Better?

Dear family members!

I have turned into that typical mom constantly saying, “You’re getting so big!” just about every other day. I thought that people might be interested in at least some sort of update, but that may be my own personal absorption with Shanna talking. 🙂 She loves to babble, which makes a lot of sense coming from Noah and I. She can have long conversations where she is extremely intent and it makes her much happier if people respond back. She sits up by herself although she can’t get to the position alone yet. If I set her on the floor with a few toys she can play alone happily for 30-45 minutes while I do chores; granted, I generally only get one of those long play sessions a day, but it’s still really cool! She is a very happy baby. When she gets grumpy it is very directly to something being off-kilter like hunger or tiredness. Even her diaper-change fussiness is distinctly less than it used to be. Noah and I have a running joke that she wants the neighbors to know that we are ritually disemboweling her during diaper changes. I think it is the sort of joke where either you laugh or you cry.

She does better push ups than I can but so far she isn’t all that interested in crawling. It’s fairly remarkable how much she dislikes “tummy time”. Sitting is better than laying down and standing is better than sitting. She stands up with a little bit of balancing help and will take multiple steps on her own. When she is in the mood to walk she needs very minimal assistance to walk down the hallway. By minimal assistance I mean that she holds on to my fingers for balance–she doesn’t need anymore help than that. Given that she rolled and sat up fairly early I think she is going to be an early walker. I’ve been told to knock her down (gently of course) and try to make her crawl first but I’m not sure she’s going to be ok with that. I go to Gymboree classes (they are classes designed to stimulate the baby–I think they are a little silly but they let me meet other moms) and it is remarkable how far ahead of the curve her development is. We started going to the 0-6 month class when she was 3 months and she was not real patient with the curriculum because it required laying down the whole time. Recently we moved to the 6-10 month class and she is among the more advanced babies in the room at 5 months old. I would take more pride in this if it had anything to do with me; instead I marvel at my awesome baby.

She is growing like a weed. She is in the 90-something percentile for her age. She is in 9-12 month clothing already and I’m willing to bet that by Christmas she will be encroaching on 12-18 if she isn’t in it already. This means that she is already wearing the cute bug clothing that Noah’s aunt sent us. I need to upload pictures. I haven’t been doing so lately because I’ve been swamped with studying for my comprehensive examination. I’m already doing my best to stock up on 12-18 month clothing and I’m buying 18-24 at the same time. Eventually she is going to slow down and stay in a size for a while but I’m not sure when that will happen. I’m having a lot of trouble finding the sort of jammies we like the best in the next two sizes, which is really annoying. We like one pieces with snap crotches for ease of diaper changing. If anyone has any idea where to find those I would appreciate the pointer. I also managed, somehow–I’m not sure how, to end up with something like 10 pairs of jeans in the next size up. I don’t know exactly how that happened. That seems a bit excessive. I’ve been blessed to be on the receiving end of a lot hand-me-downs from friends, which I love because I’m a big time crunchy Californian and I’m trying really hard to reuse stuff instead of contributing to the landfill. It’s also pretty handy that most of the friends I am receiving clothes from also dress their kids in pretty gender-neutral clothing because it seems like quite the trend to not begin installing gender demands in little babies. She has a couple of girly items, but by and large I’m trying to not push her towards being really girly. If she’s like me she will assert her own opinion in another year or so and demand to only wear dresses, I’ll adapt to that when it happens.

A few friends were talking about how they have all of the books they own listed online and that struck my interest. I haven’t done that for Noah’s or my books yet, but I did it for Shanna’s books: http://www.goodreads.com/profile/ShannaBoBanna because I think it is neat to share what she is reading. She really loves her board books and we have learned that she strongly leans in the direction of highly rhythmic quick paced books. Her favorite is Hands, Hands, Fingers, Thumb followed closely by Dr. Seuss books. She doesn’t really have the attention span for longer books during the day yet but I don’t think it will take long. That profile also includes all of the childrens/young adult fiction Noah and I have collected over the years as Noah reads from more grown-up books at bedtime. When Noah reads to us at night she likes to stare up at him in rapt fascination. It makes me really happy to watch.

In the process of researching education stuff for kids I came across Waldorf schools (no, we don’t plan to put her in Waldorf schools) and I saw that they believe in never letting kids have plastic toys. It made me start to think about what sorts of toys are going to be good for her. I’ve been looking into wooden toys and they are neat! I don’t think I am going to be 100% focused on wood only, but the fact that the wooden toys are more likely to stand up to hard usage and go through multiple children well really makes me happy. Along with the clothes, we’ve been getting a lot of hand-me-down toys and I am utterly thrilled. It fits right in with my uber-crunchiness. I think we have enough rattles to keep a daycare center full of babies happy at this point. It’s great. As people are giving us more stuff it is making me notice just how small our house is though. I’m having to exert a lot of self-control towards not acquiring toys because we just don’t have a lot of room. Reality doesn’t make me happy sometimes, especially when the reality is that we just can’t have many toys for her.

I think that is pretty much all the news from Shanna’s world. I promise I will upload a bunch of pictures soon and send that link along. I’m kind of lame in that uploading pictures takes me a while because it is a fairly new process for me. My comprehensive exam is next Saturday so I will have more time after that.