scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

26.8.08

forty-seven weeks

This has been a big one: you learned how spoons work, how they can get yogurt from the baby yogurt cup into your mouth, if you hold the spoon by the handle and dip it in the baby yogurt cup and then there is yogurt on it, and then the yogurt can go into your mouth on the spoon and then you are eating yogurt! This is fantastic! But you don't quite get when the yogurt cup is empty and there is no more yogurt in it: because this is where yogurt comes from. There must always be more yogurt. Mommy will attempt to make sure of this. I am pretty sure you learned how spoons work from baby P at the baby group, who is maybe two and a half months older than you and can feed himself, and you always learn something at the baby group and this time you got lucky. Little learning machine.

Also phenom: you learned to wave at people (and at dogs, and birds, and trees, and the sky, and at billboards) and then they smile and wave back at you and you are getting so much more love on the subway now. The baby group, too, the other moms were very impressed - you're still the second youngest and here you are being all grown up. It is "just" imitating but it is also the precursor to conversation, right? Or something. I did not realize that it was possible to get more love than you were already getting but here it is: and it's like being a minor celebrity. Everyone smiles. Not just the mommy types who always did, not just the wistful grandmothers, but bankers in suits, teenagers with green hair and bridge piercings, little old men in worn sweaters, reserved women in hijab, men in shiny orange construction uniforms, kids, other babies, everyone.

And and and (it's been a big week) you learned how to splash in the bathtub. I think the French bath toys helped as you first noticed that they splashed when you threw them, and that was kind of fun, and then you dropped one, and it made a splash, and then you made a giant mess and got Mommy all splashed on and i think you got a pretty large volume of water out of the bathtub and it was really funny and then you were so, so tired afterwards, because making a ruckus like that is exhausting, and so then also you slept last night better than you had been in a while, you'd been doing that thing again where you wake up at two AM and want to play and just. aren't. sleepy, and so when you had a big dinner (pasta and yogurt and pretzels and baby-spaghetti and half a banana and then milk) and then you got so thoroughly tired and then, finally, then, then you slept and slept and slept. It gets old fast when you want to play at two AM. And since you sleep so well most of the time, Mommy and Daddy get used to having enough sleep, and then when we don't it's reallly debilitating.

Note that the not sleeping started the day you went to Burgenland and i don't think you enjoyed the car ride, but where were you going in at the Neusiedlersee? Basically Disneyland. You so have the best tagesmutter ever. And then your nap schedule was shot to hell from all the excitement and it just takes a long, long time to normalize, but you really liked it, so there's that.

And we went to the zoo again and you liked the colorful birds, the peacocks, the cranes, those funny decorated penguins. The peacock especially was grooming himself so he was up and doing stuff and poking his little birdy head around and putting on a show. Too many of the animals are very small (like all the rabbits and prairie dogs near the playground) or brownish gray (like the elephants and the rhinoceros) or slow-moving (like the lion and the giraffes and the zebra) and therefore boring. But the petting zoo was fun: goats! Friendly, soft, pretty, high-contrast, nearby, and active goats, that nuzzle you and are soft and pettable! And you didn't want to sleep at the zoo either, but we made it happen somehow anyway. I would say that we're getting better at this game but that would only jinx it.

Labels: baby, milestones

scrawled @ 13:15