Today, Owlet waved goodbye to HRH as he got his coat on to leave for work. In the past couple of days she’d been staring at her palm and moving her fingers very slowly, as if she was waving to herself in slow motion, and I thought that maybe she’d be one of those kids who waved to herself because that’s how they see other people waving to them. But no: this morning, without prompting, she looked at HRH, held out her hand, and wiggled her fingers ever so slowly, with a small smile. She had never waved before, even in response to someone else. We were thrilled.

She can do so much. She can play peek-a-boo anytime, anywhere. She can hold her own bottle (although we don’t encourage it, because she tends to bash it around). She can pick very small things up in a pincer grip. She can just about manage a sippy cup, although chewing on it is more interesting right now. She can turn pages in a board book, although she is impatient with books in general when we try to read them to her. She would rather turn handfuls of pages at once, or grab the book to chew it. Her favourite book is a body book showing babies and toddlers doing different activities, with body parts and clothes labelled. She loves to look at babies in any book. But really, the best thing about books is chewing them.

Owlet is developing socially, too. She has started feeding others, for example. We felt special when she offered us Cheerios or bites of her rice rusks… until we discovered that she was also pushing rice rusks at the furniture, her toys, and pictures of people in books. She has figured out the piano/xylophone that once was Sparky’s, after a brief period of just looking at it or watching us demonstrate it, and now bangs away at it both with her hands and the sticks that are attached to it. She is working on clapping; I noticed her making the motion with her hands last week, but with fists instead of open hands. Like knocking coconuts together, heh. Mostly she bangs her fists together a couple of times, then clasps her hands, then bangs the clasped hands on her legs or the table or whatever is in front of her.

Suddenly she’s everywhere. No longer can we put her down and expect her to stay where she is. She wriggles around quite well, despite not formally crawling. The other day she squirmed under my spinning wheel and managed to get herself on top of a treadle, and checked it all out for me like a little mechanic. To occupy her while I’m in the kitchen I give her a plastic mixing bowl of Fisher Price Roll-a-Rounds (I don’t think they make them any more, which makes me sad because I love them) and she digs them out, rolls them back and forth either with me or from hand to hand, and sometimes dumps them all out and watches them roll all over the place with great delight (and then puts the bowl on her head).

The biggest leap forward this month is the standing and cruising. Owlet pulls herself up on everything and everyone. She cruises along the chesterfield and along the coffee table, although the corners of the table continue to defeat her. She can’t get herself up into a sitting position on her own from lying down on her front or back, but if she starts off sitting she’ll get herself over to something upright (like the aforementioned table, chesterfield, chairs, bookcases, adult legs, my hair) and pulls herself up to her feet. I left her sitting on the floor of the living room a couple of days ago, with some toys around her to keep her busy, and went to work in the kitchen for five minutes. The kitchen and living room are essentially one big room, and she was quiet, so I didn’t think to check on her. But then I walked back in and found her standing on the other side of the room, leaning against the chesterfield where Gryff was lying. She was chewing on the tip of his tail and touching the pads of his feet.

Her favourite activity is walking around the house holding on to someone’s hands, which is great for her, not so great on the person whose fingers she is holding and whose back is about to break. Will she skip crawling? Who knows? I am told there are children who walk first and then retroactively apply the self-mobility thing to the crawling.

When we last left her teeth, she had two incisors on the bottom and her top two were taunting us. Well, the top two came in, followed shortly after by her right second incisor (three new teeth within five days, ack). The left second incisor is still tormenting her, but it should be any day now, too.

Just before the teeth came through she was running a high fever, which broke just as the teeth started cutting. I figured it was teething related. Except a day or so later a rash started breaking out, so surprise! Roseola! Sparky never had it, but the timing of the high fever and the rash was textbook. (I mentioned this to our doctor and said I didn’t bother bringing her in because if it was roseola there wasn’t anything anyone could do other than say, ‘Yup, roseola,’ and she said, “I wish more parents were like you!”)

