Lydia’s cold is a thing of the past. She’s been totally fine pretty much the whole week, and more active and engaged now that she’s over it.
A few days ago, I was thinking that it was still a pretty peaceful period, without any major changes on her part. But the last few days have been a bit more exciting.
Sleep
Sleep is a bit different every week. This week, I think Lydia napped a bit less and got more nighttime sleep. She went to bed on the earlier side, usually before nine, and slept pretty late. Once she was in bed until ten. However, during the week no one sleeps past 8:30 or so, because Will gets up to go to work.
I may have mentioned this before, but Lydia usually has at least one sleep window in the morning that she doesn’t use to fall asleep. It’s a clear dip, and she’ll display signs of tiredness. Sometimes, if she got up earlier than she wanted and I’m doing something particularly soothing, she’ll fall asleep then. But she almost never does. She usually falls asleep the next time she gets sleepy.
Nursing
Nursing is fine. I think usually eats two big meals after I’ve gone to bed at night. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe 4:00 and 6:30? Hard to know. I haven’t noticed more of the biting behavior, though it might have happened a little. Still no teeth.
Solids
I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but for a weeks now, Lydia has been pretty accepting of me putting food directly into her mouth, which is my preferred method when feeding her in the wrap. She seems to have caught on that she usually likes to eat the food, so she no longer grabs it out of my hand as much. She got more variety than usual in food this week, since I shared by food with her at a fancy brunch our friend made, and at the churrascaria we went to.
She’s fine to eat most things, but she’s not indifferent. I remember during brunch that she didn’t want anymore salmon (she’d eaten a bunch of pieces already), but she was happy to eat more blueberry.
I haven’t been trying the high chair much recently, since she obviously isn’t crazy about it. I don’t feel bad about buying the chair, since it’ll last her for years, but now she’s just not that into it. I think loosening the straps was good, and I’ve been skipping the bib, since she dislikes it. But she still has to be in the right mood.
I do think there’s been less drama about her getting big pieces of food stuck in her mouth though, since she’s more used to it. I’ve also gotten in the habit of giving her smaller pieces these days.
She seems to finally be into the idea of water! This actually started a few weeks ago, when she liked drinking out of my bottle of water at Maker Faire. But it’s kept up. She still doesn’t care about her own cup of water, but when I’m drinking water she’ll grab it and bring it to her mouth. She doesn’t drink much, but she will drink a little bit at a time and keep taking sips.
Elimination Communication
I put away all but twelve of the diapers, and I’m still not doing laundry even every other day. EC is going quite smoothly, and I’m often keeping Lydia in underwear or training pants while at home. She still pees quite often in the morning, but she’ll surprise me with how long she can go later in the day.
I think one of Lydia’s signals that she needs to go is when she tries to go outside. We have a sliding door in our bedroom to a patio area, and I often let her play out there, sometimes without a diaper, since we don’t really care if she pees on the patio. One day we may decide otherwise…
But yeah, the other day she looked expectantly at the door until I let her out, crawled around and peed, then came back so I could change her diaper. Now, I offer her the potty before letting her outside. It’s fun learning her signals and trying to get inside her head.
Babywearing
I’ve been better about actually wearing Lydia around the house when she wants it. It’s definitely the single thing that I think I should do more of, but I’ve been improving.
No big news here. She feels heavier (haven’t weighed her recently, but maybe as much as 19lbs?), but I must be doing something right with the wrapping, since it’s comfortable to do it for hours at a time. My form isn’t awesome, but Will’s shoulder started hurting in the wrap after less time than that when he did it, and he’s stronger. (Usually he uses the Ergo, so he’s not as practiced a wrapper.)
Motor Skills
The standing is similar. She seems a bit more stable, but it’s rare that she actually stands for really long periods. And I think she’s possibly gotten more cautious about what contexts she’ll do it in. She’s still very much into practicing standing on the edge of the mattress though.
I wonder whether she’s actually slowed down in this department because she didn’t get as much practice when she had the cold, but she did continue to gain weight. Hard to know, and these things are often not all that steady anyway.
Last week, Lydia was a bit more interested in the stairs. As of today, she can climb them! She still hasn’t mastered the bottom step, since it’s the tallest, but I put her up one steps, lured her with the phone, and she climbed all the way up to the second floor!
In the past, Lydia has actually been pretty cautious about the edge of the stairs. She would approach, but never tried to go over. Now that she’s gone up though, she’s more curious. She tried to go down headfirst, which is usually how she gets off the bed. i was there of course, so no damage was done. I read on some RIE website that it was a good idea to let children try to go headfirst (obviously spotting them), until they decide they want to go another way. The logic was that you want to encourage them to listen to their body about what’s safe, instead of redirecting their motion wholesale. Not sure I’m convinced, but it makes enough sense to me that I’ll try to let her figure it out.
I let Lydia play with some wide, shallow stairs at the playground, which seemed helpful. She seemed able to safely go down those.
Communication
Lydia is waving to people!!!
She’s been doing it since Saturday, I think, but I was only totally sure it was intentional today. It’s not very coordinated, but she’s doing it. Plenty of people who aren’t me have recognized that she was waving at them.
And to me, this means that signing is just around the corner. I’m going to up the practice there quite a bit, because now it seems more possible than ever. I don’t think her fine motors skills are good enough for a bunch of the signs I do with her, but she should be able to do things like more, all done, mommy, daddy, eat, and a few more. Waving her fist around as an approximation of the potty sign would be amazing.
I’m probably getting a bit ahead of myself, but I’m taking the waving as a pretty big step socially, up there with smiling and laughing!
Personality/Other
Lots of strangers recently have commented on how happy Lydia is. And she usually is! She loves to see people and smile at them.
She’s also grabbier than most babies that I’ve seen. There was a cute interaction at the playground today with a 13 month old. Lydia grabbed her shovel, and the girl sort of looked at me. I said something like, “you want that back,” and gave it to her. She vocalized something and seemed pleased.
Me
The long weekend was fun. Will and I had our anniversary on Memorial Day, and it was great getting to see so much of him after he’d been working all week. And the weather has been great the past few days.
I was rereading some RIE blog stuff about how we should really slow down and be present when doing things like clipping nails, and I’ve been taking that attitude more. I’ve always thought it was a good idea, but slowing down is often challenging for me. Today though, I really talked through the process of nail clipping, and Lydia was calm and cooperative. Inspirational!
Next goal: be more present during diapering. I do talk about what I’m doing with her, but I definitely rush, and the current status is that she doesn’t like the process much.
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