7 months

I am having a hard time processing that we have a little girl in our family now.  It's still pretty surreal and she really is feeling like a little girl instead of a little baby more and more every day.  She is also a girl in motion and is constantly spinning, wriggling, rocking, or swatting (even when eating).  C does not take well to confinement right now unless she's highly entertained since she'd rather be practicing her moves.  She is thisclose to crawling which has been equally fun and terrifying to watch since we've been fairly lax about babyproofing.  We did finally get some outlet covers, door stops, and a few cabinet locks for the kitchen but largely want to find a way to teach her about what's safe and what's not without having to lock down every nook and cranny of the house.

Without further ado, here's the little lady at 7 months - a ball of energy who is a fan of pumpkin. :)  For more pictures in her 7th month, go here.

We tried putting in some props for the photo and she was clearly more about the props and getting her photo taken.

Firsts

The last few weeks have been a lot of firsts for Little C: first teeth popped up (bottom two), first solids (avocado), first rocking and army crawling (real crawling isn't far off), first "long" stretch alone with a sitter (it went great!), and her first tumble off our bed (bad Mama).  

Teething has been rough - lots of fussing and cramming her hand in her mouth and us trying absolutely everything to distract or soothe her.  We've tried the washcloth, the amber necklace, frozen breastmilk popsicles, teethers (silicone, wooden, cloth), toys, swinging at the park, suncatchers that make dancing rainbows, fun music, and depending on the day some work better than others.  The lead up to these teeth popping through has felt like forever - she's been showing signs of teething since August at least.  And we had a handful of days last week when she seemed to feel a bit better right before her second bottom tooth appeared out of thin air.  We suspect the involvement of upper teeth now given the fussiness that has been on display this past week.  She's also been waking up quite a bit and needing soothing and I keep having to tell myself this will pass but it's really hard since I have to take other people's word for it and I'm not one to take things on faith especially while in the trenches...

Starting solids has been funny (see the shots from her first feed here).  We decided to start with avocado (tomorrow is pumpkin) since a growing trend is to start babies with veggies instead of cereal.  The plan was to start her on an avocado from our yard since they are ripening right now, but the ones we're getting only taste so-so for some reason.  So I had to get some organic ones at the store and farmer's market, but go figure, they aren't much better either, and we didn't want to wait since she was already at 6.5mo, so we just said to heck with it and started.  She's been eyeballing our plates and mouths when we eat for the last two months, has been imitating me chewing, and seems really eager to get her hands on whatever we are eating so we knew we couldn't wait any longer.  She hasn't seemed to have any adverse reactions to the avocado thankfully (we have to monitor everything she and I eat and how she reacts since she could have inherited some of my food allergies), so tomorrow I'm going to roast a pumpkin and move onto that for the week (we have to introduce new things one week at a time to see if she has a reaction).  We also suspect she has a soy sensitivity right now based on an experiment I did 2 weeks ago by eating some miso soup (it tasted amazing and I've missed it so much) - it seems going off soy while I'm breastfeeding her has been a good precaution that I'll keep up for a while longer (btw - soy, like wheat/gluten, is in EVERYTHING so that's been a challenge to weed out any remaining sources and makes eating in public a pain - "Excuse me sir, what kind of oil do you fry your tortillas in?  Soybean oil?  Well damn, then I officially cannot eat anything here.")

Why are you doing this to me?!

I had a meeting to go to this week for an advisory board I am on so we had to brave leaving the minion with a sitter.  I say brave because when she gets really worked up, the only way we have found to break her meltdown cycle is for me to breastfeed her.  Once she goes over the edge we have not found anything else that works - she's the type of crier who works herself up more the more she cries until she's literally choking for air so "crying-it-out" is not an option (and because frankly it would be cruel given her personality).  This is why we haven't even thought about going out at night - once she goes to bed for the night, when she wakes up, no one, and I mean no one, has been able to soothe her except for me unfortunately).  We've been working on getting her to fall asleep without me having to nurse her down and have been making progress so our sitter and Wade can usually get her down for a nap now and can soothe her if she wakes up crying after a nap.  Bedtime however is another story entirely. :(  The good news is that C likes her sitter and the 2.5 hours with the sitter thankfully went ok so perhaps we can plan an afternoon date one weekend very soon! 

And the last first was not a positive one - C rolled or slid off our bed last week. :(  She was in the middle of the bed after I had just checked her to give her a toy when I walked 5 feet away to pour laundry detergent in the washing machine.  In the 30 seconds it took to do that she managed to work herself off the bed and hit her head.  I ran back to her, horrified and frightened, and assessed her to see a developing egg on her forehead so I iced it and called my mom for reassurance (I too rolled off a bed at nearly the same age).  Once I was calm and C was calm we called the pediatrician then headed into the office to get her checked out.  She actually smiled at the doctor when we got there and they cleared her but warned she'd get a nasty looking bruise and possibly a black eye - which she did.  Her egg wasn't so bad because I iced it so quickly, but she ended up with a spectacular black eye that made her look like she'd been in a bar fight.  And every time I looked at her I felt like the WORST mama in the world.  But go figure, later that afternoon she ended up rocking on her hands and knees for the first time that I'd seen (maybe that's why she went off the bed?) - so the fall was a good wake up call that we need to watch her more closely and take no chances since she is officially on the cusp of crawling.  She has been obsessed with rocking on her hands and knees as well as doing what looks like real pushups.  She's fairly mobile already mostly by spinning and being able to push herself backwards across the floor, but crawling will introduce a new ability for her to explore wherever her curiosity takes her rather than where she can happen to back up or spin to.  To that end, we hit up Home Depot tonight for a few baby proofing basics but still have a lot to do.  Yikes.

Happiness is in the air

This past weekend we finally had our first cold front of the season and it made me absurdly, deliriously happy.  Saturday we got up early and made it down for the season opener of the Farmer's Market, despite the rain and C took it all in stride while we picked up veggies, seeds, a ginger plant, Ethiopian food, and kettle corn.  We made it home in time for lunch with her Grandpa then we all went for a walk to the park to enjoy the swings, by which time she was pooped after some swinging.  So we walked for a bit enjoying the sun hoping she'd nap, but she fought it pretty hard and we all took turns carrying her until we made it home and Wade could pack her up in the air conditioning to finally get her down for a nap.

 

(C's first time on the swings, to illustrate how funny she looks in the huge swings)

 

That evening the "cold" front finally blew through and we were able to open the windows which made me so happy I nearly cried.  I nursed C in the rocker by the window while the breeze floated in carrying snatches of bird song and rustling bamboo and it was magical.  I haven't felt that joyful in months and felt like I had taken something for the high - it was amazing.

The next day Granzie and Poppi finally came to visit after returning from NC and we had a fun day catching up and getting things done around the house.  We enjoyed more glorious weather, had lunch outside, put up Halloween decorations (they were a hit with C), got some yard work done, and enjoyed a soup from the slow cooker.  It was so wonderful to have a taste of fall and know it's right around the corner.  We capped off the lovely weekend by C actually going down in her crib for her first shift of sleep - a first!  We made chocolate chips cookies to celebrate. :)