Sleep is undergoing a weird overhaul. When developmental stuff starts happening like crawling, walking, acquiring new social skills and things like that, sleep can often be disturbed because there’s a lot going on in the brain as new neural pathways are established. So naps are all over the place, and night wakings are ranging from one to six per night. Teething and the roseola didn’t help, either. And on top of it all we’re trying to teach her to self-soothe and go back to sleep if she wakes up after a sleep cycle (hers seems to range from twenty to forty minutes), so I nurse her once at night around two when she wakes up after her initial long stretch of sleep, then if she wakes up after that I leave her in her crib while I pat or stroke her back and give her the soother, instead of picking her up to cuddle or nurse her back to sleep. She has let me know in no uncertain terms that she is not a fan of this, but she gets back to sleep within about ten to fifteen minutes.

We’re hearing the beginnings of real words, too. She has deliberately used Mama, Dada, and cat, although not consistently. She also says baba (or bababababa) now and then, usually when looking at one of her bottles. In fact, one night she looked at me after nursing and said, “Dada? Baba?” And I said, “No, kid; Dad is not coming upstairs to give you a bottle. You are stuck with me, and with what you just drank. Now go back to sleep.”

In the glorious world of food, she now eats just about everything except berries, milk, and nuts. She’s pretty much off cereal and mashes (not that we really did them much at all); we only mix up a bowl of cereal if we need to get something into her fast, and we pile diced veggies or meat in it to make a kind of potage or porridge. New foods this month include grapes, peppers, hamburger, turkey, scrambled eggs, Cheddar and Swiss cheese, mushrooms (raw and fried), celery, watermelon, and rice vermicelli. Overall so far, the only things she has really not pounced on and stuffed into her mouth are carrots and avocado, although I can grate carrots and add them to stir fries for her without a problem. We’ve started eating the same thing for lunch: I make macaroni, for example, and fry up mushrooms and a diced chicken thigh, then grate cheese all over it and toss it. Then we each have some. There’s something so very thrilling about your baby eating the exact same thing you’re eating. And now we have to defend our food again, because if you’re eating something and she is not, there is a great fuss made until she too has something, be it a rice rusk of her own or part of what you’re eating.

Nursing has been a bit of a challenge, and I can’t blame her, what with having to get used to three new teeth in such a brief period of time. Her latch is all wonky and she’s slipping down to nurse shallowly again, which is not optimal and is, quite frankly, cumulatively painful. We’re working on it. She’s has also developed a tendency to bite when she is really frustrated and at the end of her rope, which is not fun at all.

Also not fun: Getting one’s legs firmly wedged in the crib when one turns oneself crosswise, lifts the legs, and slots them in between the spindles. That’s what you get for having legs like turkey drumsticks, child! At her 9-month appointment, he doctor wrote down with great glee that Owlet now weighs 10 kg 38 gr (or 22 pounds and 2 ounces) at 28” tall, tracing her leap from ‘oh no, this baby isn’t gaining enough weight’ to ‘holy smokes, this child is plump and chunky and I love it’. She’s in the 96th percentile for weight (no kidding), and the 75th for height. I went back through Sparky’s records and discovered that he didn’t hit 22 lbs till he was a year old. No wonder Owlet has blown past all her 9-12 month clothes. She’s firmly in 18-month size territory right now, although her shape is changing all the time, because her diapers fit differently each week — not too large or too small, just fitting differently as her body changes shape. That plus the mobility thing mean I’m turning to dresses a lot now, to leave her legs and feet bare so she can get a better grip on the floor to pull up or get around, and because then we don’t have to sort through the drawer to find pants that fit her that day.

In general, it feels like someone switched the baby to eleven. She’s slightly manic, quick to push and push and push and suddenly start crying if things go wrong or not according to her plans, or she just overwhelms herself. Gone are the days where she’d watch and think about things. Now she throws herself in, and damn the torpedoes. It’s exhausting for everyone. I’m looking forward to things settling down a bit when this round of developmental overdrive is, well, over.

Did you blink and miss the first eight months? Sometimes we think we did.

