Maternity testing

Two dear friends of ours are expecting a child. They are both quite sure he is the father, but the expectant mother continues to be plagued by the nagging suspicion that it is not really genetically her baby. Given that they did not pursue any fertility treatments whatsoever, this fear is not terribly well founded: it's rather hard to accidentally end up with someone else's egg in your uterus by mistake.

However, I can see how such concern could take root after this afternoon. Jolly just spent the afternoon cheerfully demolishing his room, pulling every book and every toy out of the shelves and banging it about on the floor. Young Ephiny apparently took great joy in arranging her toys and in putting things in their rightful place. Young Guinevere definitely took great joy in emptying everything on the floor. Very Young Jolly appears to take after his mummy in this regard. Confusing!

Meanwhile I hung things up on the walls of the nursery (including a set of wooden dwarves that hung in the nursery of his grosspapa). I have to say that the empty all the things on the shelf game was so far the longest holding of rapt attention in terms of independent play. Jolly was seriously entranced by the growing pile of stuff surrounding him. I found some heavy duty chew marks on the book we read for bedtime the next day (appropriately, the German translation of the Very Hungry Caterpillar).

Other things that are new: he's started eating suddenly in a much more grown-up way, meaning, he no longer tries to hamster-style cram the entire content of his fist into his mouth. He's started using his four teeth to make systematic bites off and then works on swallowing that mouthful and then takes another bite. He also just started to be much more skilled at picking up small pieces of food. He's no longer holding the piece of food clenched in his fist, but is using individual fingers, sort of in a nascent pincher grasp. This means he can eat the entire thing rather than just the parts that are protruding out the ends, and also means that much less food is strewn about accidentally.

The preferences are definitely funny. Today for lunch I had lentils, then asuccession of green beans, a pretzel, golden beets, and mango for dessert. Everything besides the lentils got shared (lentils were in dal form and not sharable because heaven forbid we try to feed Jolly with a spoon, that's still very much not on). He totally managed to carefully retrieve every tiny crumb of pretzel before he started in on the beets, but the green beans were a hit. Looks like all of that playing with the stuffed green bean prepared him.