A Whole Half Year

Tomorrow, Anna will mark six months on the "outside." She had her six-month check-up with the doctor this morning, and was called by Doctor Kathy "the most independent six-month-old I know." We know, too.

She is growing and thriving on all the measurements: height in the 75th percentile, weight in the 50th, head in the 95th. This percentile business is not particularly meaningful except as an explanation of why her feet reach the bottoms of her sleepers before her belly fills out their width, and why baby hats are laughably tiny on her huge noggin. It has its own atmosphere and satellites. (The atmosphere some days is mostly methane. The satellites, we suspect, are us.)

By all other measures, she's well beyond her age. At least we, her parents, aided and abetted by her adoring grandparents, assess her as extraordinary in every possible way.

She can sit up, unsupported, and play with toys all the live-long day. (Her mother even cavalierly leaves the room for whole minutes at a time and leaves her sitting up.) She figures out how new toys work in minutes. She eats her sweet potatoes and rice cereal and carrots as though she had a full set of teeth (except for the chewing part). She loves books, also to eat. She loves the phone -- to eat, to listen to, to push buttons on, to yank from her parents' hands.
She loves to pull blankets over her head until someone says "Where's Anna gone?" at which point she pulls down the blanket to show a big giggly smile and to hear a happy "Peekaboo." She loves her new sitting-up and looking-outwards point of view in the stroller without the infant car seat attachment. She gazes at the world with a frightening level of knowingness. And sometimes she (almost) catches the cat, who continues to be a careful playmate, strutting in front of the baby but keeping a safe distance.

Anna is still a striver. Desperate to crawl, she pulls herself onto her belly from a sitting position and then shrieks with unhappiness as she flails her arms and feet and scratches the floor with her fingernails, all to no avail in getting her forward. She reaches for whatever is in front of her and rocks on her belly and bends her knees, but she can't coordinate her actions. God help us when she can. Nothing will be safe from her. (Please, no one tell her about the rolling-across-the-floor option, or the bum-scooting option!)

Getting her dressed is a huge ordeal now, because she is so busy and so strong. She pulled a diaper out from under her bum one night and waved it in the air while her sleepy father was trying to change her. The fewer pieces the outfit comes in, the better. Pants and socks make her cry -- if you can get her into them at all. "I'm ready for the rodeo," Stephen laughed one day after wrastling her into something or other. If only her long legs and feet were better accommodated by one-piece suities . . . Grandma Carolyn might have the best idea -- she just yanks off the baby's outer clothing as soon as she gets near her and lets her eat her toes in peace.

Beyond clothes, Anna's "new look" this week is the nose-squinch, the first sign that she might be related to me and my family. Previously, she had two smiles, the close-lipped impish grin and the big toothless open-mouthed show-offy smile. This week, she added a brand-new smile with an open mouth and a squinched-up nose (and a little laugh created by inhaling and exhaling through a slightly stuffy squinched up baby nose). The nose-squinch was, of course, perfected by her aunt Emily when she was a baby. (Emily famously used her nose-squinch "ph-mile" to charm and distract grown-ups so she could put her arm into their whiskey glasses.)

What Anna loves best in the world is to be praised. "Yay" and "Hooray" are her favourite words. Applause is her favourite sound. What a little diva. The praise is obviously spurring her on to great accomplishments -- and, uh-oh maybe that's what swelling her head?!

Happy Anniversary & Bonne Anniversaire

By luck or by design, I've managed to work a few major life milestones in before society-dictated "deadlines."

Friday, Stephen and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. We got married three days before my 30th birthday -- not, as some suggested, because I was desperate to get married before I turned thirty but, instead, because I was desperate not to have to endure a thirtieth birthday party, so we had a wedding instead. It was a great day.

Our first year married was tough, with two miscarriages and the death of Stephen's ancient old hag of a cat, Neruda. The next two years, we celebrated the time we had together as a couple to enjoy each other's company, but we were saddened that no baby was on the way. Last year, we were at the trepidatious end of my last trimester, nervously hopeful of a happy ending.