The big news is that Owlet is Sleeping Through the Night. In casual medical parlance that means five or six hours between eleven PM and six AM. Well, she was doing that, with two wakeups… and then suddenly she wasn’t. She was sleeping ten or eleven hours straight. Which is just fine with us, thank you! Sleep maturity is a wonderful thing, and it happens differently for every child. It’s also not permanent; it will fluctuate and shift according to developmental stages and external circumstances and stresses. But for now, we are very, very happy. At the moment I’m still sleeping in her room, because when she does wake up after those ten or eleven hours, hoo boy, she is hungry and cranky and has a very wet diaper that she detests and wants out of right now. The extra time it would take me to wake up enough to hear her over the monitor, stumble out of bed, get up the stairs and into her room just isn’t worth the screaming right now. Roughly, the night goes like this: She sleeps about ten hours a night, from six-thirty or seven to fourish AM. She feeds somewhere between three and five, then goes back to sleep till six or seven. We’ve had our hiccoughs, of course, like the night where she was up every two hours, or the other night where she refused to go to sleep for two hours and insisted on nursing sessions and cuddles and rocking, but as a rule, this is the new normal (for now).

She’s been sleeping on her tummy, though we do put her down on her back. We put her down drowsy or only in a light sleep most of the time, and she can usually fall asleep on her own. Other times she hyperextends in a stretch backwards while being put down and wakes herself up completely and is not happy about it, or knocks about in her crib for a while, wiggling around and babbling to her stuffed animals or her blankets before falling asleep on her tummy. Sometimes she squirms while she’s asleep and wakes herself up because she’s gotten herself stuck across her crib. (Which is kind of funny, although not at all from her point of view.) Unlike Sparky, who needed to be rocked and soothed to sleep for pretty much every nap and night, but was fine once he was asleep, Owlet falls asleep relatively easily, but wakes up a lot more often than her brother did. Naps are still tricky, although they’re starting to resolve into one nap both morning and afternoon, anywhere from an hour to ninety minutes long. (Except when they’re not.)

She’s made some great physical leaps forward, too. I woke up one night to feed her and found her raising herself up onto hands and knees, then lowering herself back down to her tummy, then lifting herself up again and rocking back and forth on all fours. In other words, she was prepping for crawling. She’s been slow getting that lovely round tummy off the ground, and really, we shouldn’t be surprised. She’s become very stable when sitting up, too, and can reach in all directions to grab things. It’s so much easier to get her dressed to go out then sit her on the floor by the front door while I put my own coat and shoes on, instead of lying her flat on a blanket somewhere. She’s also been working hard on pulling herself up to standing position using the arm of the settee or someone’s fingers (not being pulled up, using them as leverage). She loves to stand, and has been doing it with flat feet some of the time instead of on tippy-toe. She pulled herself up using the bottom bar of her crib a few days ago. I had to take off her socks and roll up her pants so she had a better grip with her feet, but she did it. She bounced on her feet, looking very pleased with herself, considered cruising, got as far as moving her hands over, then decided that maybe that was enough and let go with one hand. She swung down and pivoted because she was still holding on with the other hand, and sat down on her bum, boom! She was very pleased. And then she was immediately overwhelmed by the experience and begged to nurse and nap.

Teething has begun again. This past week has been rather cranky on that front, although she’s still one of the most tolerant children I’ve encountered regarding teething pain. She’s generally her usual happy self just quicker to grizzle, but sometimes she just can’t be happy any more because things hurt too much, and then she cries in frustration because she doesn’t feel like she usually does. She caught my finger in her mouth today and I could feel her upper incisors like pencil erasers stuck on the front of her upper jawbone, the poor thing, so we are desperately hoping that it cuts soon.

New foods this past month include peaches, pear slices, shredded roast chicken, Greek yoghurt, peas (again), carrots (also again), fried tofu, pizza crusts, spaghetti, and, oh my, yes, CHEERIOS. Cheerios are the gods’ gift to babies, and she adores them. We introduced the sippy cup, too, which is a wonderful toy. I’d forgotten how hard it is to teach a baby to lift it up high enough to get the liquid inside to reach the mouth. She got to taste a slice of smoked turkey from the deli, too, which she gobbled up, though sliced meats aren’t high on my list of good things to feed tiny persons just yet; they’re too high in sodium and nitrates.

