Flipping over and sucking on Sophie

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that Owen was sucking on his hands. Feverishly and hard. Like they were coated in honey. He wasn't singling out his thumb or just a few fingers. He'd stick his entire hand in his little mouth. Most of the time he would have both hands in his mouth. A few times he actually choked himself.

"What are you bulimic?" I asked, picking him up to soothe him as he coughed and grasped my fingers with his moist, milk-soaked fists.

When he was a newborn any kind of sucking or rooting around meant that he was hungry. But now he was doing this even after a big meal. So I did what any contemporary mom would do: I consulted Google. "Three months old sucking hands," I typed into the search field. Up came an article from a parenting site that was right on point.

"Three months is about the age when babies discover their hands -- and find that they're wonderfully useful!" the all-knowing pediatrician author said. "They most love using them to get anything they can into their mouths, including their fingers. Sucking can be a sign of hunger, but if your child is eating and growing well, I don't think she's hungry. Most likely, she's doing it to soothe herself, which is a very normal behavior."

 At 15-plus pounds, Owen is definitely eating and growing well. Okay good, he's normal.

It seems we have reached the oral stage around here and everything is starting to go in his mouth: the edges of blankets, wash cloths, Baby Einstein toys and of course Sophie -- the plastic teething giraffe from France that is now the No. 1 selling baby item on Amazon. He loves to suck on Sophie's face and occasionally a leg.

With the oral phase comes drool. The drool is just an added bonus to the spit up we've been dealing with for months. At least a third of every bottle seems to come back up to drench the hardwood floor, the living room carpet, his playmat, Dave's favorite T-shirt, my work pants and the front of every onesie that Owen owns. I am forever wiping down his cheeks, chest and the back of his neck with a wash cloth and shimmying it back and forth under the folds of his neck to keep cottage cheese from growing there. Don't get me started on the loads and loads of laundry.

The spit up is apparently the result of the fact that the sphincter in a baby's esophagus doesn't fully develop until they are six months old, according to my research. So whenever they burp, liquid comes right up with it. Dave hates it when I give our uneducated friends and family members that explanation. I don't think he likes me using the word "sphincter" so freely.

The other development is that Owen can now flip over from his back to his stomach. It started with him hanging out on his side whenever we put him on his playmat but then one day Dave went into our bedroom to find him sideways in his sleeper with his legs dangling precariously over the edge. We knew then that his days in the plush little Fisher Price rocking bed he had slept in since birth were numbered.

At first, we tried strapping him into the sleeper because everything made for babies seems to come with straps and snaps that make them look like they're in a miniature straight jacket. But that seemed inhumane so we knew it was time...time to transition to the crib.

For the past two nights Owen has slept in his crib, where he looks so small and lonely on the sprawling flat sheet with no pillow, blanket or stuffed animals to accompany him. The fear of SIDS has every parent deathly afraid of putting so much as a tissue in the crib with a sleeping baby. As soon as we put him down, he rolled over to his side, snoozed for awhile and rolled right over into a face plant.

"Do you think we're supposed to flip him back over?" Dave whispered.

I looked at Owen. It looked uncomfortable, but I could see he was breathing.

"I don't know," I said. "Let's check the Baby 411 book."

The answer: let him sleep. I was still surprised, however, that after 3 1/2 months of sleeping on his back he'd roll right over to his stomach again and again. Clearly his preference. Now when he wakes up from his naps his right cheek and the right side of his forehead are pink from the pressure of his little face against the mattress.

The other day I came home to find Dave putting together the activity jumper. When he put Owen's chubby thighs through the leg holes and settled him into the seat, Owen lurched forward. His head wobbled as he tried to regain control of his neck and back muscles. He can't really sit up yet and his feet dangled at least a foot above the ground.

"What are you doing?" I asked Dave. "I don't think we're supposed to use that until he's six months old."

"He's fine," Dave said. "Look, he likes it!"

Owen did look pretty happy to find himself surrounded by bright colors and things that swiveled.

So as you can see, all kinds of excitement is going on at our house. Before we know it Owen will be walking, driving the car and hopefully, doing his own laundry.