Status report: Month 10

This girl is growing so fast. Next month she'll be learning to drive. Everything's zoom, zoom, zoom! with her. Let's go look at this toy! And then crawl down the hallway! And veer with alarming speed into the craft room! And now pick me up, Mom! And now I'm going to struggle to get out of your arms so I can crawl on air!

(Maybe that's why I could never seem to find the time to sit down and finish this. Also she keeps trying to eat the computer.)

Chloë is crawling, crawling, crawling these days. Her knees are often red when we change her. It's so hard to believe she was sitting, immobile, only a couple of months ago. We've had to baby-proof the house out of necessity, and we're working our way up as she perfects her next trick: cruising. She loves to stand, especially by the wooden seat in the entry (by the Rack of Forbidden Shoes) and in the upper hall (holding onto the Rail of Parental Fear), holding casually on with one hand like, I'm only holding onto this thing because it's afraid of heights and I'm trying to make it feel better. Then she edges along whatever it is she's got, reaching ever higher.


This makes bathtime particularly difficult, though it's also a lot of fun, and much easier to clean the insides of her thighs when she's standing up, holding onto the spigot (which we bought an inflatable cover for) and grinning at us as if to say "I know! I can't believe I'm doing this either!"


Our house is constantly littered with toys these days, both actual purchased toys and things that merely entertain her, such as CD cases and pie pans. She loves pulling the DVDs down from the TV stand and still won't leave my computer alone. She's responding to "no," though. (Except when it's "No biting!" Then she laughs.) She's fond of her remote control and her cell phone with the buttons she's allowed to push. She likes the xylophone/piano we bought her, but it's harder to work than we thought so she mostly listens to us play.


She's still in nine months clothes, barely. At her nine-month checkup she was 90th percentile weight, 50th height (75th head), so I'm guessing it's that the height matters more than the weight. I'm plenty okay with this. It's been warm in the last few days, and she's been wearing things like dresses and shorts. Now that she's crawling and standing, they stay on her. Hooray! I'm not sure whether I'm looking forward to the end of the onesie era or not.

Her diet is progressing quicker than the books recommend. Now that her top teeth have partially grown in, she can have actual bites, and does, although she can't be trusted to take a reasonable-sized piece so we're still cutting bread and fruit and such up for her. We had pizza and squash for dinner the other night. I cut up some bits of crust and cheese and green pepper for her and she ate them with gusto. Then she refused the squash until she saw me eat a spoonful. She'd much rather have cut-up strawberries and grapes than her 3rd foods chicken and vegetables. She's very into cheese and bread, and pretty much anything we offer her. She had her first taste of chives the other day, for example, when she was helping me bring things in from the garden.


The biting of the R.I.N.D.S. is becoming a bigger problem. She does it almost all the time now. She cries when I poke her cheek and say "No!" and put the R.I.N.D.S. away, but it doesn't seem to deter her. I'm feeling ambivalent about giving up nursing, but this is one aspect I'll be glad to be done with. Since she's nursing less now, we may have enough milk in the freezer to last until she can start having cow's milk. But telling her this doesn't seem to deter her either.

Separation anxiety has gotten a little better; she'll sometimes reach for Daddy when she's in my arms, and will happily go to Miss Danita and Miss Mindy at daycare. (Her last day is coming up, and they're sad.) She's generally happy to sit in the living room and play while I go to the kitchen to get a snack or put away dishes or see if maybe I left her nail clippers there, since I can't find them anywhere else. (This is going to be a problem shortly. Her nails grow fast and sharp. Also her toenails, and since we've given up on socks for her, this matters.) She smiles and crawls toward me when I come home or go to see her at daycare, but she's also likely to get distracted before she gets to me and start playing with something else.


She's got tricks now. She does the "Indian warcall" thing with her hand, and especially when we put our hands over her mouth, and she does her own variant by moving her side to side while babbling. She claps, and waves, and will occasionally high-five, though I'm not convinced she's actually responding to the request. And she's learned how to make a clicking noise with her tongue. It's one of her great delights to get me to mimic her doing it.

She remains a happy girl, and she's going to love Cedar Point when she's bigger. One of her favorite things right now is being held upside down. Another is being "thrown" from Eric to me, or vice versa. She hates getting into her carseat and being put down for naps, but otherwise life seems to be going pretty well for her.

Happy anniversary

Blechh. I've got the month 10 status report mostly written and will get it up soon, I promise. In the meantime, you can tell that we're parents of a baby. Tonight was our anniversary (three years). What did we do? We went out for dinner (Chloë enjoyed her tastes of reggiano hash browns and three-cheese ravioli) and then accidentally fell asleep together. Ah, love.

What Do You Dream About?