The new section we can add to this month’s report is words. Owlet starting saying “Mahm’a” last week, and she has a very similar sound that’s more of a “meh” that I think means milk (she’s back to sticking her tongue out and lapping like a little cat when she wants to nurse, too, which is when she usually says it). Sometimes she stuffs her hand in her mouth when I think she gets hungry, which may be a version of the fingers to the mouth sign that means “food,” but I can’t tell if that’s associated with hunger or the teething at this point. Yesterday she very clearly said “MOE!” at lunch, when I was too slow loading rice and squash on a spoon and handing it to her. I got excited and kept asking, “Do you want more?” when I got the spoon back, but all I got was impatient hand banging on the tray or big grins because yay, she was eating, and oh goodness she loves to eat. I listened to her quietly say, “Mama, Mama, Mama” over and over to herself via the intercom while she wiggled about the other night, and it was a wonderful feeling.

Playing peek-a-boo continues. And she made up a game in which she puts things on top of her head. Bibs, washcloths, small toys, socks… it wasn’t a game at first, just something she did matter of factly. Then she noticed us laughing, and now she does it with a smile and a peek at us if she knows we’re watching. She sometimes still does it matter of factly on her own, though, as if she’s testing something.

We’ve given up on any clothes marked 12 months or smaller. However, most of the 12-18 month size clothes we have are summer dresses, mainly sundresses at that. So I think I’m going to need to find a few long- and short-sleeve basic t-shirts to wear under them. And that way we don’t have to worry about wiggling pants that are too long and too narrow over her cloth diapers, either. Bless stretchy leggings, for they have been our salvation…

Where did our waif go?

Somebody jumped from the 10th percentile at eight weeks (oh noes, she’s not gaining enough weight, we’re really worried about her…), to the 25th percentile at four months, to the NINETY-FIFTH PERCENTILE at six months (although really, she was five days short of seven months at the appointment). We have twenty pounds and one ounce of Owlet. No wonder I could barely handle the infant car seat any more! We officially moved up to the next size of car seat this past weekend, which brings with it its own host of issues like Owlet sitting on her own in grocery carts and so forth, with which she is not entirely comfortable yet.

So much happens in a month. The things that happened more recently are more present in my memory than the ones that happened thirty days ago. For example: Broccoli is the best thing ever!!11!1eleventy! Except roast potatoes were the best thing ever about four weeks ago, and two weeks after that it was green beans that were the bee’s knees, and so on. Since we’re already talking about food, this past month she has added green beans, oatmeal, roast potatoes, toast, broccoli, carrot sticks, mixed grain cereal, and yoghurt to her already rather varied diet. Generally I steam the veggies a bit and cut them into sticks, and she goes to town on them. She just adores food, any food, all food: she is so excited about it. Witness how enthusiastic about her first taste of broccoli was last Friday:

We introduced her to Baby Mum-Mums, the ubiquitous rice rusks that essentially melt as soon as they hit the tongue, and she is, as I feared, insane for them, and can recognise the package and throw a fit if she doesn’t get one after seeing them. They’re like potato chips for babies: they can’t have just one. They are reserved for treats, and she gets one when Sparky comes home from school and has his snack. She loves to eat with other people; it’s a huge social inclusive thing, so she feels very important sitting eating her rusk while Sparky has his cookie and milk. Toast serves much the same function when we’re at the table.

A week ago she figured out peekaboo on her own; it was like someone flipped a switch. It’s so much fun to watch her figure stuff out. A few weeks ago it was playing with her tummy turtle, a toy that has a mirror in its tummy so when the baby has tummy time they can look into it. I happened to be on the floor with her and she saw me in the mirror, then she angled the mirror again so she could see only herself, then again so she could see me, and so forth. Every time she moved it she’d look over her shoulder to see me in real life, to see if I’d moved, too.

She is dragging herself around with her hands and wriggling to get from point A to point B now, too. Crawling will happen in the next couple of weeks, we think. She loves tummy time; I can put her down on a blanket in her room with a box of toys on its side and she plays quietly for fifteen to twenty minutes, pulling things out and exploring them. She’s very social, however, and if other people are around she demands to be with them.

Sleeping in her own room continues to go well enough. Naps are still tricky at the twenty- and forty-minute marks, and if we can get past those she sleeps for over an hour or two. Nights generally are four to five hours of sleep before midnight, then three, then two, then she’s awake for the day, but after a horrible night of gastro last week she’s regressed to waking up every hour to two hours. Except last night, when she celebrated turning seven months old by sleeping five hours straight as of 11:30 PM, which, in casual medical parlance, is called ‘sleeping through the night.’ We shall see if she can repeat it.

