!!Warning!! extreme cute below

Of course we have a costume.

We Have Tooth!

Anja was pretty fussy most of yesterday, and I finally felt the edge of a tooth on the bottom that has broken through her gum. She was pretty happy for most of today though, so it must not hurt as much now.

We haven't carved our pumpkin yet:



Anja likes looking out her window. We aren't sure how cold it will get near the window in winter, so hopefully we won't have to move her crib away from it. She would be sad.



Here she is performing her new favorite trick:

Pumpkin time

We took Anja today to a local cider mill/pumpkin patch to pick out a Halloween pumpkin. She fell asleep on the way there and was a little sad to be woken up. It was in the 40's and windy on the farm, with some spitting rain. I'm not sure she was too impressed.


She was however very impressed with the pumpkin itself (pictures later) and will be REALLY impressed when she feels how squishy they are inside.

She sure loves standing up and trying to reach things. Here she is trying to grab things off the third shelf of our bookcase.


She is beginning to play with toys while sitting for short periods of time, instead of just plowing through them and gumming them.


She crawled into her bouncy seat again today and stood up in it. She is really good at climbing. But sometimes she stops moving for just a moment:

Standing standing standing

All Anja wants to do now is stand. She can get toys from the third shelf in the bookcase now. You really have to watch her though, because she still falls a lot.

A friend of mine with small children referenced the "Golden Time" when babies can sit up and play with toys, but haven't yet learned to crawl. Since Anja learned to crawl first, we completely skipped that stage! She very rarely just sits to play with toys. And now she crawls straight toward the closest big object in the room so she can stand up. Usually through all of her other toys. She's like a 4X4 tonka truck - straight through everything. I think she crawls really fast because she knows I'm going to catch her before she gets there. Remember those little toy cars with the wheels you can "rev up"? You put the cars on the ground, wheels spinning, and they take off really fast in one direction. You get the idea.

When she gets really close to something she can pull up on, she gets really excited. She makes a funny repetitive noise, like a baby hyperventilating. It's the best thing ever. Today she crawled to her bouncy seat and stood up. Then she crawled completely into it. And then she stood up inside it! You should have seen the look on her face when she turned around to see me. You'd have thought she was at the top of the monkey bars.

In my personal news, I finally turned in the final copy of my thesis to both the graduate school and the bindery today. I am completely done now. It's a little anticlimactic since I defended last March, and it's taken this long to finish the required edits. But that doesn't mean it doesn't feel REEEEAL good!

Stats

For her official 6 month birthday, Anja is 27.25" and 16lbs, 3oz. That's 57th percentile for weight again, but now 95th percentile for height! She must be going through a growth spurt. We have to get the next type of car seat soon, because while her current seat is good to 23lbs, the height limit is 29". She will need a new one before Thanksgiving.

I find the percentile rankings a really funny way to look at height and weight. They foster an atmosphere of competition among parents, hoping that their child "wins" by getting as high a number as possible. I'm not sure why this happens.

Now I can't decide whether to make jicama slaw, jicama chili sticks, or crab jicama pate.

6 months old today!

It's hard to believe Anja is halfway to one year already! Later I will measure and weigh her so we can have official numbers. Right now she is actually taking a nap, and as everybody knows, you do not wake a sleeping baby.

She has been really tired today. She slept in the carrier at Fenner Nature Center today. Then she played with her friends Toby and Scott:


And after they left she actually took a 30 minute nap. Then she woke up and ate a huge amount of avocado (three ice cube squares) and drank an entire 8oz bottle (which is rare for her) and fell asleep again! She's been sleeping for 1.5 hours so far. I'm hoping that helps for tonight, because generally the more she sleeps, the more she sleeps.

In between naps, I managed to take a picture of her with Laura's baby fruit this week:


>>>
I'm back. I had to leave to go get her because she woke up. Only two hours after her huge meal, and she drank another 5oz, she was starving! Now she's sleeping again!

Meep Meep!

Never fear, I did manage to find a jicama, which represents Laura's baby this week. Jay wonders how one eats a jicama.


In local news, this kid is fast! In just the last week she's really improved in her crawling skills (crawling skills?). And she can pull herself up on almost anything now. Even things way above her head. When I picked her up from daycare today, Brenda's husband said, "I can't believe she's pulling herself up at 6 months. I've never seen anything like it!" And he's seen a lot of kids. She is getting better at falling, too, which is arguably more important. She usually falls onto her bum from a standing position, which she doesn't mind (thank you bulky cloth diapers!).

She is also suddenly really good at sitting this week. All day Monday she insisted on sitting straight up, then falling over and bumping her head. It was really hard to catch her every time. But she figured it out and now she doesn't fall anymore. Again I am amazed at how quickly babies learn.


Anja discovered her tongue this week. And that moving her tongue will make different noises. This is her at bedtime a couple of days ago:

Back home

We made it home from the UP without too much trouble. Anja was pretty fussy for the first 3 or so hours, but then she slept for the most part.

It was fun to visit family. Anja has been sleeping a little better since she is over the worst of her cold.


The fall colors were beautiful, and it was unseasonably warm - high 60's to low 70's.




