The Six-Month Mark

El is 6 months old.

I know everyone says this, but it seems to have happened in minutes. The older you get, the faster time goes by. I'm already forgetting what she looked like, sounded like, and felt like when she was days old - I need my pictures and video to remind me. Reference points help, too, like looking at her on her changing table. When she was tiny, she looked like a little mouse lying there. If her head was close to the top, her feet only made it about halfway down - of course, she was always curled up in a little ball, too. And she would stay where you put her. Now, she fills the thing out, and the moment you put her down on it, she splays out her legs and flips onto her belly, reaching for whatever she can hook a finger around.

It amazes me how babies are in constant motion. I read recently, or somebody told me, about a man who tried moving like a baby for a whole day or something. Meaning constant, vigorous motion, like lying on your back on a bed, raising both legs all the way up and pounding them down onto the mattress as hard as you can. Repeat a hundred times. I think the guy broke a couple of small bones, maybe slipped a disk. No wonder babies need to nap all the time.

She's so happy. GW and I like to brag to each other that for all our faults and failings as human beings, the two of us make some really cute babies.

So let's catalog El's accomplishments. At the point I'm writing this, she's 6 months, 11 days. She's going through this period of intense change, and her sleep and mood reflect it. Lots of waking up, lots of resisting sleep. At the same time, she's learning to fall asleep without nursing and has very little problem with it. That's mostly at nap time. Still two naps a day, one long one starting 2-3 hours after she wakes up in the morning, and a shorter one in the late afternoon. Sometimes her mood is a little strange these days....kinda full-moon manic. It's because she's soooooooo high on herself, as she should be. She's learning to sit up, drink from a bottle, and crawl - she can now do the soldier crawl to retrieve something she wants, and of course she can roll from one end of a room to the other faster than you can say, "Where the hell's the baby?" She's tasting food - pureed carrots, smushed tofu, watermelon, apple. She's now using her thumb and first two fingers in a pincer grip, instead of just the whole-hand grasping thing babies reflexively do. That one is the most significant, because it means she can pick up tiny objects now and get them in her mouth, which is dangerous, of course. Plus it's happening about a month earlier than I expected, so I'm having to mend my crappy-housekeeping ways a little earlier than I'd planned.

Those are the major milestones. There are other things flying under the radar, like emerging separation anxiety. I'm delighted with everything. She's the last baby I'll ever have. I was, and am, equally obsessed with the minutiae of Av's behavior, but that's because she's my first. So I've got a really good excuse for both. If/when they have babies of their own, perhaps they won't think their mom a total dork for writing all this down.