Lydia is six months old today! I find this quite exciting. We got her three new toys to play with, and she was definitely into their novelty. The caterpillar and car seem like good toys for her. The car is pretty much the only good rolling toy she has now, and it’s good for chasing around. She can’t use the stacking rings for their intended purpose at all, which is fine, but there are also a bunch of pieces that roll around a lot. I’m putting it away for now because I know otherwise I’ll be constantly getting the bits from under the couches.
The fussiness last week that I attributed to Wonder Week 26 seems to have passed. It was around the first half of this week, but it’s been a few days since I’ve noticed it, which feels like forever ago in baby world. Still no sign of teeth.
We also started solid food today! She’s been sitting up and putting everything in her mouth quite well for ages, and the last few weeks she’s also seemed particularly focused on food. I was tempted to start earlier, but I figured it would be a good idea to wait until her gut had matured. I don’t know that there’s much importance to it, but, for what it’s worth, I’ve maintained Lydia’s virgin gut until this point.
I’ll talk more about the solids thing below. As you’ll see, I’ve added a new section about it.
Sleep
More rolling, crawling, and sitting during sleep this week. Once, she rolled off the bed (which is a mattress on the floor) at night. She cried out which woke me up, I screamed which woke up Will, she knocked over the water, and one of my roommates (who had still been awake at the time) came to make sure we were all okay. We were though. Lydia seemed scared but not hurt, and calmed down immediately after I picked her up. No fun for anyone, but not a huge deal. After that though, I’ve been more conscious of her positioning at night. I’ve stopped putting water near the bed, and started putting something soft next to the bed, to minimize distress if she does roll off again.
The advice I’ve gotten about this is to let her play with edges a bunch during the day so that she can figure it out sooner.
Other than that, I don’t think I have much to say about sleep. She wakes up various times. I think she only really eats a lot a few of the times she wakes up. Last night she went to bed around 10:30, but that’s late for her these days. The most reliable way to get her to go to bed early is to keep her away from artificial light in the evening. The most reliable way to get her to sleep in is to be in a deep sleep myself and lie next to her.
Once at least this week she was pretty tired and fell asleep cuddled next to me in my arm, not nursing or anything. Pretty rare, and I like it when that happens. It’s also been more true lately that she’s pulled off at the end of nursing, rolling around a little, and then falling asleep. My little girl is growing up!
Sometimes recently it’s happened that Lydia’s clearly exhausted, but still happy. I can tell she’s tired because she’s all droopy, and she’s not as coordinated as usual. And she’ll usually fall asleep pretty quickly if I wrap her up and wear her around, but she won’t always fall asleep if I just nurse her. I hadn’t thought of this until just now, but I think part of what’s going on here is that it’s getting easier for her to exhaust herself physically, even if she’s not super sleepy.
Nursing
No more concerns about supply this week. My period is also over. These things are very likely not related. I can’t remember anything very interesting about nursing this week.
Solids
As of today, baby-led weaning has begun! Will and I were so excited. For her first meal, we cut up some avocado, banana, cheese, and red peeper into stick shapes. The avocado was basically too soft, so it fell apart quite a bit when she tried to pick it up.
For a bit at first, Lydia seemed mostly interested in the new texture, but before long she did start putting everything in her mouth. (Not so surprising, since she does that with absolutely everything else.) She did manage to do a little chewing (still no teeth), but I don’t think she swallowed much of anything. One timed she gagged quite a bit, I think on a piece of cheese she’d bitten off a piece of. Kind of weird to watch, but I wasn’t worried at all, since the book told me to expect this.
Whenever she put a new food in her mouth, she’d look pretty offended and do this funny wiggle/shiver thing. At some point I’ll have to upload a video of it. It looked like a negative reaction, but after she did the offended shiver she’d always pick up the thing and try to start eating it again. Maybe she was just a bit overwhelmed by the sensory experience of a new taste?
For dinner, we gave her one piece of red pepper and a stick-shaped hunk of steak! At one point she did chew off a little bit of the pepper, but as far as I could tell she gagged and didn’t swallow any. The steak was a big hit though. Once again, id on’t think she swallowed any, but she sucked on it quite a bit. I gave her a fattier hunk near the end of the meal, which was different enough that it got its own offended wiggle. So cute!
Dinner was a very enjoyable experience, not only because we got to watch her eat for the second time, but because we could eat while she was eating. She was having some fun playing at the table before, but both times we had her eat she happily lasted about half an hour at least. And for dinner she was pretty tired, so quite a while for a baby who wasn’t in the best mood.
