On the Move … Almost

Now that Lexie can reach out (impressively far, I might add) to grab her toys and other enticing objects (toothbrushes in Mommy and Daddy’s mouths, cans of pop, necklaces and just about everything else), she’s itching to find new ways to get to what she wants. We’re pretty sure that relatively soon, she’ll be on the move.

Yes, our “carefree” days of being able to leave her briefly in one spot and come back to find her still there are numbered. Just the idea of having to constantly chase Lexie around to avoid dangers big and small sounds exhausting, not to mention all the babyproofing that needs to be done. (Hmm, that last part sounds like a father’s job, doesn’t it?)

But we can tell she’s on her way. Already she’s experimenting with rolling to get where she wants to go. The funny thing about that is that she still only rolls in one direction, to her left, so if the object she wants is to her right, she needs to get really creative. Yet she often manages to make it work, rolling from her back to her stomach and then pushing up on her arms, wriggling around a bit, rolling over again and then repeating the whole routine until somehow, she’s reached her destination.

As for actually crawling, she’s not quite on the verge, but you can see her starting to turn the idea around in her head as she props herself up on her arms and starts flailing around. (On a side note, she’s always been a master at flailing. Her arms and legs move so much sometimes that we have photos where she actually looks like a little hummingbird, all a blur except her head and body).

Sometimes, she’ll actually start in a sitting position and if you put something she wants in front of her but too far to touch, she’ll reach forward so far that she winds up on her tummy. For some reason, getting to the almost-crawling position that way seems to get her mind more in tune with the idea of moving forward. A time or two, she’s actually made some movements from that position that really looked like she was trying to crawl. But mostly, she’s still a roller.

I was a photo shoot the other day and Cindy, the food stylist who gave me those maternity clothes all those months back, told me that one of her twins (they’re now three and a half) never did start really crawling and used rolling to move around until she started to walk. Apparently she became quite masterful at it. I can totally see Lexie going that route, the little nut.

These days we spend most of our “free” after-work time with Lexie – the time when we’re not feeding, bathing or changing her – playing with her and training her to master her new skills. Andy, especially, enjoys helping her reach each new milestone and can be a tough (but always gentle and encouraging) taskmaster.

He’s the one who, when we were helping her learn how to roll over, would praise her heartily for turning on her own from her tummy to her back and then pick her up and put her right back down on her tummy to try again. Today, after she finally reached the cloth book she spent at least five or 10 good minutes rolling/scooting/pushing toward in a roundabout way, was ready to move it a few inches farther away so she could try again, but I convinced him to let her take a break.

We make a good team.

6 Months and Counting

So yes, I haven’t written in ages and yes, I’m going to try to start up again, at least once every couple of weeks. This time with Lexie is so amazing that I want to keep a record of it as much as I can.

For most of the time I’ve kept this blog since Lexie’s been born, a lot of it has addressed the challenges of having a baby and getting used to this new style of life. And I think that’s probably what a lot of first-time moms are focused on in the first few months. But then something happens that no one really told me about. Well, they told me about it but I didn’t quite believe it, and either way, they really didn’t go into too much detail about it anyway.

What happens when the baby reaches, I don’t know, maybe four months or so, is that it gets COMPLETELY AWESOME.

Seriously, we are having an absolute blast. I know everyone says having kids is the best thing they ever did and blah blah blah, but it’s just incredibly hard – really, impossible – to grasp how amazing it is until you’re there. I mean, here we are, witnessing the development of human life. And it’s a hell of a trip. I mean, it feels like every new days she’s doing something that she wasn’t able to do the day before.

First it was rolling onto her side. Then it was sleeping through the night (hallelujah!). Then, kind of unfortunately, it was rolling from her back to her tummy. This came two days after she first slept through the night the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and (predictably, since I’d heard about it from other moms), she started doing it in the middle of the night. So she’d wake up, turn onto her tummy, not be able to roll back and start wailing until we went in there and turned her over. It took a few weeks, but she finally started sleeping through again. (She didn’t stop rolling onto her tummy; she just finally realized, that hey, this is a pretty comfy way to sleep! Adorable.)

So next was rolling from her tummy to her back (she still doesn’t quite do it right – she tucks one arm behind her back so it looks kind of painful as she turns around, but she’ll get there). Then it was shaking a rattle – on purpose, to make a sound!

We’ve also learned that the power of suggestion seems to be a motivator for her. When we took her to the doctor for her five-month appointment, Dr. Peters (who we’ve decided is our favorite out of all the doctors we’ve seen there) said that by six months, she’d be able to sit up by herself for about 10 seconds. Literally, she was doing that by the next day! It wasn’t long before 10 seconds became 20, and 30, and a couple weeks later, she could sit on her own for about as long as she wanted.

