Katsuke

Someone gave us one of these and Alia finds it fascinating. Lights and music, but only when she spun it so it encourages movement. We can even take the ball off the stand and let her crawl after it. Yes, she can CRAWL! It’s so exciting to see her crawl and not back wiggle.
The weird thing about the toy was that it would only play two songs except for odd times when a snatch of a nursery tune, but never the same songs. We tried to figure it out over and over; what caused those odd songs?
Finally after weeks we figured it out, the letters are buttons! Each of the 26 letters plays a different tune bite, normally starting with the letter in question. “L” for London Bridge, “A” for Frere Jacque or Are You Sleeping, etc.
It’s both nice to know that the ball isn’t broken, and also that it can play something other than just two songs.

• ‘You’re licking my computer in the USB port!’ - Nathan to Alia #

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I realized that while I may apprise people of what Alia is up to, I really haven’t been letting people know what she is doing.
Her baby milestone calander has one very common pattern, nothing for a couple weeks and all of a sudden -boom- two or three or four new things all at once.
This last 11 days I have 7 new stickers and notes (a personal record for her, and I have to remind myself that’s probably why she’s not sleeping as well anymore).
Here are her notables:
Alia sat herself up today, I don’t think she realized what she did because she hasn’t repeated it. She can also pull herself to a stand on pretty much anything graspable. Both of these together are going to be havoc in the making.
She said “mama” although it seems to refer to both Nathan and me.
She’s started feeding herself finger food (which is a whole other story).
She stood alone for 20 second, she will also not repeat this.
And last but not least Alia has learned how to take 2-4 steps all by herself, this is followed by falling and she doesn’t like to walk alone. She always grabs our hands and takes off.

A note on things she won’t repeat. It took her a month to being able to sitting up all by herself to actually doing it without being tricked into thinking we were helping her. So I’m guessing somewhere from a month or two and those things will be done on her own.

I keep hearing about sensitive baby skin and the importance of hats, sunscreen, etc. I know it’s true, but I also make sure that my little lady gets her vitamin D as well.
Yesterday we went to the pool, and since I wasn’t planning on staying long, Alia was looking a little sleepy, I thought I wouldn’t sunscreen either of us and just leave before sunburn set in. I watched that baby like a hawk and we stayed for a whole 45 minutes in which Alia piled on more beautiful tan. The only problem was that later in the evening I found my shoulders red and painful. Okay, so one fluke. I burned and she didn’t, but today we’d both we wearing sunscreen (and a t-shirt for me) so it’d be perfectly fine for the both of us.
In the 30 minutes of sunscreened sun today, Alia was fine and I burned my nose. It’s safe to say that while she may look a lot like me, that baby does not have my skin but the awesome tannable complexion of her daddy. I’m jealous.

• I did 160 sit-ups today. That sounds impressive until you learn that it wasn’t all at once. Breaks in exercise make a BIG difference. #

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• Alia is enjoying standing on one foot, it’s so new and different! #

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• Alia has been taste testing the picture book spines as she pulls them off the shelf one by one. #

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At first when I started getting baby food for Alia I thought that it was a little odd to hear over and over about gross baby food. Yeah, it looks like mush, but it is. Sure those green beans don’t smell like adult beans, but if you like canned beans it doesn’t seem too different.

I found I was basing this off the first set “stage 1″ foods. I started looking at the “stage 2″ foods today and realized where all this gross happened to be.

There’s the normal green beans and mixed veggies, even some stuff like the peaches and rice cereal (which is what I do sometimes anyway without buying it mixed). Then I found the horrifying food. No one in their right minds would eat these things together, and we somehow don’t like it that babies don’t want to eat it.

Ham and peaches!

Turkey and APPLES!

Who thought this was a good idea? Really? Can’t they be separate? I couldn’t find just baby meat by itself; some of them were with vegetables which is better, but still weird.

And here I mashed up some of my navy beans, watered down a little juice, and gave Alia a very nice, healthy, real meal. By the way, she only liked the juice. I haven’t been feeding her many fruit stuff so as to not foster a sweet tooth, but I think it’s just built in.

• I used to think my mom was silly for telling me to look something up in the dictionary if I needed to know how to spell it, but I do it now. #

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