Today was Zander's 5th birthday, and we drive up to Ann Arbor and back for his party. Chloë slept both ways, for the most part. At one point on the highway driving back, she cooed for a moment, then said "a-da-da-da" and clapped three or four times... and then promptly fell asleep again. We figure she must have been dreaming, and we'd love to know what was so applause-worthy.

Feed me

I think my favorite part of watching Chloë feed herself so far is the way she opens her mouth wide and then steers food toward it. It's important to get these in the right order, you know.

She was doing that last night with bread and cheese and sweet potatoes and strawberries. The strawberries came last, and she started to slow down and play a bit (and I thought it was about time, because she put away a pretty decent amount of food there). I'd eaten the strawberry I saved for myself, so I snitched one of her pieces. She watched me in interest. I leaned over and open my mouth wide, pointed at a strawberry, and pointed at my mouth. She carefully picked it up and deposited the piece in my mouth--well, she positioned her whole hand there, which is the way she feeds herself, so I had to fish between her fingers with my tongue to get it. Still, she fed me a strawberry! I thanked her effusively and she smiled. We repeated this, and then she insisted that I eat her drooly fist, which was kind of slimy but it made her laugh, so it was worth it.

Biting off more than we can chew

Chloe's fourth tooth is coming in now, a small off-white blob at the top of her mouth. She's loving these teeth. Normally I don’t have breakfast at home, but she woke me up at six and I was hungry, so we shared a piece of bread this morning. We sat on the living room floor, and I pulled off a couple of bean-sized bits for her. She accepted them, but then she wanted to get her own, so I let her pull off her own piece from my slice. While she ate that, I took a bite. Her eyes followed the bread as it went up to my mouth and down again, and then she was on it, chomping a bite for herself.

Her checkup last Friday went very well. She was 21 lb., 13 oz., down to 90th percentile for weight instead of 95th, which the doctor approved. She's still solidly 50th for height and 75th for head. She's developing perfectly and doing just fine except for an ear infection. I felt bad about not knowing this; but when she hasn't been irritable or feverish how were we supposed to know? She has pulled at her ears occasionally, but she's been doing that for months. The doctor gave us a prescription for antibiotics, but suggested waiting to see if the infection actually starts to bother her before filling it. That's what we're doing.

So far she hasn't seemed to have gotten any worse, except maybe for one thing. She's been waking up in the middle of the night and standing up and screaming instead of going back to sleep as she normally does. This started when we were at Penguicon for the weekend, in a hotel room where I didn't want to let her scream for fear of disturbing our neighbors, so it could be that she's taking advantage of the inch I gave; or she could be having trouble sleeping due to earache. It probably doesn't make a difference, but I'd be less grumpy at being woken at two every night this week. We've been starting to think that maybe a second overlord wouldn't be so bad sometime (until they destroy the Earth in their sibling rivalry, that is), but now I'm remembering the sleep deprivation and I'm not so sure.

Baby-related trauma

I have a lump on my inner lower gum. It's not a sore or anything, just a bump that kind of gets irritated when I press it with my tongue. It only showed up in the last couple of days, and I couldn't figure out what it was. It grew too fast to be cancer, but I was worried it was an abscess or some other annoying problem.

So I went to the dentist. "That's an interesting little lump you've got," he said, and took an X-ray. "The good news it's not an abscess," he said. "Your bones look good, and you have nice teeth. Sometimes the gums just get irritated from food-related trauma. Did you burn yourself on anything hot recently? Eat a lot of potato chips?" I said no, and he wrote me a referral for a periodontist, saying, "It may just go away in a week or so. If it doesn't, you may have a growth in the bone that's getting infected or something, and you should go to a specialist."

I took the slip and went home. I was happy I wasn't going to have to have a root canal, but a little concerned about the possibility of having some exotic oral disease. What if I had to have surgery? What if they had to remove part of my jaw? What if they forbade me from eating chocolate?

Chloë was a little irritable and I thought she might be tired, so we nursed on the bed and fell asleep together. When we woke up, she was happy and playful; she grabbed the wipe rag and shoved it at my mouth, and I made "Aaaah! Gahhh! Graaah!" noises into it as I've been doing recently, and she laughed and slapped my cheek, then grabbed at my face, as she often does. Her fingers slipped into my mouth and grabbed at my lower lip, as they often do, and then at my teeth and gums. I removed her hand and remembered that I still hadn't clipped her nails like I'd meant to. I think I know where the lump came from.

Status report: Month 9

Chloë is nine months old. Nine months! That's so old! She has now spent more time outside my body than in. She's grown a lot more in this latter nine months--her checkup isn't until next week but she's got to be 23 pounds or so by now, which is an addition of about 15 pounds, as opposed to the 8 pounds she put on in her first nine months. Of course she also started from a single cell in that first nine months, so I suppose we should take that into account.