Elimination Communication
I haven’t yet had to deal with solid food poop–that’ll be next week’s update. Notably though, last night I had a bunch of wheat, which I’m normally quite strict about avoiding. It may not be related, but Lydia had foamy poop all morning, and seemed to have more gas than usual.
Another pretty good week for EC. My strategy in the past when Lydia hasn’t wanted to potty has been to nurse her while doing so, and recently I’ve noticed that she’ll actively request it a lot by squirming into the position she’d be in while I nurse her. Makes sense to me that she’d want it and communicate that to me. I don’t mind doing it.
It casually seems as though she’s peeing at night more. No idea what’s going on there, since I don’t think she’s feeding more at night. I have noticed though that she’ll often not want to potty much early in the night.
Babywearing
It seems like Lydia has been wanting to be in the wrap more lately. Definitely for sleep. I’ll nurse her lying down a bunch for a while and she’ll be up and crawling around, but the minute I wrap her up and start walking around she’ll just be out.
And we’ve also had some long periods this week where she’s been unhappy on the floor but totally content to hang out in the wrap and watch what I’m doing, but not go to sleep. It usually doesn’t work to wear her and be on my computer (if she’s awake–I can when she’s napping), but I can typically cook, clean, do laundry, put away dishes, and other things like that. Talking on the phone works too. I’m often tired and feeling lazy, but I try to remind myself that it often works really well to just wear Lydia around the house. Walking is more physically tiring than sitting or lying down, but a happy Lydia makes for a happy me, which usually matters more :-).
Motor Skills
She’s crawling longer and longer distances. The rolling from her back thing is mostly old hat, though if she’s in a weird position on her back or really tired she’ll occasionally request help with it.
And she’s gotten way better at pulling up. Last week it was mostly the mattress. She could stand holding some higher things if I helped get her in position. Mid-week, I got some packages that came in boxes the perfect heights for her to practice pulling up on, so she did that.
We also have a low shelf on Will’s desk in our room where we’ve been keeping a bunch of power cords. She learned how to get up there this week.
And now, she can pull up onto both of our coffee tables. I came back from the kitchen one time to find her pawing at my computer, which I’d left somewhat near the edge of the higher coffee table. Let the childproofing begin!
Still not sure how much to do there, and whether to maybe hire someone.
On the plus side, she’s almost never bothered by falling and hitting her head, which happens from time to time. If she falls on the front of her face and hits her nose, that will upset her.
On the fine motor front, I’m pretty excited about the self feeding. She didn’t have any issues getting the stick shapes to her mouth, and I’m going to start giving her some of whatever I’m eating to see what she does with that too.
Personality/Other
Once again, we had Zumba and one time with a babysitter. She wanted me more than usual during Zumba this week, which I think was because she was fussier in general. The “babysitting” (Will and I were there the whole time) went pretty well. She fell asleep on the babysitter in the wrap, which was pretty cool. We tried once to leave her alone with the babysitter though, and she freaked out once she realized what had happened. I did say good bye to her and tell her that I was leaving, since I don’t like the idea of springing a departure on her, but my saying good bye doesn’t seem to be registering yet.
We had a second babysitter night scheduled with our roommate, but she was sick and didn’t want to infect Lydia, so we had to reschedule that.
Lydia seems to have been happier in the carseat lately. It might just be a happy phase, but I’ve also been intermittently positively reinforcing her for being happy in there, which might possibly be helping. I actually kind of doubt it though, because we just got a car mirror so now I can see her in the rear view mirror. And when I get all excited and cheer (the reinforcement), she doesn’t seem to react much. She likes it when I get excited and cheer when I’m right next to her, but doing it from the front seat seems to be less interesting to her.
She still loves stairs, slopes, and peekaboo-type games. She had gotten bored with basic peekaboo a while back, but I’ve added letting her be the one to move the cloth away, and she gets a kick out of that.
I took her to a playground with a friend of mine yesterday and she absolutely loved the sand and the swing set. We’re going to the zoo next week. It really feels as though a whole new world of kid activities is opening up, and I love it. I want to take her to see things, and I want to make her laugh. It’s like crack.
Me
Doing a bit worse on sleep this week, but I don’t think it has much to do with Lydia. Just me staying up late more often to hang out with friends and not catching up with naps.
I’m happy though. Parenting is getting more fun, and I can imagine the trend continuing.
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