Lukas at 6 weeks

Lukas has now passed the six week mark!  He’s doing well and getting over some of what Doug terms the “funny looking newborn” period.  He’s also becoming more social, with occasional social smiling and cooing (or as we say, saying “goo”).  He weighed in just over 14 pounds when he went to the doctor at 6 weeks (for a skin infection behind his ears, which has now improved).  In general he's a fairly easy baby, which is good because there are plenty of other things creating chaos right now! (Doug is sick with a week long high fever, Zrbrt has a seriously abraded paw pad, one car broke down, we're negotiating to buy a new house, I went back to work part-time, and we have the normal Ian high activity level and occasional defiantness, etc.)  This week and next week as I'm back at work half time, Lukas has been hanging out with Danielle and cousin Leo.  Starting in September we'll start with his regular nanny, Lisa.  I go back full time at the beginning of November.

Here he is back at 5 weeks.

And now at six weeks:

Various expressions:

Sleepy Lukie:

It’s been hard to get a photo of him smiling, so this is the only one where I’ve caught even a bit of a smile:

His other new skill is wriggling from place to place – a side effect of his high arm and leg activity while he’s on the floor gym (where he’s usually happy for 20-30 minutes each morning).  I put him down with his head on the burp cloth earlier this week and came back from the kitchen to find this (as you can see, he’s still wriggling and pushing onto his side in this photo):

And for comparison to all this true-to-life photography, here’s Ian’s recent depiction of Lukas (yes, on a toilet paper tube):

I’ve recently discovered that Ian can in fact draw things that look like things.  I had thought this was the only place in which he fell behind the “your kid should be able to do this at his age” list.  I had never seen him draw anything that was intended to look like an object or person, but apparently it’s just not his preference (he likes to draw things with lots of little compartments instead).  At his four year checkup, the doctor asked him to draw a smiley face.  I was sure he couldn’t (and thought it was a shame that the doctor had chosen the one area in which Ian wasn’t awesome to test his development).  But of course Ian took the pen and readily drew a face with eyes, mouth, nose, ears, etc.  And this Lukas drawing shows that his abilities are more developed than I thought.  I guess he just needed a brother for inspiration.