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 :-)

Six months

Yesterday Maren turned six months old. 

Time is flying! It is hard to believe that she is an "older" baby now, not a tiny newborn. At the moms group that I go to there have been some really little babies that have come, and Maren seems like a giant. I remember when she was so little, and I went to these groups and could not believe the size of three-month-old babies, let alone six-month-olds. I am so glad that we have the photos and videos that we have, because it would be so hard to remember how much change has happened over six months. She is still so little!

This past month has been very exciting, in that she is learning to do lots of things. She reaches and grabs like a pro, and is gaining a lot of strength and body control. She can sit up for longer and longer periods of time on her own, though we still have to keep our hands/arms very close, as she falls eventually. She is making some significant progress towards crawling, though she can still only move herself backwards. This backward motion is completely unintentional, and sometimes quite frustrating for her. But it is lots of fun watching her try to figure all this out. She is also babbling, and trying out lots of different sounds, including some that are very high pitched. She is particularly interested in "p" and "b" sounds these days.

The most exciting thing in the past couple of days is that we have introduced some solid food. We started out with baby oat cereal, and the first time she had it she was very unsure. But now today, the third day, she is starting to really get into it. She still isn't sure exactly what to do when the food goes into her mouth, but she is working at it and learning fast!

Yesterday we gave her some banana. At first we tried to let her pick it up herself, but it was too slippery and quite difficult, so Jeff helped her out. This video is kind of long (about a minute and fifteen seconds), but in my opinion is worth watching :-)

Today for Easter we decided to try out carrots. We tried them two ways: first, I looked up how to make mushy carrot sticks so that she could grab them and eat them herself, and we also tried a carrot purée. She tried both, but had somewhat of a hard time with the carrot sticks and didn't eat much. She really enjoyed the purée, but her high chair tray appears to be permanently stained orange already, and I imagine her clothes/bib are also. Solid food is messy, but awfully fun :-)