Today, Anna Sophia is four months old -- by the calendar. She's a bit older in lunar months. But we seem to have lost track of weeks, and so lunar months as well. We know for sure that winter has arrived, because it is making it harder to traipse about with stroller and baby. Sometimes, the snow slows us, sometimes the wind that steals baby's breath.
It would be impossible to chronicle all that Anna has learned in her first four months. By the time we register one learning or one change, she's striving for the next.
She now tracks the cat's movements in fascination and adoration and has, a few times, petted her fur quite gently. The cat, in turn, sniffs Anna up close and jumps over her head when she's playing on the floor. Every day, though, there's more reaching, and you can see the wheels turn in Anna's head: "I want to chase that cat." And in Moon's head: "I want to be chased, as long as I can move faster than whatever is chasing me."
This morning, Anna's dad and I took her upstairs for the whole morning, a change of scenery she seemed to enjoy, albeit from the comfort and safety of her playpen (politically correctly renamed as a "play yard"). She looked at her dad's new painting, with approval, and she probably swallowed four months' worth of her peck of dirt. We haven't spent a whole morning together upstairs since Anna was born, and we mostly had to vacuum the wood floors up there, which we also have not done since she was born.
Now that she knows she can turn herself over, she doesn't bother to try very often. Instead, she is putting her energy into trying to sit up. If you lie her down on an upward tilt, on your lap or any other surface, she strains to lift herself upright. And if you set her down sitting up already, she smiles and smiles -- though we set her up sitting in her "play yard" this morning and she stretched forward as far as she could (paschimottanasana in yoga), fell onto her belly, then flipped onto her back. She was ricocheting more than causing the flips through her own effort, but we praised her anyway.
When she's getting changed, Anna now likes to immobilize the parent who is changing her by hanging on to one of our arms with her bare feet and holding on to the other with her hands. She then tries to eat our sleeves.
There is no adjustment of pipes that will turn off her faucet of drool these days. No washer we can install. Her fingers and thumb are constantly in her mouth, and any slackness in her sleepers gets yanked on so she can get as much fabric as possible to suck on. Her cheeks are also starting to redden up. These are all signs of teething. Stephen likes to tell Anna (while she watches, transfixed, as we brush our teeth) that if she had taken better care of her teeth, she'd still have them.
I have a strong suspicion that Anna's teething process will be as long and drawn out as her birth -- a sign here, a sign there for weeks and weeks -- then a big, painful production. I've warned her that she can't reasonably opt to have her baby teeth surgically extracted from her gums.
