Cordelia at Five Months

Cordelia is five -- actually five and a half -- months old, but she's growing out of nine-month sized clothes, and fitting nicely into twelve month clothes. She is freaky huge. Fortunately she is freaky strong, too; she can sit up for minutes at a time. And she's working on crawling, but she hasn't gotten much past the lying on her tummy, kicking and getting really pissed off stage yet. She shuffles her way around the living room quite effectively, though, usually ending up near the (moving) glider rocker ottoman, ready to have a leg broken or a head bonked. I have said it before, and I'll say it again: it's astonishing how quickly and how far a supposedly non-mobile baby can move.

All the reference books, and the doctor, would like to know if she is cooing. I don't know about your babies, but my babies don't "coo". Mostly she makes this noise which I haven't been able to come up with a word for, because nothing else on god's earth makes it; it's most like a groan, with some kvetch thrown in. Like, Heeeeeaaaaagh. And that's when she's happy. No-one could ever call it cooing.

(Does anyone's baby coo? My friend Ellen's baby Maxine makes these awesome hellmouth, troll noises: GRREEEAAAAUUuuuuch.)

We started her on cereal (even though they are saying now that you should wait until six months) because she was so desperate to be part of this eating thing that everyone else is doing. She's done rice, barley and oatmeal baby cereals so far, and she doesn't hate them. Once she passes six months I am going to start her on vegetables, and then she will see what the excitement is really about. Carrots! Parsnips! Oh my! (Oh, unless those are the ones with nitrates; I will have to look that up.)

I was kind of sad to start her on food; I thought, "this is the last time I will have a baby who exclusively breastfeeds". I expect I will have thoughts like that a lot. It was a brief moment, though; really I am very much looking forward to having two little girls, rather than a little girl and a baby. Babies are nice but little girls are better.

We're tiptoeing around the bedtime thing, thinking about it. Right now Cordelia's sleep, especially in the daytime, is pretty disordered, and I know she's old enough now (and definitely big enough!) to have a proper two-nap schedule, rather than the three or four mini-naps she's taking now. I also think she's old enough (and again, big enough) to go through the night without nursing; the trick now is to teach her that.

Last night we put her in the crib (already asleep) in the evening, and we had the evening mostly to ourselves. She woke up a couple of times, and both times we soothed her back to sleep and then put her back in the crib. I expect at some point we will put her in the crib and let her cry herself to sleep (because we are SO MEAN! And because it worked so well with Delphine), but I want to get her used to the idea that the crib is safe, and for sleeping, first. (Until now she has mostly slept in the high chair or on my lap or in bed with us.)

Generally she continues to be a charming and sweet baby. She's not so ready with the smiles for strangers any more, but she still blesses Blake and I with the huge, gummy, ear-to-ear grin that I hope she never grows out of.