And check out this fox that walked across Grandma Roberts' back yard!

Up north

We're in Marquette for a long weekend. Anja did pretty well on the car ride. She took a few short naps in the car. Jay says they were 45 minutes, but they seemed shorter to me. This time we brought along a few new little toys from the "used baby store" so we could pull them out at fussy times. One toy that was pretty useful was an arch-shaped attachment that connects to the car seat, from which you can hang other toys. It kept toys where she could reach them instead of allowing her to throw her toys away.

For the last hour or two she was really not happy being in the car anymore (the trip is about 7 hours of driving, without a baby). So sometimes we just had to let her cry while we drove. It was more of a low-grade whine/cry, since she was just tired.

We had a funny experience at a welcome center/gift shop along the way. I was letting her walk around on the floor of the gift shop so she could stretch her legs. The woman at the gift shop was enamored with her. Before we left she had me fill out a card with Anja's name on it; then she handed us a big teddy bear and said, "Here, she won this." That's the first time she has won something for being cute!

Things are settling out

It seems we are back on a normal schedule now, and even Jay is mostly better. Anja was only up once each night for the past two nights, which is normal.

Laura's baby weighs as much as four naval oranges this week. Wish me luck for next week when her baby weighs as much as a Jicama. Not sure if they sell those in Marquette.


When I dropped Anja off at daycare today, the little girl who loves her, Zoe (she's two), showed me her own baby doll that she calls "Baby Anja". She puts diapers on Baby Anja and puts Baby Anja down for naps. This is the same Zoe who used to say hi by poking her in the eye :-) She is SO excited when we show up every morning.

Sick. Plus crawling, sitting and standing

All three of us have been sick since the last post. Jay has had the worst of it. I was sick first and am feeling fine now. Jay was just getting sick when he ran a 1/2 marathon last week, and that caused him to get sicker than I did (in the period right after any race, your immune system is really low for several days). And Anja was sick for several days, and now seems to be feeling much better, but has lingering congestion and a runny nose. It hasn't been pleasant for any of us.

The sleep issue was REALLY bad early in the week. Laura sent me some good vibes on her blog (http://everyseasonbutwinter.blogspot.com/), possibly building up some karma for when she's dealing with this in a few months :-) Looking back, Anja probably wasn't feeling well when we were having sleep problems, but we didn't know that yet. She wouldn't go to sleep easily, and once she was asleep we would rarely get a full two hours before she was up again. One night after feeding her I tried for 1.5 hours to get her back to sleep in her crib, but she would wake instantly as soon as she touched the sheets. Most of the time I just gave up and brought her to bed. We started dividing the night again like we did when we first brought her home: one of us takes the first 4 hour shift, and one takes the second. Even so, we both lose sleep, because we both wake up when she cries.


You'd never know from the pictures how much trouble she gives us at night :-)

There are some simple techniques you can use to help your baby to establish better nighttime routines. Well, simple in theory. You are not supposed to try them, though, if she is sick or if your routine will be disrupted, and we are going away for a few days this next week, so now is not the time to try it. But if we are still having issues in a couple of weeks we will try something. Mainly what you are supposed to do is establish a regular routine (ie bath, food, book) each night before bed, and we haven't been very good at that. And then if she wakes up before we know she should be hungry (for example, after only two hours), then we comfort her in bed without picking her up and feeding her, until she falls asleep. Eventually she learns to comfort herself back to sleep. Again, in theory.

Anja has finally started crawling by moving both hands and feet to go forward. She was doing it for a while yesterday, but then she went back to the army crawl. I think that when we dress her in slippery clothes (like fleece) she finds that it's easier to just drag herself around on her belly, especially when she's on the wood floor.


Yesterday she sat up without using her hands several times. The first time she went over backward (again) and bumped her head on the floor. But that didn't stop her from doing it again right away. She held it for a little while, it was pretty neat. And she has been pulling herself up on anything she can grab. There isn't any good video of it yet because I need my hands free to catch her if she falls.


Now that she is getting stronger, she doesn't want to sit in her reclining bouncy seat anymore. This seat has been so useful for putting her in while we make dinner, or take a shower, or do anything that requires two hands. But she leans forward so far in it now that she can pick up toys on the floor in front of her.


We rarely buy new things for Anja, both because we don't need to and can't afford it. But I broke down and bought this at Target today:

Her friend Toby has this set and she was playing with it when we visited this weekend. I couldn't help it! It's a "musical set", complete with plastic drum and centipede drumsticks, ant jingle bells, bee maraca, caterpillar tambourine, and ladybug xylophone. It's made by Parents brand, they make some pretty cool interactive stuff for kids.

I also broke down and bought a "tag blanket". Anja absolutely loves playing with the tags on things. She likes to feel them and suck on them. Apparently this is common, which is why you can buy a fuzzy blanket covered in tags. She loves it.


Speaking of things she loves that we didn't buy for her, look at her reaction to a sheepskin rug. Kim and Scott pulled it out for us when we were over yesterday. When we put her on it she started laughing and burying her face in it. She couldn't get enough of it. Here's a video I stole from Kim's website:


And as usual, she still has plenty of energy: