Probably the most notable feature of this week was increased separation anxiety. Quite interesting to watch. I do think that, because of her own increased mobility, Lydia has much more of a concept of people leaving than she used to, and she doesn’t like it!
The most classic thing she has been doing is crying the minute I go around a corner. She’s also sometimes not liked to be put down, even if she can see me. (Since she’s been born, there have been times when she didn’t want to be put down, but this seems to have a different character. More clingy is one way I would describe it, though I don’t like the negative connotation of that word. It’s not that she’s otherwise tired or fussy, but that she wants me. If I put her down, she’ll crawl over and start climbing my leg.)
And sometimes Lydia just wants to be with me, not even Will. Though, even when I’m with her, she’ll still sometimes get upset when Will leaves to go to the kitchen or something, and start crawling after him. Actually, Lydia’s not crazy about anyone leaving, and has expressed distress when my roommates left in the morning for work, and when a guy we were hanging out in a coffee shop rounded a corner and she couldn’t see him anymore.
But in the case of non parents, I think it’s more that she’s trying to understand what’s going on. When I pick her up and take her to see them leaving more clearly, she doesn’t seem to mind.
We’ve been making a point of saying “bye!” to her when we leave (her visual field), and then saying “hi!” when we come back. I think that works pretty well. I doubt she thinks of it as meaning very much, but saying “bye!” is something positive for her to focus on, so it seems to work from that angle.
(My sister-in-law taught her 9-month-old to wave goodbye to her toys when she’s done with them, and she said that it’s been helpful for keeping things positive.)
That said though, mostly I’m just keeping her as near to me as she wants to be. More on that below.
Sleep
Lydia is still on her later schedule. This morning, she seemed to be up around 8:30, so we both got up then, but she was back asleep within an hour. On days where she sleeps past ten though, she can be up for three or four hours pretty happily.
Assuming Lydia gets to sleep in, and she gets naps that are as long as she wants them to be, she seems to be pretty solidly on a two nap schedule. Bedtime isn’t very consistent. On an early day, she’ll be asleep before nine, but it can go as late as eleven or so.
I remember talking to my mom friend ages ago, when Lydia was around three months, about how I didn’t know when to try to soothe her to sleep, and being worried about sleep windows. She told me that Lydia would get much more clear with her signals. And she was so right!
Nursing
Last week I mentioned that Lydia seemed to be eating more substantial amounts at night. That continued. She had at least one night where it felt as though she nursed constantly all night. I would try to take her off and she would be fine for a few seconds, until she moved, I moved, or something else made her realize she wasn’t latched on. Then she would relatch, so I would accept the situation.
I’m so glad I figured out early how to sleep through nursing. And I’m also glad I’ve pretty much never had issues with my nipples hurting from really long nursing sessions. I’ve met moms whose babies, like Lydia, go through periods where they’re nursing all night, who are fine with co-sleeping, but haven’t figured out how to nurse and sleep at the same time.
In this case, anyway, I’m pretty sure the issue was a growth spurt. Lydia went from around 16 pounds 7 ounces, to 17.2 pounds in a week or so. (New milestone, she can now sit on the bathroom scale so I can see her weight!)
Now that the growth spurt seems to be over, night nursing is back to where it was before.
Solids
Lydia ate much more this week. I’d say she’s finally gotten in to the whole solid food thing. And her poop is pretty adult-like too. It smells worse :-(. There have been times when there were lots of different visible chunks of food in it, which I hadn’t actually seen much of before.
She also just seems more focused and directed when I give her food these days.
She’s capable of eating basically anything, even though her form is weird. She can eat peas just fine, even though she’s not using her pincer grip. She’s consuming ground beef, which she mostly ignored before, I think because it wasn’t a great shape for her. She can eat big and small pieces of it. Little shred of carrot? She can eat it. Mashed potato? She can get some off a spoon, shove some in her mouth, and lick her fingers. She’s not the best at handling rice, but she’ll get some stuck on her fingers and suck them.
The whole process is still very much a mess, but more of the food is staying on the table. I’m pretty sure her intent is to keep it there, it’s just iffy.
She’s still not that into drinking water, but I think mostly what she objects to is having me pour the cup in her mouth. She likes to hold it herself. And, while she can make the movement of pouring the cup into her mouth, she typically doesn’t.
I hear about other babies I know loving water at this age, and I wonder sometimes whether I should coax her into having more, get her a sippy cup or straw cup, or give her bottles of water.
But my inclination is to keep offering both to pour water from the cup into her mouth and let her play with the water cup with a little water in it. She can always nurse if she’s feeling thirsty.
I have heard that it’s actually much easier for babies to figure out cups when the cup is nearly full, which makes sense. I haven’t tried it yet though, because I’ve been reluctant to clean up huge amounts of water. Maybe I should put her in the bathtub naked with her cup though and just have a practice session. That actually seems like a good idea…
The most awesome food story happened a few days ago. We keep some food on the lowest shelf in the kitchen, including, this time, a bunch of bananas.
Lydia went over, grabbed a banana, peeled it, and nommed on it. The bananas were quite ripe, which made removing one banana from the bunch and peeling pretty trivial. Her eating of the banana wasn’t very directed though, and she was mostly sucking on the peel. We decided just to let her go for it, since it seemed totally badass that she served herself. Eventually, she got upset about something and wanted to be held, at which point it became clear just how much banana slime was all over her and the kitchen floor :-).
Some of the most useful advice I got about babies eating and mess was just to lower my standards.
It really does seem like something clicked with Lydia, and now she’s eating meals most of the time when I put her in the high chair.
Oh, one other trick I figured out was that it works much better to put the food on the high chair before putting Lydia in. She’s not crazy about the chair in general, but she mostly wants food these days, so if she sees it she’s happy to sit there.
Lydia ate a strawberry this week at our home birth class reunion and smeared it everywhere. It was adorable.
Elimination Communication
This week the Gerber training pants came in the mail too. She has them on right now, and they fit about the same as the Green Sprouts.
There are some other notes here.
She peed during a nap transition twice this week that I can remember, which she hasn’t done for months! Weird, and I have no idea if anything is causing it. It doesn’t matter much to me, but it’s a new thing to keep track of. She doesn’t sleep as well in a wet diaper, but changing it risks waking her up, so there’s a tradeoff there.
As noted above, she’s pretty much moved past breastmilk poop, so I’m much more inclined to wash the diapers often even if we’re not close to running out.
I haven’t done much in the way of diaper free time since last week, but I’m doing it at the moment, and the plan is to do more. She currently has five pairs of training pants that fit well enough to use, and two pairs of tiny underwear. I want to move to having her in training pants or underwear by default if we’re at home. I still won’t do that when we’re out, but if it’s working well I may do training pants with a diaper cover instead of prefolds and covers.
I think I’m already getting a better sense of her signals though. I remember looking over once this week while she was squatting a bit and being quite and motionless for a few seconds. I knew she had just peed, and I don’t think I would have recognized it a few weeks ago.
Babywearing
There has been an uptick in babywearing this week, due to the increased separation anxiety. Wearing Lydia while I get stuff done around the house works well.
When out and about, I find myself still pretty much doing the front wrap cross carry, but shifting Lydia to my hip a bit. She likes to look out and see what’s going on.
It’s increasingly true that sleeping in the wrap isn’t her preference. It usually works better these days to take her out and nurse her lying down on my lap. Not that she wouldn’t fall asleep if we were walking somewhere and she were really tired or there weren’t many distractions, it’s just happening less.
Motor Skills
More new skills this week! Lydia continues to be even better at standing. I think I’ve seen her do it for up to five or six seconds, and she’s quite frequently balancing at least a little when she lets go, or sometimes when I place her on the ground. I’d say she’s hit the “standing for a few seconds by seven months” prediction with room to spare.