We got our happy ending in September, and, as I said to Stephen on Friday (as we prepared for an evening out! with dinner! and a movie! and a wonderful sitter, in Auntie Cathy, for Anna to enjoy!), it was our fifth anni-versary but our first Anna-versary. Our beautiful, smart, funny girl.

As a gift, we bought ourselves (or, err, Anna) a ridiculous contraption of a play centre with literal bells and whistles. It takes up the entire of the available floor space in the living room. But when Anna tested the floor model at the store, she shrieked with delight, and we were sold. All our proclamations that we would not be materialistic parents distracting our baby with noisy contraptions melted away as she found first the bells and then the whistles and then sounded them all at once.

Today, on my thirty-fifth birthday, with a five-month-old unadjusted to an early change to Daylight Saving Time and brightly and noisily working the bells and whistles, I realized that I had met the other society-imposed deadline for having babies before you're 35.

Tune in another time, not my birthday, to hear me bristle and rail against arbitrary dates designed to put social pressure on women and to make us feel guilty and/or inadequate, too old or too young. Don't get me started on pregnancies being called "high-risk" the instant a mother turns 35. Just don't. It's my birthday, and I'm putting politics aside to read cookbooks and talk on the phone.

Playing Catch and Playing Catch-Up

I keep checking this blog to see if there's anything new about Anna Sophia, and I am always disappointed there are no new posts until I remember that I'm the person supposed to be posting. I'm sure I'm not the only blogger who secretly hopes that someone else will have uncovered something shocking and thrilling and will have revealed it to the world (or to the audience of six interested family members) in a breezy and engaging literary style while no one else was looking.

At this stage in her growing up, everything Anna's world changes so fast, it is difficult to document - but at the same time, her growth and her learning are so constant and so incremental that they can slip past, day by day, until you one day realize that, gosh golly gee, she's five months old, and she's begun eating rice cereal and sipping from a sippy cup like an expert, and she's "talking" with new sounds every day, and she's growing like a thing that grows in both her length and her weight, and she can sit up without help (but with close supervision!) for a few more seconds every day.

We've had a few days of bright and warming weather and have been able to pop out of the house on unplanned, unscheduled adventures on a whim - tra la la - so today's return to the deep freeze and wind chill and to the ignominy of snowsuits and the indignity of car seats and cold drives in the car was disappointing and tiring for both Anna and her mom.

Restricted as she is to the indoors and her playmat, Anna is making the best of it. She rolls and kicks herself into circles so she can end up somewhere other than where she was put. She sits up and scrutinizes her surroundings. She rolls balls back and forth with her dad, playing "catch" and even kicks at the ball if it comes close to her foot while she's standing up (supported). She knocks over towers of blocks. She makes designs on the bookshelves that her body can't quite carry out - yet. She shrieks with absolute glee when she sees the cat and even has a special vocalization just for her furry friend. She hopes and hopes she will be allowed to pet the kitty, and once a day or so, kitty obliges by allowing a flank to be rubbed with a drool-covered mitt. Once this week, kitty miscalculated and got her tail good and grabbed, but both she and the baby were so surprised that they startled each other into quick extrication.

Man, are we going to be in trouble when this baby can move much farther than the inches she can manage now.

Every day, she is more reachy and more grabby and more stretchy and more strong. She wants to drink coffee, but her father says "she can't until she's two." She loves to wave around, tear up, or eat the flyers from the paper. She uses sweeping motions to clear off any surfaces she can reach (leaving us worried she might be the kind of neat freak that we are decidedly NOT). She initiates her own games of hide and seek and peekaboo by pulling a blanket over her head and then pulling them off with a sly grin and a giggle. She's all personality, our Anna.

But soon she will be all personality and action. God help us all.

Baby Human Tricks

Anna is up to new tricks -- every day, it seems.

