Dear Lucille: Month Six

Six months?! You’re half a year old. It doesn’t seem possible!

You started the new year by moving from your bassinet to the crib. You also traded sleeping for two bottom teeth and a healthy appreciation of all foods. Actually, you seem to sleep okay – it is me and your father who are woken up all night by you crying out and then falling back asleep. We go to bed at 7:30 now and we’re still tired. What happened to our champion sleeper?

You are a such a great eater, though. You will happily scarf down anything we offer. Plain greek yogurt, beets, spinach, beans, avocado, banana, peanut butter with oatmeal, hummus, eggplant, squash, mango, oranges. You still love oranges the best – we go through 5lbs a week. You started drinking a few ounces of water from a sippy cup with dinner and you think it is the most delicious beverage ever created.

This month, your awareness of the world has expanded beyond what is right in front of you. You used to just float in the bathtub, then you’d play with bath toys, now you squirm all over the place and try to figure out the construction of the tub and the path of the water droplets down the side of the enamel.

You went for your first volunteering with us at the start of the month. A trail building day at a park behind Laguna Honda Hospital. You love being outside, so had no issue at all with four hours of riding in the pack out in the woods.

You also went to your first protest. You walked alongside millions of women around the world on January 21st and then went to Chinatown’s flower market for Lunar New Year the next day.

The hardest week was the first week of our new President, which coincided exactly with your teething and with our friend Margaret landing in the hospital with a scary blood clot. I felt like gravity was shutting off and I was going to float out into space at any minute.

We bought you a “Jolly Jumper” to hang from the living room doorway and you are a prima ballerina of bouncing. How to do you get those little leaps so perfectly right? You think it is hilarious and “sing” the whole time.

You are unsure about other babies. Especially when they touch you. You spend most of your time with 30-40 year olds and seem to prefer that despite the baby play-dates we set up.

Every morning, we have breakfast in bed together while I pump breastmilk for the day ahead. Then, it is up to get changed, get you changed, clean the house, put on make-up and – if all goes well – take a walk around the neighborhood for 45 minutes before the babysitter arrives at 10. I love being able to walk out the door with you to get a coffee at the cafe down the street while you nap.

I pump again at lunch. After the babysitter leaves at 2:00, you and daddy hang out in the living room while I finish working. We have dinner together early, then bath and to bed, where I pump one more time. We are SO lucky to be able to spend so much time at home with you every day.

You don’t go to the doctor for another “weigh-in” until next week but you seem to be continuing in the 99th percentile. It seems like you grow about half an inch a night and are wearing 9 month old clothes. You are so much bigger than even the pictures from the start of the month!

You’re really getting tickling now and it is easy to get you to laugh with a few strategic “chomps” and kisses. Tummy time is still not your favorite, but you’re working on it.

You are the best!