10 months (ish), Snot Face is back and general venting

Kids and colds are horrible.  Play groups are just a giant petri dish of germs.  Spencer managed to go almost nine months without so much as a cold.  Now that we are going to play groups and indoor playgrounds, snot galore.  This is Spencer's second cold in almost a month.  The first one took about three weeks to clear.  I hope this one isn't as bad. 

To help him with the cold we have a humidifier going during naps and at night time.  We are putting baby vicks on his chest and back after his bath/shower.  I've also been putting it on before a nap this time.  We also have the spray nasal saline solution for him that we use at night.  If his congestion gets worse we used it before each nap last time too. 

Poor little guy.  He gets spackled from head to toe after a bath almost. He gets baby Aveno for eczema on his cheeks.  That seems to finally be clearing up. We aren't sure if that is because he hasn't been having infant cereal much any more or because we have cone back to the blue label formula. 

Because he is sick he gets Vicks on his back and chest. Then he gets barrier cream and now because he is teething he also breaks out in a rash. Poor little guy. 

The latest battles have been feeding him. He is becoming picky and doesn't like being fed by a spoon. He wants to feed himself everything and even then he is picky.  We tried to ignore bad behaviour but now it has escalated to Spencer making himself puke. It used to be when he was bored in the playpen or exersaucer and I have merely tried to ignore it or reprimand bad behaviour but not give in to what he is trying to achieve. The other day during dinner Spencer was refusing all food and flinging it everywhere. So we decided to let him cool down in the high chair a bit. Well he started to make himself gag. The instant decision was to ignore him and wait out his tantrum of sorts. That was very hard and very messy. It lasted almost 15 minutes before he stopped doing that and moved on to crying to get out attention. I almost didn't make it but Deb helped me be strong and wait it out it I was ready to cry. Since then the "tantrums" have been much shorter and becoming fewer slowly. Being a parent is not for the feignt of heart. Hopefully this works. Ignore bad behaviour reward the good. 

The upside to going to play groups is Spencer crawling well and he also learned to go from the crawl position to sitting. He has loads of fun there. With being able to crawl he has been pulling up on different things exponentially, trying different techniques and what not. Considering though he has been pretty cautious about moving between objects. He is not cautious, however, about crawling off objects, ie the bed, stairs, the couch. We need to catch him all the time. Sometimes it turns into a game. Spencer has also been climbing stairs with relative ease. Sometimes he gets tired sometimes he does the entire flight. We now need to work on his down technique. He has no fear and wants to just walk down them or crawl down them. 

Ill try and upload a few videos when I'm on the laptop. 

This month has been a no spend month as mentioned before, and any money saved is going towards the Malawi Water Project with Helen Timoffee. It has been a good month and I'll give you the total at the end of the month. But with that being said, we have been watching Kijiji Free items and found a free play structure for the back yard. It was a great find and Spencer loves going on the swings and down the slides and can climb the climbing wall with some assistance.