time.  I had hoped that with this additional "substance" he might sleep longer at night, but so far no such luck.  He's actually had the worst couple of sleep(less) nights the past three days, but I think that's due to the teething and a growth spurt.  My plan is to stick with just the rice cereal for at least a week and then move on to some pureed veggies - perhaps he'll share in my love of sweet potatoes!  And of course we snapped some pictures of this monumental event, which I'll upload soon...they're quite hilarious.