Eight Months
It's been ages since I've updated, and a lot has changed, although it seems like mostly in the last couple of day.
Delphine's a champion stander now; she easily pulls herself up on whatever is around, and she will stand and play at a coffee table or chair for ages. She's even started experimenting with only holding on with one hand, and she cruises from one piece of furniture to another.
On the crawling front, though, she hasn't advanced much. She can get around pretty quickly, but she's still commando-crawling, and hasn't discovered the superiority of the hands-and-knees technique. I'm beginning to wonder if she won't bypass that stage altogether and skip right to walking.
Much to my relief, she has finally discovered consonants; Friday she figured out muh-muh-muh-muh, and by Sunday she had added ba-ba-ba-ba-ba and da-da-da-da-da. Soon she'll be writing sonnets.
She's eating lots of different foods now; fruits, vegetables, cereals, yogurt, cottage cheese and beans. This week I'm going to give her tofu, and then we'll try actual dead animal. The only thing that seems to stop her is chunks; she still likes things well pureed, or else she has to make dealthy gagging sounds until I rescue her from the killer peas! In her mouth! And then sometimes she vomits. I've learned my lesson.
She's cut her nursing way back; she doesn't nurse at all in the morning, and sometimes we go all afternoon without nursing either. She still nurses in the evening and through the night. The only thing that settles her when she wakes overnight, in fact, is nursing. Sometimes I get tired of being the human pacifier, but it's not like she'll be a baby forever.
She's well and truly into the separation anxiety phase, apparently right on time. She doesn't even like it when her aunt or grandpa hold her, and she never used to have a problem with them. Now, it's Mum or Dad or nobody.
We went to playgroup for the first time last Wednesday; it's a program with music, games and crafts. I signed us up as much for an activity for me as anything. I need something to break up the weeks or this winter is going to last for years.
I was really looking forward to it, to learning some new songs and meeting other mothers, and in that respect it was disappointing. I didn't like some of the new songs, and the ones she sung that I knew were kind of mangled: "hush-a, hush-a" in "Ring Around the Rosies" instead of "a-tishoo, a-tishoo", and "all around the town" in "The Wheels on the Bus" instead of "all the livelong day", not that that makes any sense. I know they're folk songs, and that's what they do, change, but it seemed weird and wrong. I'll get over it.
The other mothers weren't so friendly; I felt like the new girl all over again, trying to make eye contact and smile and be friendly, and everyone seemed to avoid my eyes and close off into their cliques. It was quite weird. I did end up elbowing my way into a conversation or two, and I'm sure it will get better as the weeks go on.
I've decided I'm going to stop worrying about whether I'm doing things right. I kept second-guessing myself; should I be feeding Del this, or that? Should I try and make her sleep in the crib? Should I nurse her more? Less? Make her nap longer? How? Hold her more often? Less often? Read to her? Make her listen to classical music? Describe everything she sees, loudly, like some deranged docent?
Finally I realized that I'm a reasonably intelligent and emotionally stable and if I follow my instincts and listen to my heart, I won't go far wrong. I don't need her to pass the RCM Grade 12 piano exam by the time she's eight, or cure cancer or remedy world hunger. All I want for her is happiness, and right now that means sleeping with me and eating bananas and going for walks.
She's pretty smart, too, and I'm sure she'll figure out how to go to sleep by herself, and how to talk, and how to read, without me shoving it all down her neck.