When Ben was Eating

Life's tough for Ben at the moment. He's still sick with this awful gastro thing. I changed no fewer than 10 pooy nappies yesterday. Things have improved a little today and he reduced his output to 6 pooy nappies. We thought he was through the vomiting side of things, but after being very grizzly all afternoon he bookended the day with a massive up chuck. Poor little fella. It's all a bit worrying and I took him back to the GP today for a check up. The assessment is that Ben is still moderately dehydrated, but all we can do is more of what we have been - try and keep the fluids up to him, keep a close eye on him and take him to hospital if he gets worse. He's lost a little bit of weight, but hopefully when he gets rid of this thing his appetite will improve. My mission now is to try and catch a poo as it comes out of his bottom and get it to a path lab within 30 mins. I also have to be very careful not to get any wee in the sample - good job he's dehydrated and there's nothing much coming out of his kidneys anyway.

With all this going on, Ben is understandably off his tucker. We introduced solids about three weeks ago but at the moment his intake is virtually non existent. If you could have seen him 5 days ago!! He wasn't so sure when we first started, but he very quickly developed a love for pumpkin and any other vegetable I offered him. He's also tried beef, lamb, apple, pear, banana, yoghurt, custard .. and of course rice cereal. Ben's pictured above showing me how well he's emptied his bowl - some did actually go into his mouth!!

In other Ben related developments... we have now replaced his capsule with a seat that faces forward. Ben seems to really love it (as do I, even though it's pretty distracting). I'm constantly looking in my rear vision mirror and getting lots of big smiles from my boy.

Ben has also managed to sit without being held (if only for a few seconds).

He's also getting stronger on is tummy and looks like he'll crawl at any moment. Generally speaking he's getting quite mobile. I'll put him down on his back and he'll roll about and get himself in all sorts of weird and wonderful positions. Here he is scoring a try for the baby wallabies team (someone's gotta keep Australia's hopes alive).

As well as rolling and shuffling about, Ben has taken to holding on to his feet. He loves doing this, I guess he's gotta keep those hamstrings supple if he wants to graduate from the joeys to the wallabies team.

Ben's also been making some great sounds. Lots of boos, baas, goos, gaas, burbles and raspberries. He's also been sucking on his bottom lip and making a very cute little popping noise. Apparently the sucking might be a sign of teething - but we haven't seen any pearly whites yet. I've actually been quite amazed at how Ben keeps doing all this stuff (apart from eating) even though he's been so sick. When I was sick all I wanted to do was go to sleep. But Ben just throws up and then gets on with whatever he was doing. He's such a little trooper.