Eight months!

This week Maren turned eight months old. I can't believe how quickly time is going by. In three months, I will be headed back to work. Here is a snapshot of Maren at eight months:

She has really started to get into eating food. She eats everything we give her, though not every time we give it to her. One of her favorites is yogurt, but she is very ambivalent about spoons, so this sometimes makes for very messy times :-) She is sitting up and rolling around and sort of climbing all over, but hasn't started crawling yet, so we are still able to be fairly confident that she will stay more or less within certain boundaries. We have a baby gate installed at the top of the stairs, and are ready to baby proof things when necessary, but so far we haven't had to.

She is busy busy busy all the time, and loves to jump with a little help. When she isn't jumping, she is often babbling, screeching, or shaking a little shaker that is currently her favorite toy. In general, she is full of energy and full of joy.

Here is a video taken the other day in the morning not too long after we got up. What you don't see is Jeff dancing around in his pajamas, so you will have to imagine it:

Much to say, little time

It seems that as Maren gets older, I am less able to find time to do things like blog. She is busy busy busy, always doing something. Also, she has started to stay up a bit later, but this has only translated into a slight change in her wake up time. She is going to bed more like 8 PM, and waking up around 5:30 AM or so. This means that I have less time in the evening to do things, but I am waking up at the same time (because Jeff is still getting up with her early in the morning and I am sleeping in for another hour or so).

I have been almost exclusively talking about Maren on this blog, but there have been a few other things going on in our lives :-) We took a trip to Oregon last week, and saw many wonderful friends, and spend time with family. I will post some pictures from our trip when I get a chance.

But the big news here all relates to security and permanence: both Jeff and I have been awarded tenure (meaning that our positions are truly permanent, unless we really mess up), and have been promoted to the rank of associate professor. It is early in our careers to get tenure and promotion, and it feels like we have really "made it."

The second piece of news is that when I re-entered Canada after our trip to Oregon, I "landed" as a permanent resident. It took what felt like an eternity to get this status, and then the actual process was fairly anti-climactic – it involved having an immigration officer ask me whether I had ever been arrested and whether I had any additional dependents that I had not declared, and both of us signing a piece of paper. That was it, and suddenly I was entering Canada with a new status. So at some point soon, Jeff and I will have to have a big party to celebrate!

Happy Mother's Day!

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.