Where does the time go?
Feb. 2nd, 2006 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaAlex is almost ten months old. As her pediatrician commented today at her nine-month well-baby visit, she's starting to have more in common with toddlers than with infants. It's just shocking, how quickly that's happened.
20lbs 3oz, and 29 inches long. No wonder all her pants are starting to be high-waters. She's still right around the 75th percentile in height, but, unsurprisingly, has dropped closer to average in weight with all of her new gross motor activity. She's totally healthy.
Fortunately, Michael discovered that she had a soggy Cheerio stuck in the hair at the back of her neck before the physical exam. So the doctor still thinks we're good parents.
"Is she pulling up?" the doctor asked. Ha. She pulls up on everything, including things that are so low to the ground that instead they qualify as pushing up, and she cruises along the furniture with great facility. She stands supporting herself with just one hand, easily. I predicted that she'd be walking by this appointment, but she's not quite there. Yet. We might have a few more weeks.
She can do just about anything she wants to with her hands and fingers. She picks up tiny objects - not just Cheerios and pieces of puffed rice, but tiny paint chips, bits of fluff, and wood splinters - and steers them to her mouth with ease. She turns pages in a board book. She continues to love lift-the-flap books, and now has no problems managing all kinds of different flaps. (It used to flummox her to encounter different flap directions on different pages.) She claps her hands, waves, points her stubby index finger.
She makes tons of sounds. Although saying her name is something she hasn't repeated, she's definitely saying "hi" and is probably saying "Mama." She'll sometimes parrot words we say, but that's a pretty random thing. Mostly she puts together long strings of syllables: "deckle deckle deckle." "thwa thwa thaaaah." She loves to talk. Hard to believe she's my baby, huh?
I don't think I've ever seen a baby this young love books this much. "Alex, shall we read some stories?" I ask, and she sits down, clasps her hands, bounces up and down with a smile on her face. She's fully engaged - leaning forward, eagerly turning pages or lifting flaps or patting the bunny or rubbing the scratchy turf of the outfield, smiling, exclaiming, pointing. We'll do seven or eight books in a row. And she also sits and looks at books on her own - turns the pages, looks at the pictures, talks to herself. (Okay, sometimes the book is upside-down or she's started from the back.) At story hour, I'm constantly trying to distract her from Miss Regina's pile of books.
She's starting to understand the basic premise that violated expectations = funny. So, for example, I can always make her laugh by putting a toy on my head and pretending that it's a hat. Or by eating food from her highchair tray. Or by putting a toy where it doesn't belong, like the rubber duck in the shape sorter. Speaking of which: she puts shapes into the correct holes of the shape sorter. She hasn't yet figured out some of the details, such as that she can't reach in through the holes and pull the blocks back out, but I'm sure that after the thousandth time her fist gets stuck it will finally become clear.
She loves to look through things. We peek through the holes in the middle of her stacking rings, or through the translucent purple plastic of her inflatable ball, or through the neck of her undershirt, and it's funny Every. Single. Time. So, of course, are endless variations on peek-a-boo.
She loves to stand at her storage bins and remove every article of clothing within, piece by piece. She doesn't like to sort it back into the right bins afterward, for some reason.
She loves people: all people everywhere. We go for walks trolling for people to smile at, and it always cheers her up. The store clerks in our neighborhood are disappointed if I come in without the baby. Other kids are especially interesting to her, but she hasn't the slightest idea of how to play with them.
She's starting to have the cognitive maturity to resist and protest. As you can imagine, this is a mixed blessing. She breaks out into brief but hard sobs when we take something away that she shouldn't be playing with, when we try to dress her or change her diaper, when one of us puts on our coat to leave. She's usually pretty easy to cheer up, but right now she is very susceptible to disappointment when things don't go her way. Unfortunately, this extends itself to bedtime. Two nights in a row, now, she's expressed the desire to go on standing up and talking after it is manifestly bedtime - not just by the clock, but by her yawns and face-rubbing. It used to be that we could just patiently thwart her, again and again, and eventually she'd give up and go to sleep. But now she's escalating into hysterical sobbing that doesn't ease even when she's picked up, cuddled, rocked. It is Not Fun.
Ironically, everything else about nighttime is going better than it ever has. She sleeps 8-10 hours in a row almost every night, and then goes back to sleep after an early morning bottle. Twice now she's gone without a bottle from bedtime to breakfast time. She soothes herself easily when she wakes up at night - we'll hear one or two cries on the baby monitor, and then perhaps a little murmuring, and then silence. She's taken to sleeping on her tummy, knees drawn up and bottom in the air. The cuteness is almost overpowering.