THAT was a big one. Interacting with her in a sitting position and seeing the different ways she plays and explores her little world is such a difference from her just wriggling around on her back all the time. That position always kind of reminds me of those bugs that get stuck on their backs and just flail around kicking their legs.

At five months she also started eating “solid” foods, and by now, at a little over six months, she’s worked her way  through the rice cerea and oatmeal, all the stage 1 veggies and applesauce. Prunes, here we come!

Her first time eating (rice cereal, per the standard procedure) was utterly hilarious (and captured on video, as a ridiculous amount of her life so far has been). She took the first bite and made this awful face like it was the worst thing she could ever possibly taste. Then as she kind of moved the food around in her mouth, she literally gagged (she was just fine, so it was okay for us to fall into near hysterics laughing). It took her several more days to get the hang of it, but she did, and now she does pretty well with her food.

She’s also started reaching for toys, and can get to things that are much farther than you’d think her little arms could grab. Given the big efforts she’s making to move toward things she wants, we’re pretty convinced (as is Dr. Peters) that crawling isn’t too far away (yikes! there goes the honeymoon period – soon we’ll be chasing her around nonstop instead of spending leisurely time with her sitting in one place).

Yesterday, for example, we were playing with her on the bed in the nursery and she actually started rolling toward things! I’ve read that for some babies, that’s actually how they get around instead of crawling, at least for awhile. But I think she’s just starting with that, because she’s also been doing a lot more lifting herself up onto her arms when she’s on her tummy, and she’s squirming around and you can just tell she’d be moving forward if she could just put her tiny little finger on how to do it.

So back to the whole power of suggestion thing – we had her six-month appointment on the 4th, and Dr. Peters said that in the next few weeks she should start making more actual babbling noises with consonant sounds versus just making those kinds of “ahhhh” noises she’s always making (quite loudly, often). So what happens? Within days, she was saying ba-ba-ba-ba and da-da-da-da.

This weekend, she talked up a storm. She still does the B sounds sometimes, and the occasional N or M, but her favorite is da-da-da-da-da. She’ll get into these zones and just go on with it for minutes on end. Needless to say, Andy is enthralled. He knows she’s not really calling him Da-Da, but can you blame him for loving that it’s all she says? Especially when yesterday at one point, she pushed up onto her arms from her tummy, looked him straight in the face and said, “Da-da.” She only said it twice like that, too, and he just about melted. You could almost visualize him being slowly wrapped around her finger.

But seriously, regardless of the fact that she wasn’t really saying a word, it was an amazing moment. He even got a little teary eyed and frankly, so did I. And this is what we’re living every single day. She is just such an absolute joy. I know she’s a particularly happy and good-tempered baby, and for that I am extremely thankful, but the fact is that all babies go through these milestones, and it never stops being utterly miraculous to witness. So, so, so cliche, I know it. But for very good reason.

Anyhoo, to continue this catch-up entry, I will say that being back at work and getting into the routine of going through the daily grind with an extra (tiny, adorable, precious) body to account for and care for is a definite adjustment, but we’re doing well. We all get up at 6 every day (occasionally she’ll give us 30 or 45 extra minutes on the weekends) and I take her downstairs to feed her and Andy takes a shower. Then he gives her a bottle and I take a shower, and then he watches and eats breakfast while I get ready. I leave for work around 7:15, and he takes her to the nanny a few minutes later.

I get to work around 7:45 or a little later and stay there until 4. It’s weird and sometimes hard having to walk out right at four every day, but I know I’m getting all my work done and putting in my time. I usually get to Laurie and Jeff’s to pick her up around 4:50 and get home a little after 5. Andy usually is either already home or gets home shortly thereafter.

We play with her until around 6 and then give her “dinner” (today, about 2 Tbsp. of applesauce and 1 Tbsp. of oatmeal, which unfortunately, she didn’t want to finish). If it’s bath night (every other night) she gets a bath shortly after she eats, and then it’s upstairs for her before-bed bottle. We put her down to sleep right around 7 every night, and she sleeps through (almost always) until 6 a.m. the next day.

On weekends we have the best of both worlds – we’re able to spend tons of time with her during the day and relax together at night. We’re able to go out quite often, too, since we’re super-spoiled with my parents almost always at the ready for sitting. She’s even spent the night over there and does wonderfully (though the first time she stayed there and they told me she slept all the way through with no fussing, I was half-convinced that she really woke up every hour since she was in a strange place but that they didn’t want to tell me because they wanted us to do it again).

So that’s where we are. I know we’ve been lucky so far and I’ve also heard that 6 months is a particularly fun age (though I’ve also heard people say that just about every age is a fun one – till they get to be teenagers, of course, and begin to hate you), so I know that there will be plenty of challenges (and more sleepless nights) ahead. But I just wanted to capture the high we’re on right now, and I’m hoping to continue to track the coming ups and down with more entries.