Outdoor fun

It is finally spring/summer in Saskatchewan. The weather has been warm and sunny, and it is projected that we will have more of the same - even getting hot - in the week to come. We have been doing lots of outdoor activity. This is partly just related to the weather, and partly related to a new sleep strategy we are trying.

It has been difficult (especially for Jeff) having Maren go to bed so early and get up so early. Jeff has been getting up with her at 4:30 or 5:00 am everyday. So we are trying to keep her up a bit later in hopes that she will start sleeping a bit later. Instead of letting her determine bedtime, which has lately been around 5:00 pm, we are trying to keep her up until at least 6:00 pm. In order to accomplish this, we are spending time with her outside close to bedtime. She has also started getting really into music, and will "dance" along to anything that has a good beat. So after outside time, we have been having a pre-bedtime dance party every night. It's hard to say whether it is working, but we did have two days in a row where she slept in until 5:40 am, and that was a sign of possible success.  We are going to keep trying, and hopefully there will be some lasting change. Fingers crossed.

One of the outside activities we have been doing is carrier bike rides in the recumbent. I know that all the experts say not to bring a baby on a bike until after age 1, but after thinking about it, as long as I don't go too fast, it's no different than pushing her in a stroller. So while I can't go for long walks in the stroller, I am able to cover that kind of distance by riding with her on my tricycle. We have so far gone to the park and taken a trip to the local library branch. I am looking forward to many more trips in the months to come!

Library, lab, tooth

Maren has been very much into books for the last little while. Recently she has been grabbing on and not letting go, and sometimes she doesn't totally realize where she is waving them:

However, she lately has been eating books more often than we are actually reading books :-)

A couple of weeks ago we started going to a program at the library for kids under two years old. It is a half hour filled with songs, rhymes, stories, scarves, bubbles, and basically just everything that can hold a baby's attention. It is a lot of fun, and it gets us to the local branch of the library once a week, where I have been checking out new books for Maren each time. I love that there are so many programs like this here, and that this is such a baby friendly place to live.

A few days ago we took a trip to Jeff's lab and participated in a study he is running. I did not know the hypothesis, or what he expected to see, so Maren got to be a real research participant. It was the first time that I actually have gotten to see exactly what Jeff does – I hear a lot about it, but it is different seeing it from the participant side. It was lots of fun and Maren was a good little research participant, observant and active. One of the tasks involved dangling different sized balls in front of her, and she grabbed them eagerly, which was just what they hoped she would do.

The other big news around here is that Maren is getting her first tooth! I had thought that I felt something quite a while back, and it turns out that a tooth is breaking through in exactly that spot. It is only about a millimeter high above her gums at this point, but she is already using it as much as she can. We have been using the "baby-led weaning" approach to solid food introduction since about a week after we started solids. It is much less stressful, and basically just involves giving your baby lots of different kinds of food, in all different forms. She is doing quite well with it, and recently used her tooth to "bite" a little piece off of a pear. So far teething has really not been so bad it seems, and we might end up getting off lucky in that respect. I think she has been experiencing some pain, but she is not crying and crying endlessly like some babies do. She was awfully cute as a toothless baby, but I think we are entering a different phase of cute, and I am looking forward to it.

Visit from grandma

This past week was busy, with a visit from my mom. We had a good time, and Maren loved spending time with her grandma. A picture is worth a thousand words, so I will just leave you with these:

Banana...

...is one of Maren's new favorites.

We are having lots of fun with food :-)

Sick

This past week Maren and I both got sick with a cold. Maren seems to have it worse than I do, but we were both feeling pretty under the weather on Friday. We spent most of the day cuddling under blankets and reading books.

It was super adorable – Maren wanted to carry Kermit the frog everywhere we went, and she was hugging and cuddling him, which is the first time we have seen her do anything like this.

We are both feeling better, but Maren still has a stuffy runny nose. She has been wanting to go to bed even earlier than normal (asleep by 5:30 PM today), and when we tried to feed her dinner the past two days at 5 PM, she was just very upset, I assume because she was so tired.

Spoon feeding has kind of gone out the window, as it is now not possible to put a spoon in front of her without her grabbing it. So we are just going with it, letting her grab the spoon and put it in her mouth if she wants, but moving on to more self-feeding. We hadn't really planned for this, so the past week hasn't included a lot of feeding/eating (except for banana, which she seems to like), but hopefully this coming week we will give her lots more opportunities to play with her food :-)