She's just an amazing kid, you know? It's so fun to be her mother.
20lbs 3oz, and 29 inches long. No wonder all her pants are starting to be high-waters. She's still right around the 75th percentile in height, but, unsurprisingly, has dropped closer to average in weight with all of her new gross motor activity. She's totally healthy.
Fortunately, Michael discovered that she had a soggy Cheerio stuck in the hair at the back of her neck before the physical exam. So the doctor still thinks we're good parents.
"Is she pulling up?" the doctor asked. Ha. She pulls up on everything, including things that are so low to the ground that instead they qualify as pushing up, and she cruises along the furniture with great facility. She stands supporting herself with just one hand, easily. I predicted that she'd be walking by this appointment, but she's not quite there. Yet. We might have a few more weeks.
She can do just about anything she wants to with her hands and fingers. She picks up tiny objects - not just Cheerios and pieces of puffed rice, but tiny paint chips, bits of fluff, and wood splinters - and steers them to her mouth with ease. She turns pages in a board book. She continues to love lift-the-flap books, and now has no problems managing all kinds of different flaps. (It used to flummox her to encounter different flap directions on different pages.) She claps her hands, waves, points her stubby index finger.
She makes tons of sounds. Although saying her name is something she hasn't repeated, she's definitely saying "hi" and is probably saying "Mama." She'll sometimes parrot words we say, but that's a pretty random thing. Mostly she puts together long strings of syllables: "deckle deckle deckle." "thwa thwa thaaaah." She loves to talk. Hard to believe she's my baby, huh?
I don't think I've ever seen a baby this young love books this much. "Alex, shall we read some stories?" I ask, and she sits down, clasps her hands, bounces up and down with a smile on her face. She's fully engaged - leaning forward, eagerly turning pages or lifting flaps or patting the bunny or rubbing the scratchy turf of the outfield, smiling, exclaiming, pointing. We'll do seven or eight books in a row. And she also sits and looks at books on her own - turns the pages, looks at the pictures, talks to herself. (Okay, sometimes the book is upside-down or she's started from the back.) At story hour, I'm constantly trying to distract her from Miss Regina's pile of books.
She's starting to understand the basic premise that violated expectations = funny. So, for example, I can always make her laugh by putting a toy on my head and pretending that it's a hat. Or by eating food from her highchair tray. Or by putting a toy where it doesn't belong, like the rubber duck in the shape sorter. Speaking of which: she puts shapes into the correct holes of the shape sorter. She hasn't yet figured out some of the details, such as that she can't reach in through the holes and pull the blocks back out, but I'm sure that after the thousandth time her fist gets stuck it will finally become clear.
She loves to look through things. We peek through the holes in the middle of her stacking rings, or through the translucent purple plastic of her inflatable ball, or through the neck of her undershirt, and it's funny Every. Single. Time. So, of course, are endless variations on peek-a-boo.
She loves to stand at her storage bins and remove every article of clothing within, piece by piece. She doesn't like to sort it back into the right bins afterward, for some reason.
She loves people: all people everywhere. We go for walks trolling for people to smile at, and it always cheers her up. The store clerks in our neighborhood are disappointed if I come in without the baby. Other kids are especially interesting to her, but she hasn't the slightest idea of how to play with them.
She's starting to have the cognitive maturity to resist and protest. As you can imagine, this is a mixed blessing. She breaks out into brief but hard sobs when we take something away that she shouldn't be playing with, when we try to dress her or change her diaper, when one of us puts on our coat to leave. She's usually pretty easy to cheer up, but right now she is very susceptible to disappointment when things don't go her way. Unfortunately, this extends itself to bedtime. Two nights in a row, now, she's expressed the desire to go on standing up and talking after it is manifestly bedtime - not just by the clock, but by her yawns and face-rubbing. It used to be that we could just patiently thwart her, again and again, and eventually she'd give up and go to sleep. But now she's escalating into hysterical sobbing that doesn't ease even when she's picked up, cuddled, rocked. It is Not Fun.
Ironically, everything else about nighttime is going better than it ever has. She sleeps 8-10 hours in a row almost every night, and then goes back to sleep after an early morning bottle. Twice now she's gone without a bottle from bedtime to breakfast time. She soothes herself easily when she wakes up at night - we'll hear one or two cries on the baby monitor, and then perhaps a little murmuring, and then silence. She's taken to sleeping on her tummy, knees drawn up and bottom in the air. The cuteness is almost overpowering.
She's just an amazing kid, you know? It's so fun to be her mother.
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Date: 2006-02-02 06:49 pm (UTC)