November News

Amelia is walking!

She took some of her very first steps at her Nanny's house in late October. From there it was a gradual progression. She would "cruise" between chairs and such. But one morning Dean and I sat about 3 or 4 feet apart and played "walking", having her walk back and forth between the two of us. She did it several times, and from there just started walking more and more on her own. If she wants to get somewhere really quickly, she will drop to her knees and crawl, but otherwise she is venturing out on two legs pretty often.

These are from last week, one of her walking to me,




and then back to Dean.




Amelia is changing by the day. She is more and more aware and interactive. She has started initiating games like peekaboo: she'll put a cloth over her head and then uncover herself, grinning, or hide behind the couch and peek back out at us. She points at EVERYTHING, wanting us to name objects--and wanting to hold them, which can be problematic, because it turns out there are a lot of objects around our house that a baby should not hold. She has started really playing with a few toys, too. In addition to rolling a ball, which she has done for awhile, she will move her toy car and dump truck on the floor making a rmmm, rmmm noise, and just the other day I showed her how to hug and rock her baby doll. She gently hugged the doll--threw her headfirst onto the floor.

Sleep-wise, night sleep is holding steady at one wake-up a night, more or less. We are struggling with naps. This one nap or two thing is really difficult. Usually, no matter what I try or when I put her down, Amelia ends up sleeping for about an hour. If that hour is in the morning, she wakes up happy; if it's in the afternoon, she wakes up screaming. I think an hour is not really enough for her, because of the difficult wake up in the afternoon, and the fact that if she naps in the morning she is a complete mess by about 5 pm. But I really don't know what to do about it. So we are trying to go with the flow.

Speaking of which--I thought I was going to have a long, long time to catch up here, but SOMEONE is babbling in her crib. ("Ball, ball!") So more ASAP.