Eat, Play, Sleep

It's been awhile since I have recorded Amelia's current habits and such and I thought eat, play and sleep would be good organizing topics.

Let's start with the most fun, play:

as you might have noticed from the recent videos, Amelia is a very fun girl. She started crawling at about 9 and a half months and has been on the move ever since. She quickly progressed to pulling up to stand on couches, chairs, benches, and anything else she can reach, including, this week, the bottom of the refrigerator. She likes to take the magnets off of it. She can now stand on both legs without holding onto anything with her hands for several seconds at a time, and has even started to "cruise," or move short distances between items she can hold on to.

Also around the end of 9 months, Amelia discovered books. We were reading this book I got from the library called "Baby Loves Peekaboo." It has flaps that open to reveal hidden cats, bears, toys and babies. The pictures are photographs, not drawings, and A loves to look at "real" babies. So we were reading and all of a sudden she seemed to notice that the could open the flap and see the babies. She was delighted. After that we introduced story time into the bedtime routine--more on that below.

Some of A's other favorite activities are rolling around on a stack of three comforters and pillows on the living room floor, turning the pages of various board books, taking all of the credit and other cards out of my wallet, tackling and biting large stuffed animals, and standing at her toy box, removing toys one at a time. Oh, and throwing things! She loves to throw and roll balls, but also enjoys throwing other toys--and sometimes, while she is eating, she throws spoons, forks, and small pieces of food. We take it as a sign that she is no longer hungry.

Speaking of eating:

Just this week, I FINALLY got Amelia to eat babyfood. As we recall, she has loved solids for some time, and by that I mean actual solids: only food she can pick up herself. She loves cheese, rice, beans, Cheerios, toast, bread, tortillas, tofu, black bean burgers, little bits of spinach, these odd chalky puffs of freeze dried yogurt they now make for babies, and any type of meat she has tried. But she generally avoids being spoon fed with all of her will and might. It may seem easy to put a spoon into a baby's mouth but unless the baby wants the spoon there, it is not. She has a few exceptions to spoonfeeding, such as peaches, instant oatmeal, and ice cream (which she has only had 2 or 3 times), but none of that helps me get more vegetables into her little body--it's hard for her to eat vegetables because generally if they are soft enough for her to chew, they are also too wet and slippery for her to keep hold of. She can pick up peas, but does so only so that she can throw them on the floor. So I have been trying various ways to sneak in the veggies: spreading a thin layer of pureed green beans onto bread, attempting to pass off sauteed yellow pepper as peaches, etc. None of this has really worked. Then I saw this new kind of babyfood that comes in little plastic pouches, like Capri Sun. It's fancy sparkly organic babyfood supposedly made by "real chefs." It has a little tube at the end and while the idea seems to be that you can squeeze as much as you need into a bowl, I thought why couldn't you just squeeze it directly into the baby's mouth.

It turns out this stuff is delicious. (I take Caroline's advice of long ago to always taste whatever you put into your baby"s mouth.) I mean it is really delicious. The roasted sweet potatoes taste like Thanksgiving dinner. If for some reason you ever have to be off solid foods (wisdom teeth removal?), stock up on this stuff. So I have been feeding it to Amelia while she plays. I can't get as much in her while she is officially eating and sitting at her high chair because she starts to want to hold the tube and do it herself and then half of the babyfood, which costs 1 million dollars per ounce, ends up on her face, her clothes, my clothes, and the floor. But while she is playing I can sneak the tube up to her mouth and she will take a sip, realize it is delicious, then take some more. The go back to playing, and repeat.

I have had the most success with the flavors that mix fruits and veggies, like this afternoon's "blueberry pear purple carrot." But I have high hopes for "spinach pear peas" and "pumpkin corn apple."

So that is eating. She is now officially breastfeeding a number of times a day that I can count, which is 7: when she wakes in the morning, again awhile after she wakes up, before her morning nap, about half an hour after her nap, before her afternoon nap, early evening, and bedtime. Then once more at about 4 am.

I guess that sounds like a lot. Actually some books say that a baby will nurse 6-8 times a day by 3 months or something like that. At some point, maybe 5 months, I realized that Amelia was nursing way more than what most books described as common, and I called the DC Breastfeeding Center about it. The LC told me that just like some adults, some babies were grazers. "Sometimes you want a whole meal," she said, "but sometimes you just want a bagel. Sometimes you just want a cup of coffee." Amelia has cut out most of her coffee breaks. When she does nurse now, it's only for about 5 minutes.

Ironically, just when I was ready to move on to sleep, Amelia is waking up from her nap. And I am sure you are all at the edge of your seats about Amelia's sleep! I usually am. So, to be continued...