Mobility: Ada is crawling! See the video at the bottom of this post for a demonstration. She's getting very proficient at transitioning between sitting, crawling, lying on her belly, and then getting back to sitting so that she can play with her "prizes" (i.e. whatever she was crawling to get). She is still quite slow when it comes to actually making progress across a room, but I know it won't be long before she is zipping around. Ada is also pulling up to standing on anything and everything. For a few days last week, she would stand up only to be stranded in the standing position, but now she'll very slowly lower herself back down to plop on her bottom. It gets more and more fluid every day. She still does not roll from back to belly very easily, so if we want her to stay put we can put her on her back and be pretty sure that she'll still be in the same spot a few minutes later. She does not enjoy being there, though, so I have a feeling this won't last long.
Personality: Ada is such a happy baby. She has a huge smile most of the time, and loves to giggle, make beaming faces, and generally interact with anyone who wants to play. She is very friendly and loves to be held. She also laughs at her brother all the time. He is a comedian and she finds everything that he does hilarious. Ada does get a little bit fussy sometimes, usually when she is tired, hungry, or has a dirty diaper. However, in general she is very easy-going and patient. It's common to see her waiting in her car seat while we convince Jude that it's time to move on to the next activity, like leaving the house or going to bed. She loves to wave and does this really cute one-handed wave when she's sitting in her eating chair waiting for more food. I'll have to post that video soon.
Verbalizing: Ada has a lot to say. She often says MA-MA-MA, but also DA-DA and BA-BA. I'm not convinced that she has connected words to meanings yet, but the words definitely happen all the time. She also shrieks, especially when she's ready for another bite of food or when she doesn't get enough attention. When she wakes up in the morning, she babbles to herself for quite a while before getting upset that nobody has gotten her out of bed. We take advantage of this to get a few extra minutes of sleep most mornings...
Eating and Drinking: Ada is still nursing 2-3 times a day, but she is rapidly losing interest and I think she'll be done in the next few weeks. As of this week, I'm no longer pumping at work. I can't complain about that! Ada just loves to eat, downing three big meals a day and a couple of snacks. She's enthusiastic about her baby-food purees still, and also loves finger foods. Meals usually start with some spoon feeding from a bowl, then move on to picking up various bite-sized morsels from the tray. She has her favorites, but has yet to flat-out refuse anything that we've fed to her. Ada also loves her bottles - I think it helps that we warm them. I don't know how enthusiastic she would be about a cold or room-temperature bottle at this point. She will happily take a bottle from me as well as others, which makes it easier for us to be a little bit more flexible about who cares for her.
Sleeping: Ada is finally sleeping well at night. She wakes up once for a bottle, then falls back to sleep after she drinks it. The bottle feeding has been drifting later and later, and now it's usually after 5am. I wonder how much longer it will be until she is done with middle-of-the-night feedings altogether? Jude stopped at about ten months. Ada typically naps in the morning and afternoon, although she can skip her morning nap from time to time without it seeming to bother her much. Our day works best when she takes a short morning nap and longer afternoon nap, so we usually try to arrange her schedule so that happens. Ada is still swaddled at night, although we had to move her up to the size large velcro-swaddle-blanket thing. She sometimes breaks out of her swaddle in the night, but often she is still tightly wrapped in the morning. Again, I wonder how much longer this swaddling will last. With Jude, he was swaddled until 11 months, and I would not be surprised if Ada is the same. We've changed around the bedtime routine so that I nurse Ada and then Daddy puts her to bed (often with another bottle) so that she no longer associates nursing with going to sleep. This is working out well as I get to put Jude to bed while Daddy takes care of the last part of getting Ada down.
Growing: Ada is about 18.5 pounds fully clothed (according to our bathroom scale) and still fits well in 9-12 month clothes. She uses size 3 diapers. Her third tooth just came in recently, and didn't seem to bother her much. She now clicks the top and bottom teeth together to make this funny grinding noise. Jude did the same when he got his first top tooth.
Our girl is happy and healthy and growing well. Here are a few cute photos from the last week or so.
Using the backgammon board as an obstacle course...
She's obsessed with the phone already.
A rare moment sitting still.
And a short video from the weekend...
1 comment:
such a sweetie! Can't wait to see her!
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