Consonants!

Last night Aria said "ba ba ba ba ba" back to us several times while she was up on the changing table.

6 months and counting

Aria turned six months old on March 16th. We can hardly believe that much time has gone by, but you look at the pictures, and they don't lie. She's so much bigger and more agile now. She's just under 18 pounds. She can easily roll over from her back to tummy and back again, in either direction. She wriggles around on the floor and can sort of scoot herself backwards. She's looks scarily close to crawling: she is starting to get her knees up when she's on her tummy, and occasionally gets her butt up in the air too.

She's eating solid food every day now. We've tried sweet potatoes, peas, carrots, apples, and bananas. The only one she has solidly rejected is sweet potatoes. She still likes carrots the best, but will happily chow down some peas or apples too. I absolutely love feeding her because she does my absolute favorite thing in the whole world. I give her a spoonful of food, then she furrows her brow a tiny bit and looks up at me with this special look. It's a look that says "Are you sure about this?" while she's got food all over her face and is pensively moving it around in her mouth. I always give her a squeeze after I get that look. I just adore that look.


Bedtime is still a struggle for us. She's so squirrely now that the only thing that consistently gets her to sleep is nursing. I've kind of given up on trying to walk or rock her to sleep because it's just gotten too frustrating. She's so strong now that she squirms around in my arms, pushes off my chest, and kicks me with her little toes. Occasionally Hosie's mom is able to walk her to sleep, but I don't understand how she does it. During my attempts both baby and Daddy get very frustrated.

That's not to say that nursing is a magic bullet either. Right now as I'm typing this Hosanna is trying so hard to get her to sleep and I can hear Aria squealing over the baby monitor. They've been up there for 45 minutes. I know Hosanna is probably going nuts up there, and I don't know what to do to help. If I go up there, the only thing I can really do is pick her up, bring her downstairs, and play with her for a while until she gets more tired later. We know that we need to get into a routine where she doesn't depend on nursing to get to sleep, but we're at this awkward in-between stage where she still relies on Hosanna for comfort but is getting too big to handle like an infant. (Oh, and I can hear you saying "She's just going to get bigger...")

...And now Aria is here on my lap. Hosie couldn't do it any longer. This kid is wide awake. 10:00 p.m. Well, it's not so bad. We'll have some fun together for a little while.


We bought her a bouncy chair after debating it for a few weeks. She absolutely loves it. She gets annoyed when she's lying down for too long, but she wants to be active, so this is a nice compromise. She gets to see what's going on and jump and kick like crazy. Some toys and noisemakers came with it but we took them all off - they were too overwhelming for her. (And I don't really miss the jolly bouncy music, either.)


The other activity that she really loves is sitting on a lap and banging on the piano. She's quite a composer already. Although her pieces do lean towards the aleatoric, cluster-tone type. Schoenberg and Webern would love it. Bach might not be so impressed though. :)

Other general items of interest:

• She's discovered her tongue, and often sticks it out or rubs it around her mouth.
• She's afraid of strangers now, especially men. She got really scared by Uncle Manny because he used to be bald but then he grew in all his hair and she didn't recognize him.
• Her favorite song to bounce around to is the "Cantina Band" song from Star Wars.
• Her favorite book is still Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton. We bought a bunch of books by her, but she doesn't like any of the others nearly as much as that one.
• She loves to play in front of the mirror.
• She also occasionally shakes her head back and forth, especially when she's looking at a light or brightly colored object. We think she must like seeing the color trails or something.

We threw out a bunch of our toiletries we had - both adult and baby stuff - because Mothering magazine alerted us that many of them are filled with nasty chemicals, including several proven carcinogens. We found a web site called Skin Deep that rates shampoo, soap, etc for their chemical content. The only stuff we found that was remotely OK was Burt's Bee's.

Also, the Sacramento Bee did a really nice story on The Birth Center (the place where we had Aria) becoming a breast milk bank. Since Hosanna is their first donor, they interviewed her for the story and published our picture along with it. The story is here: http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14233895p-15055646c.html.