juthwara

Poor K got taken to the doctor by her cruel parents yesterday, specifically so we could have her stabbed in her thighs with many sharp needles. We're so sadistic. Thankfully, she's avoided the worst of the vaccination side-effects - just a very low fever (99.5) and sleepiness, which I have to confess, we've been kind of enjoying. She slept six hours yesterday evening, woke for less than an hour to eat and promptly conked out again.

She's grown and developed so much just in the past two weeks. She's definitely moving out of the larval stage of infancy and developing into an interactive being:

She weighed in at 12 pounds, 13 ounces and measured 24 inches yesterday. That's between the 90th and 95th percentiles for both height and weight. No puny babies around here. She's almost completely out of her 0-3 month clothes and I'm not sure how long the 3-6 month clothes will last.

She is developing a large vocabulary of gurgles and coos. She has about three vowels (a, o and u) and several consonants (b, d, g, m and n) in her arsenal. Her u's sound very Scandinavian - perhaps she's hoping to grow up to be a Viking. I should buy her a little horned helmet and a flagon of mead with an attachment for a bottle nipple.

She's beginning to enjoy the new game of Social Interaction. She studies me very seriously until I look at her and smile or speak to her, which is her cue to break into a huge grin. Then we stick our tongues out at each other until she has to wiggle and flail her arms to express the sheer excitement of it all.

While shadowboxing is still a favorite sport, she's starting to get some intentionality to her movements. She can bring her fist up to her mouth for the purpose of sucking it, instead of her previous method of sucking on anything that had the felicity to be in range of her mouth. She can also deliberately grasp her pacifier with her hand and pull it out of her mouth instead of merely spitting it out disdainfully.

The back legs are totally ready to crawl, if only she didn't have to worry about that pesky upper body strength. Sadly, the head and torso are going nowhere. So instead, she tries to climb Mount Mommy when I hold her on my shoulder, digging her little feet into my stomach so she can try to send herself headfirst over my shoulder. If I try to have her do tummy time on the Boppy, she usually uses this same method to plant herself facefirst on the ground within 10 seconds. This is why she no longer does tummy time on the Boppy. I occasionally wonder if what she really wants is to start tunneling into the ground with her nose and forehead. Sadly, she was born a human and not a mole, so this ambition will never be realized. Although I have to say, if she ever develops front teeth like a rodent's, she's getting weaned very very quickly.