Trick 1: While getting a clean bum, lying on her changing table, she rolls onto her side, crosses her legs, arches her back, throws her head back, and reaches over her head to knock the vaseline off the table and onto the floor. Then she giggles at the clatter and looks for other items to toss. She has become a perfect sculptor's model for torsion. In art history, they didn't explain that the development of classical statuary, from straight up and down to contrapostto, followed the patterns of baby human development.

I urge you all to attempt to change a baby who is lying on her side with her legs crossed and her back arched all the way back. Anna's dad, who can paint eyeballs onto angels on the heads of pins, throws his hands up in the air in despair when dealing with our dervish.

I should never have told her that the vaseline is made from "dinosaur trees." It just spurred her on.

Trick 2: While standing around at her grandma's house, supported under the arms by her Aunt Andrea, she loosened up her formerly rigid knees and lifted her right leg like a high-stepping horse on parade. And forward she stepped. She kinda only "stepped" in this way with her right leg, which means she mostly spun in a circle. Practising pivots for basketball, perhaps?

Trick 3: Yesterday, while I was folding the clothes on the bed, I propped Anna against some pillows. From a position leaning back on the pillows at a 45 degree angle, she pushed her elbows back and raised herself to sitting. She toppled over when she got overexcited because of the praise being lavished on her for her strength and ingenuity -- but she went on to repeat her little sit-up six or eight times -- until her father came into the room to see, and then she wouldn't do it again. She was too busy gazing adoringly at her father.

**

Today, we also played with her little toy drum and little toy xylophone, but her movements aren't quite subtle enough for those toys, yet. She can grab the little toy mallet and aim it at the instrument well enough, but she hits it with an almighty, unmusical force, then draws the mallet back and bonks herself on the forehead with it.

Anna still always wants to do the next thing. She's very reachy, grabby, and lean-forwardy this week. In yoga, pushing too far forward suggests a preoccupation with the future, and I guess babies have to be future-oriented to some extent -- but we're all enjoying the moment, moment to moment, too, and we hope she'll enjoy her journeys as much as her destinations.

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.

The Failure of Philosophy and Science in the Face of Baby

Anna Sophia makes a liar out of me. Not that it takes much. Lying is an inherited, endemic family trait -- tho' we usually like to think of it as "storytelling" at best or "embellishment" at worst.

For all my claims that Anna was not eating well last week, she is growing normally, healthily, beautifully. What she wasn't doing well last week was making a transition. This has happened before -- the week before making a big jump in her eating or sleeping or any other big change to her regular routine, she hardly eats at all, and she fusses about her food, and she resists all interventions -- then kaboom, she suddenly starts to eat everything in sight. Anna woke up on Monday morning and started to eat like a ravenous animal.

It turns out that babies dissolve the part of your brain that is capable of making rational assessments on the topic of Baby. (People who generalize this brain deterioration and claim that women become irretrievably irrational when they get pregnant and give birth can go directly to hell, but I will grant that when it comes to the topic of my baby, my ability to think logically might be a little bit compromised.)

I acknowledge that last week, my concern about Anna's eating was illogical. And by illogical, I mean based on faulty logic. In fact, I mean based on two contradictory premises. My thinking went a bit like this:
Premise 1: She's putting on weight, which should mean she needs more food, but she's not eating more food, so I really should be worried.
Premise 2: She's not putting on weight, even though she's growing, which should mean she needs more food, but she's not eating more food, so I really should be worried.

I'm not sure how I managed to hold simultaneously on to the thoughts that she needed more food to grow and that she was growing so much she needed more food.

For what it's worth, I still insist that my concern over her eating last week was Justifiable. How could it not be when I went to such lengths to justify it?

(Ah, grasshopper, the tautologies grow more taut.)

Stephen, the type who bases conclusions on evidence rather than logic, was no less tripped up by last week's lack of appetite. He hypothesized that Anna was not eating because the calcium build-up in our sterilizing pot tasted bad and was turning her off. He stopped using the pot, she started eating better, and -- voila -- hypothesis proved. In his mind, anyway. Never mind that he ignored a number of important variables in the experiment: for instance, the fact that her soy formula tastes like ass with crushed up vitamins, anyway.