A Good Day

Some mornings, Anna wakes up and it's as though she has done weeks' worth of developing during her sleep. This morning, she got up early with her Dad while I slept peacefully through the news I had stayed in bed as a pretext for listening to. I missed some of the action, but I can still attest that she ran the full repertoire of her tricks -- rolling over this way and that, holding her bottle by herself, laughing and giggling and babbling, trying to chase the cat, kicking and grabbing her toys, drinking water out of a glass, trying to pet the cat, drooling on anything inanimate enough to get into her clutches, testing her gag reflex with her fingers and thumb (still works!), throwing and then reaching for her jangly soft blocks, trying to lick the cat.

She was so happy and so pleased with herself -- not frustrated that she couldn't do more, just excited by what she was accomplishing. What a sweet little butter bean.

In fact, she only managed to do one thing to break down her mother's resolve: she looked beautiful and glowing in her little suitie. Now, I've been resisting very strongly the enforced Wearing of Pink for Girls. I try to put her in other colours when we go out in public. But I'm more resistant to buying new clothes than I am to avoiding pink, so the pink hand-me-downs come out fairly regularly, for all. And, to the great amusement of anyone who knows my convictions, Anna looks fantastic in pink. All shades of pink. All patterns of pink. She just sits there, looking stunning. In pink. Of all colours.

The Further Adventures of . . .

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.

Stuff and Nonsense

Last week, Anna did manage, finally, to roll over. She rolled over twice from her belly to her back (Thursday, I think) and soon was able to do it proficiently enough to be captured by camera. She rolled over once from her back to her belly, but I missed this. I was peeling five pounds of potatoes for the family brunch in her honour and only heard the shriek of surprise when she found herself stranded on her tummy. I took a picture of her on her belly in the middle of the kitchen floor. Anticlimactic, but still worthy of applause.

Anna still can't call up the ability to roll over at will -- she's still catching on to the theory of momentum and finds rolling easier when she's on her blanket on a folded yoga mat. She works her way to the edge, and hey presto she's upside down or upside right in no time.

Last night, Stephen and I decided to stay up late for the first time in yonks, and Anna decided to wake twice through the night for the first time, like, ever. Today, we were all tired. While Anna took a long nap, I read her Tarot cards, where there were few surprises. The cards said she's daddy's girl but is more insecure about her mother's affections. She's very independent and intuitive and influenced by her environment. She is frustrated at the delays in reaching her goals at present. In her future, she feel pulled between romantic attraction to the raffish and the rational, but she will seek harmony in love above all and will love the world she discovers through her senses. Of course, the final card basically said, much will be revealed later, I'm only a baby.

Hmm. My hope in writing this post was to seem less flaky as a mom than the earth welcoming might have portrayed me to be. Perhaps revealing that I read my baby's Tarot cards while she's napping is the wrong strategy?

Anna's music pick for this week is the zunior.com Our Power Solar Compilation, featuring a great acoustic track by those In-Flight Safeties and a new favourite by Great Aunt Ida. Guaranteed to put baby to sleep in eight tracks or less, and all for a good cause.

Of course, we're beginning to wonder about Anna's musical taste, considering that when she's fussy, the only thing that settles her is her parents' singing Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" as a duet, with vocalizations of the guitar riffs. [*shudder*]

Motor developments

While much of Anna Sophia's development and self-discovery is joyful both for her and for us, Stephen and I have been surprised at her palpable frustration when she can't do something she desperately wants to do. We've known since she was born that she would prefer to be a grown-up and wanted little to do with this whole baby business, but she can express her desires in so many new ways, now.

This week, Anna discovered the top of her head, first with her right hand, then with her left. This has allowed her to do a lot of ear-flapping and hair-rubbing with her hands. Even more excitingly, it has meant she has added one more motion to the set of motions she needs to turn herself over from belly to back or from back to belly. When she's on her back, she throws her arm into the air, presses her foot into the floor, and arches her back, and with one side of her body thus launched straight up into the air, she balances, in a poised state of frustration. She hasn't figured out yet how to thrust her topmost hip forward to give her the momentum to roll. Seeing her struggle to figure this out is fascinating and more hilarious for her parents than it is for her.

On her belly, she makes a special yelp which starts out kind of excited and playful but quickly gets more frustrated as she struggles to turn over. Actually, on her belly, she has trouble deciding between attempts to roll over onto her back (where she seems to know she will get stuck -- see above) or to move forward. She pulls one knee up under her and starts to press to roll -- then she yanks up the other knee and tilts herself facefirst onto her chin.

Anna spends more time on the floor on blankets now, since she can't be left in her carseat. She used to like to sit and watch the goings on. Now, no sooner is she set in the chair than she leverages her strong, long feet against the seat, arches her back into the air, then makes her body rigid. When -- if -- she allows herself to bend in the middle again, she slumps into the bottom of the chair with her feet hanging over the end. Not safe, not comfortable, just disconcerting.

Since I am ever helpful, I describe Anna's new movements to her using their Sanskrit names from yoga and explaining their yogic benefits. "Yay, Anna! You're practically throwing yourself from the changing table to the floor by doing setu bandha sarvangasana, the bridge posture. Aren't you strong!" It's going to take a lot of yoga superstrength and centring to catch this baby when she starts to move. When people ask if yoga helped prepare for childbirth, I can now tell them that's not the half of it.