Nine-month-old Chloë is mobile, inquisitive, dextrous (I mean, for a baby), and fast. She's figured out crawling. Has she ever figured out crawling. She zooms everywhere. I'm sure she looks back on her struggles last month and thinks, "What was my problem? This is so easy!"


She's become fascinated by buttons and wires. She loves to poke at my computer, sometimes accidentally turning it off or on. (Or maybe not accidentally at all.) We've barricaded the stereo in the living room because she loves to push the buttons, turn the volume knob, press the tape deck to make it pop open. Not long ago she hit just the right combination of buttons to make the stereo blare, "OPTION!--" She started back and looked at me in panic. I turned it off, and since then the stereo has been unplugged. I didn't do this, but I suspect it's because Eric was trying to nap at the time.


Sometime in the last month she's grown tiny invisible spikes on her back that sink into her flesh and torment it unmercifully when pressure is applied to them. Or at least that's my guess, as whenever we put her on her back she screams and writhes and does her best imitation of a baby who's about to die of agony. This does not, as you might imagine, make diaper-changing easy, though for whatever blessed reason she does settle down a lot more when we're cleaning up a messy diaper rather than just a wet one. We're both getting better at dressing her while she's sitting or, frequently, standing.


Half the time when I get her in the mornings she's standing at the railing, waiting for me. The other half she's lying down (on her tummy, of course) playing idly with the aquarium or one of her toys. She absolutely refuses to be put in her crib to play when I’m getting ready in the mornings, so her room has been baby-proofed and she plays on the floor in there. At least, she does when she doesn't crawl across the hall to come see me. Then she gets to watch me brush my teeth and hair, and get her own brushed. She wrinkles up her face cutely whenever I do this. Also whenever I put a block or a cup on her head.


She's still mama's girl, but she's reached out for Daddy a few times and has been okay being left with Mimaw and Aunt Angie. She had a great time when her Halmoni came to visit. She was spoiled rotten--held while she napped, visited whenever she woke up in the middle of the night, attended to constantly. She had a hard time getting back to her regular schedule when the visit was over, and she still tends to scream at bedtime and wake up in the night more than she used to. I'm not sure that's because she misses her Halmoni's attention, but whatever the reason, I hope it stops soon.


Naptimes in general have become impossible, unless she's so sleepy she just can't keep herself awake. Apparently at daycare she gets rocked to sleep, which may explain why putting her in her crib doesn't work well at home. She's been taking a lot of naps in her carseat lately. We need to work on the nap issue.

Bathtime has transitioned from the little tub to the big one. This was a little scary the first couple of times, but now she's loving the extra room. She can crawl around, and chase the ducky (also his new friend, Pirate Ducky), and read her floating bath books, and stand up and gnaw the side of the tub. Washing her is a little harder, but them's the breaks.


Food, glorious food! We've gotten more adventurous this month, giving her pasta, cut-up lasagna, bread, crackers, grapes (cut in eighths, thank you), pieces of baked vegetables, and mixed stage-3 foods: chicken and stars, sweet potato bisque, broccoli and cheese. She's gotten much better at the pincer grasp (which means I need to clean the floors more often now that she's down exploring them all the time). She's okay with baby food, mostly, but finger food is by far her favorite. Dinners have started to look like "real" dinners: a couple of different foods, some fruit or yogurt melts for dessert, and her sippy cup. She's figured out the sippy cup, even if she does sometimes drink from it upside down.


She's not taking bottles as much as she used to, but I think that's just because she's less hungry, and the solids come first. She's still fond of nursing. She's started what our friends call "extreme nursing." For example, one of her favorite things to do while lying on the Boppy is grab her upper leg with her upper hand and fling it here and there, like a ballerina doing stretches. Yesterday we were sitting on the couch and she was mouthing my stomach where my shirt had ridden up, so I pulled it up and took out a R.I.N.D.S. interface. Before I could get her into position she simply leaned over, on her knees, and started sucking.


I'm not sure she understands the concept of books yet, but she's starting to be more willing to listen, and less likely to take the book away from me to try to eat it, when we read. She especially likes her bath books. (I think the floatiness helps.) We're also fond of the latest addition to her library, That's Not My Pirate.

She's fond of our attention, but she's growing more independent. For example, I am currently sitting on the couch typing this while Chloë plays with the toys on the living room. Sometimes she comes up to the couch and pulls herself upright to see what I'm doing; sometimes she crawls toward the other room to see if anything has changed; sometimes she looks at me and licks her lips and I'm not sure I want to know what she's thinking. But that's okay. She's becoming a real little person, a third member of the family instead of an appendix or a footnote, and we love it that way.