Cooper rolled over for the first time yesterday, just one week short of being four months old. I thought he was behind the curve, but Kelli checked Savvi's baby book, and she rolled over only two days earlier. (Not two days earlier this week, but two days earlier in age.) If you go with that whole gestational age equation, then he technically rolled over 17 days sooner. But that's just a pain to calculate. (Besides, if we go with gestational ages, then I'm already 36, and I'm in no hurry to get there.)
I barely got the camcorder rolling in time to capture it. I'll post video of that and of him laughing later this weekend.
Also, I'm trying to catch some video of him doing a few pretty amazing things. Kelli was in his face talking to him and he grabbed her nose. She told him what the nose was a few times. Then she asked him if he could grab her nose. He did, several times in fact. Our child is a genius! Take that, all you parents of average children! Not that I am prone to pride...
But I have a policy of setting the bar low for my children, so I won't be disappointed. In keeping with that policy, I thought that maybe he was grabbing her nose because it's the most prominent facial feature. Then he grabbed her chin one of the times when she said "nose." Ah ha! I was right! It was just a fluke! He's no genius. He's just an average idiot like all of your children. Then, to my amazement, he slowly slid his hand up to get to her nose. Okay that was a little freaky.
I decided to test it further the next day. I sat with him and pointed three or four times to my chin, touching his hand to it repeating the word "chin." I then touched his chin about four times, again repeating the word. Next, I asked him to grab my chin. He did. Not too much of a surprise. Now the real test: I told him to grab my nose. He did it! Several times over, he correctly grabbed whichever of the two facial features I said. He NEVER grabbed the wrong one.
I've since repeated the test on a couple of different days. One day, he was simply not interested and just stared at me with indifference. The other times, he repeated the results of my first test. I think this kid is freaky smart. Don't worry, we'll find a way to screw him up.
Something else I need to get on video is him "talking." For more than a month now, he has been making a sound whenever he's hungry that varies between "uhng-gee" and "hun-gee." Sometimes, there's even an "r" sound in there. At first, we thought it was just a coincidence. Then we noticed that if we said the word "hungry" to him, but didn't immediately feed him, he would get really angry.
Now, he doesn't say it every day, but probably five days out of the week he says it 10-12 times per day. And ONLY when he is actually hungry. Also, whenever he whines for a while, but doesn't get our attention, he'll resort to yelling, at the top of his lungs, "HEY!" He sometimes makes a sound that is like "da" or "da-dee." We don't really think he associates this with me or me and Kel collectively. We think it's just a sound he makes, but who knows? The most amazing thing about that is that he can make the "d" sound so early. (He started doing it at about 12 weeks.)
Now, I know some of you think we're completely out of our minds. I've always thought that my mom was crazy for saying that I spoke at 3 months. She was very sick at the time, taking lost of medication. You could see where she might get confused. We hesitated for weeks to tell anyone this, but we are so certain that he is actually speaking, that we had to share it. Judge us if you must. We'll just exploit our freakishly smart baby, use our ill-gotten fortune to buy your employer and fire your ass!