In general, her day looks something like this: She wakes between 6:30 and 7:00 and nurses, then is up and playing and socialising until we take Sparky to his bus stop at 8:20. We’re home at 8:30 and she’s cranky for her bottle and bed, which happens around 8:40. This nap lasts anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Then it’s usually some more hanging out or watching Sesame Street if she’s awake in time. If she wakes early then there’s a snack of nursing or a rice rusk around 10:00. Lunch is a bowl of cereal and a pile of finger food, and happens between 11:00 and 11:30, after which she gets a small bottle and goes to sleep again. This second nap is usually about 30 to 40 minutes long, though there are the days where she throws a curve into plans for errands or such and sleeps for 2 hours. (Never on the days where she has a long nap in the morning, though.) Then it’s up and finding things to do till it’s either time for a quick nap at 3:00 (if it was a short midday nap) or going out at 3:40 to meet Sparky’s bus (if it was a longer nap). We’re home from the bus stop at 4:00, and she has a snack of rice rusks while Sparky has his own after-school snack, and then if she didn’t have a nap before we went out then she gets one between snack and supper, or supper is a nightmare for everyone. She usually has a twenty-minute catnap, and is fine for supper at 6:00, after which we have another small bottle chaser of milk, and then bedtime is between 6:30 and 7:00. There is a lot of fluidity in the daily schedule because the length of her naps are so unpredictable, which makes it really frustrating to try to plan things. The multiple brief naps are crazy-making in a lot of other ways, too, because I don’t have enough time to do more than toss a load of laundry into the machine. I’m very solitary by nature, too, and not having a social break from another person, however small and dependent, is really wearing. I feel like I spend my whole day trying to get her to sleep. And she does need sleep, or she’s miserable.

She adores jumping in her exersaucers. We tried a Jolly Jumper but we can’t get it short enough for her body to be in the optimal position. Her weight pulls it too close to the floor and her legs end up too bent. We started showing her the younger Baby Einstein DVDs here and there, too, and she loves those as well.

She has turned into a little chatterbox, constantly murmeling, whispering, and vocalizing in various ways. Shrieking was thankfully brief. She beeps and natters away to herself while wiggling around her crib when she wakes up from a nap if she’s had enough sleep; if she hasn’t she jumps straight to crying. She has a really fun gurgly belly laugh.

She completely lights up when HRH comes in the door at the end of the day. She fights to stand up on the sofa and hold on to the back so she can look over it and watch him get his coat off, bouncing up and down till he cones over and picks her up. Then she turns to me and gives me a lovely smile as if to say, I love you, Mum, and we had fun today but I’ve got my Daddy now and he is mine! And that’s usually fine by me, because by that point it’s always nice to not have a small squirmy limpet clinging to me in some way. She loves Sparky just as much. If he’s reading she wants to be next to him to listen and help turn pages. If he’s having a snack, she has to have one, too. The sun rises and sets in his eyes.

When we read books she touches all the pictures, but she doesn’t do it the way Sparky did, with a finger or the fingertips. She puts her whole palm down on the page and moves her hand around, like it’s absorbing information. She does it rather methodically, too; it’s not random.

So many babies in our online birth group are crawling, pulling up, or even — eep! — walking, but Owlet is happy not doing any of that. She didn’t even roll very much till this past week, although now she is the Incredible Flippy Baby when we put her down for a diaper change (goodbye changing table, hello bed). If I were less laid back about development I might be worried. But I know that those babies are early, and we’re doing just fine. Owlet is almost exactly following Sparky’s developmental schedule, actually, which I find interesting.

I’ve given up on any clothes that are smaller than 12 months, because I know the 12 mos ones will fit, whereas anything else sized between 6 and 12 months has zero guarantee and a very slim chance of fitting. I’m a bit wistful, actually. My doctor was delighted with the roly-poly baby with the rolls of fat, and I love to cuddle and squish her, but I miss my more delicate girl. How’s that for a shallow first world problem? I know she’s bulking up for a stretching growth period, though, and I know when she starts crawling it will burn off, too.

Photobombed by Sophie the Giraffe:

Ahem: again, please? Without the giraffe?