She turns 5 months old in 16 hours so I’m a tiny bit early. 🙂

She is now 26.5″ tall and 18.5 lbs. She is barely still in 9 month clothes except for jammies, which have already moved up to 12 months.

Other general updates: sitting up for pretty much as long as she wants to. She can correct from 45 degrees of lean backwards to sitting and she can push herself up from bent in half forward. She can roll in both directions but she rarely bothers. She does push ups about as well as I do. 🙂 She loves to chit chat and has long conversations. She has gotten really grabby. My glasses are no longer safe. She loves to play with books and seems to recognize that Mommy is into books as well. She can now eat with greater purpose and get it over with quicker (thank Gawd). She eats a little bit of avocado but isn’t that interested. She goes ~ 10 hours without a diaper change most nights and gets up and goes on the potty. Most nights she wakes up twice and relatches on my boob, but we both pretty much sleep through these feedings. During growth spurts she will nurse every hour on the hour; those nights are hard. She hates having a dirty diaper and hates having her diaper changed. We need to start trying harder on EC cause she just loathes the whole “diaper” thing. She likes to sit and play with a couple of rattles and books for long periods. Oh! And by far her favorite toy is the ducky that masterfiddler gave us. He lives in the car and she loves her ducky. It’s very cute.

Generally speaking she is an extremely happy and cheerful baby. She loves to be around people and she loves to flirt. She likes playing in the water. If you haven’t met her yet, you should. She’s neat. 🙂 And if you see us out and about and you would like to hold her but feel shy about asking… go ahead and ask. My physical boundaries don’t seem to extend to her. She loves being passed around so I do it.

So if I sit her on a chair (with back support) she can keep sitting for a while. When she falls to the side or forward she can push herself back into the sitting position. Very cool.

Yesterday she had a couple of opportunities to see other babies/kids and she watched them with great fascination. They were sitting and crawling and walking. Today she sits. She was also a little more interested than normal in taking steps when I pulled her to standing. I wonder if she feels inspiration or competition when she sees other kids.

I was amused because many of the babies/kids who were much older than her were basically the same size or smaller. That’s mommy’s little tank. 🙂

After being mocked last night by no fewer than three people I caved in. See, I have this uhm thing. I like for Shanna to actually get too big for her clothes before I move up a size. But then she doesn’t look terribly comfortable and she squirms in ways that look like she is demonstrating how uncomfortable she is. I ended up putting jammies on her that were the next size up because that was all I had with me and Noah got validated in his belief that she should be in that size now.

Fine. *sigh*

She’s 16 lbs and 25″ long. But the cloth diapers seem to be pushing her firmly into 6-9 (or 6-12 depending on brand) already. I WANTED TO HAVE A LITTLE BABY LONGER!!!!!!