Anna Sophia is growing and changing faster than we're able to keep track. She continues to be a bright and active baby who only cries when she knows she's starting to fall asleep and might have to miss something. As she goes through life, she will discover . . . that she's not missing much. Her parents live boring lives when she is asleep and tend to fall back on DVDs of Corner Gas for entertainment. And let's not even mention American Idol.
As I write, Anna is lying on her back on her play mat with one hand in her mouth and a toy mirror between her feet. She intermittently kicks her toys or grabs them with both hands or dandles them between her feet. She sometimes rolls over onto one side to look at Moon, the cat, to see if she's still asleep.
When the cat wakes up, she walks and jumps around and around the room for the baby's entertainment, but she knows to stay just out of reach. Anna wants to pet the cat more than anything in the world. The few times she has succeeded, she has been gentle, but Moon is wisely wary and is enjoying the time she still has left to be in control of the situation.
Anna is never satisfied to do what she already knows she can do and is always keen to do the next thing. She doesn't bother to roll all the way over, except when comfort requires it -- she's too busy trying to sit up. And if she's propped up in a sitting position, she's launching herself forward over her feet into a crawling position. As always, what she loves best is to stand up and hold her own weight. She still can't do much from a standing position, but nowadays, rather than just standing rigid, she experiments with bending her knees and leaning forward as far as she can. Leaning forward is a big theme in any position. When we sit at the piano, she tries to play it with her head. So much for those long, elegant fingers.
This week, Anna is eating everything in sight, whether it is food or not. Everything goes into her drooly mouth. And everything gets chewed. She doesn't suck her thumb, she gnaws on it. The soothie is rarely used for sucking -- just for chewing. She can pull it out of her mouth and put it back in, now, but she usually likes to put it in sideways or backwards, the better for mashing between her gums. On Friday, she discovered that it was particularly fun to put her soothie in her mouth and pull her bottom lip over the bottom edge of it and then chew. She has done this several times since.
Anna is fascinated when her parents drink from a cup or eat real food. She makes a grab for cups, especially, and has great success with glasses of cold water. She likes to steady the glass in her little hands and gum the edge to sip as much water as she can get. I've decided that it isn't too horribly unhygienic to share my glasses of water with her in this way, considering everything else she chews on. I've tasted her fingers, for the sake of science, and they don't taste like distilled water in a clean glass. They taste of floor.
Funnily enough, while she was sucking back a glass of water at lunch today, I decided to see if she wanted to drink a little bit of her formula from her glass. Nothing doing. She pushed it away (and spilled the whole sipful in the cup all over her sleeper, something she never does with the water). Her look clearly told me that glasses are for grown-up drinks, not baby drinks. Bottles are for baby drinks. I had made a categorical error. Luckily, she knows I'm still in training, so I got off with a reprimand and an order to launder her wet sleeper.