I had Lydia practice going up some small steps at the playground, lower than the bed. It wasn’t easy, but she made it up. Then she got up on the bed with quite a bit of difficulty a few days ago. Now she’s pretty proficient at it, and she just crawls right up!
Getting down off the bed is mostly pretty safe. She sometimes crawls down head first, and while she’s been known to hit her nose, it works fine. Sometimes, she goes feet first, and that seems completely safe to me. But sometimes she sits right next to the edge and topples off that way, which can result in a longish fall where she hits her head. Not as safe, so I try to pay attention to this one.
Next step, stairs? I think that’ll be much harder for her, actually. I hear about babies crawling up stairs, but intuitively I imagine her walking before she would be crawling up stairs. Time will tell. So far she’s not interested in trying to ascend the staircase.
In the fine motor department, aside from being able to eat just about anything, she can do zippers now! She will very intentionally grasp the zipper on my diaper bag and pull it open. I think she has a pretty limited understanding of doing this on purpose to get at the stuff inside the bag though, which is somewhat convenient for now.
Communication
Lydia has been babbling with a lot more consonants this week. For the first time, I can imagine words coming out of her mouth. It’ll still be pretty magical when it happens, and it’s so cool to see progress!
I think her inflection is also more varied, and she’ll say more multisyllabic things.
In particular, she’s been working on the “p” sound. She says it over and over again and it sounds like she’s saying “poop”. I noticed her saying this much more in the morning and after naps, times when she nearly always potties, so I had hoped that perhaps the sound was related to the act. Seems like it’s not though, since I tried taking her to potty at other times I heard her saying it to no avail.
Probably, I’m just reading into the usual pattern where she’s more inclined to display new skills when she’s particularly well-rested, and the “p” sound is a new skill. Still cute though when she’s pooping in the morning saying “poop”, “poop”.
No signing from her, and I’m actually updating away from her understanding my sign language yet. Oh well.
However, I feel like telling her not to touch things is actually working a tiny bit. Moving her hand away and saying that I won’t let her play with something doesn’t feel completely pointless.
The current strategy there is to get close when she’s doing something potentially problematic. Let her do as much as possible that I’m okay with. Stop her right when she’s about to do something I’m not okay with and tell her in as neutral a tone as possible that I’m not going to let her touch/do/eat whatever it is and why.
Then, I get all excited and thankful when she moves away form the thing, just looks at it, starts to touch it and pulls back, or anything like that that seems worth reinforcing.
This plan may need to be updated as she gets older.
Personality/Other
One of the cutest things ever happened this week. I was hanging out with Lydia and another baby who’s just a little younger (and his mother). At one point, Nate was making little sounds and Lydia was laughing at them! They went back and forth for this for a few times.
A much sadder thing also happened this week. Lydia produced nervous laughter :-(. I’d seen something like this before when Lydia was otherwise scared and I was trying to make her laugh. She would laugh but also sound scared.
This time, I was in a bad mood and Will and I had decided to have a pillow fight to improve my state. We proceeded to do so, and Lydia looked at us sadly and kept laughing nervously. I was actually a little angry, even though it wasn’t at Will and we weren’t hitting each other hard with the pillows. Maybe that’s what she was picking up on?
The next day I tested the waters by having a bit of a pillow fight in front of her again, and that time she laughed in the usual way.
Speaking of water, we had another home birth class reunion, and one of our friends brought a kiddie pool. I was afraid Lydia wouldn’t like it, but she actually did! She got a big kick out of it. She didn’t like the ocean at all last time I tried, but now I’m hoping once again that she’ll have fun in the water when we go to Maine in July.
Me
This week was good. My plan is to go to the Rites of Passage group one more time and then consider myself graduated. The Attachment Parenting Park Day will be a good replacement that fits my goals better at this point. There’s also a Glen Park toddlers playgroup on Friday mornings that I will start visiting after Zumba.
I want to be increasingly strategic about meeting families who we’ll be hanging out with for years to come.
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