My dear Alena,
How is it that you are two-thirds of a year old already? You are growing at such a remarkable rate, it truly is amazing to watch.
This past month:
- Your top middle teeth came in.
- You love feeding yourself; you especially love steamed zucchini sticks.
- You also love oatmeal and avocado (although we made the mistake of letting you try feeding yourself with both of those and ended up with it smeared everywhere!).
- We discovered the hard way that you have a carrot allergy. Poor you, you had a rash all over your body and arms that night and it took you a long time to fall asleep.
- We tried getting you to drink from a sippy cup but you didn’t really take to it. Your grandma bought you a different style of sippy cup from Hong Kong and you seem to like it better. We’ll see how that goes!
- You have learned how to get into crawling position, rock back and forth and scoot backwards with proficiency. You are very strong.
- You took your first crawl forward toward an object and are quickly mastering the art of moving toward whatever it is you want to get.
- Most recently, you’ve learned how to move from sitting to crawling position and back to sitting on your own.
- We stumbled upon the great discovery that you can poop and pee over a toilet! We just hold you there and somehow, you know when to go. You’ve saved us a lot of clean up.
- You are less inclined to put things in your mouth. Although you still do it often enough that we have to keep a close eye on you.
- You and Daddy did your first duet together.
- You have learned how to rip things apart. You love ripping paper, as well as leaves from trees. You’ll also try to pull stuff like your food apart.
- You have graduated to the next diaper size!
- You no longer need the 10pm dream feed. You sleep for 11 hours straight on most nights.
- Maybe because you sleep so well at night, it’s sometimes ridiculously difficult to get you to nap during the day. No matter how tired you are, you’ll keep trying to crawl around in your crib and inevitably end up screaming and crying because you’re too worked up to sleep.
- You have become more social with strangers. You will smile at some of them and for pretty much anyone new, you will stare and stare and stare. If we have guests over at our house, you will not sleep until they have left.
- You are very alert to your surroundings. You’ll notice when the fridge starts humming, or when the garage door opens downstairs.
- You took your first ride in a shopping cart! You enjoyed it.
- We think your favourite colour is green. You gravitate toward anything green. And you kept smiling at the watermelon we bought.
- You also seem to have a preference for using your right hand. You will reach out with your right hand to grab things more than you’ll use your left hand.
- Overall, you are pretty content with playing by yourself in your play area or in your crib. You seem quite independent.
You are certainly getting more and more fun to interact with. And we are feeling the pressure to baby proof our house as quickly as we can! We look forward to seeing you reach more milestones in the next month.
With all my love,
Mommy
