Tummy time, v.2.0

Addy is working on practicing her "four-point" stance this week. This morning she was on her hands and knees on her mat, with Miss Cindy's hand helping to support her tummy, but she got too excited about grabbing a toy in front of her and reached with both hands. Fortunately Cindy kept Addy from learning about gravity the hard way.

Yesterday was the first real day of doing repeated consonants--mostly "bababa," but there is also the occasional "dadada" or "mamama" too. Before now Addy has mostly just done random jibber-jabbers and lots of raspberries.

And lastly, Addy is starting to dabble in that really annoying phase of baby-dom: "I do it." This week it's been a lot of helping hold the bottle. Only, because she's teething, she likes to push and pull the bottle along her gums.

Ferocious Teething

Chompers, oh chompers wherefore art though, chompers? 

Poor Addy is still teething and has developed a somewhat terrifying technique that we have dubbed "the veloceraptor."  She puts her hands together, brings her fists toward her mouth, and shakes her head vigorously.  I think she's rubbing her knuckles on her gums, but it's still pretty ferocious looking.

Some things were not really meant to be chewed on

Addy's teeth (a.k.a. "chompers") still have not made their appearance, so she vigorously chews on absolutely everything she can get her sticky little hands on.  Favorite chewies include teething toys, shirts (hers and ours), rattles, etc.  Apparently cardboard baby books have the mouth feel and flavor of, well, cardboard.  And she also discovered that, while interesting to look at, her hairbrush is not actually very tasty.  After she put it in her mouth last night, she gave me this very disappointed look that said, "Gross.  Mom, why did you let me put that in my mouth?" 

Addy Gets the Giggles

Thanks to Erin for being quick with the iPhone and thanks to BJ for getting Addy's giggles going!

Splish Splash

This week Addy has started splashing in the water during bath time.  It is fabulously messy.

We have also added peas to the list of things Addy likes to eat.  Tomorrow we might try bananas!

3 out of 3 cats agree: baby food chicken is gross

We've been working our way through several different kinds of honest-to-goodness baby food lately.  So far, Addy is a big fan of both squash and carrots, but didn't care for the pureed chicken that I made her try.  She disliked it so much that she actually threw up all over the both of us in the process of trying to spit it out.  I smelled the chicken before I tried to give it to her.  It smelled kind of like chicken, but not like anything I'd want to eat.  Not rancid or anything, just not very appetizing.  And the texture was just so wrong; meat should not come in paste form. 

After Addy made known her opinion of the stuff, I figured it wasn't worth trying to give it to her again so I tried to feed it to the cats.  They didn't want to eat it either.

Two socks on one foot

She's been doing good (knock on wood!) about not getting her fingers down her throat, so we haven't been putting socks on Addy's hands for the past several days.  She has been chewing on her thumb a TON lately and has been super drooly, so I'm thinking we have teeth in our future.

Today we went to visit the physical therapist to get a splint made for her left ankle to help hold it in the correct position.  Her ankle turns in pretty severely and we've been working on getting it stretched out so that it will go to a normal, neutral position, but it snaps back to the turned in position as soon as you let it go.  The splint itself is made out of something called "aquaplast," which is rigid at room temperature, but becomes malleable when placed in a hot water bath.  She's starting with wearing it for 30 minutes at a time today and we're supposed to work her up to wearing it for 6-8 hours per day.  Once we're up to wearing it that long, we're supposed to try wearing it at night so that it doesn't interfere with the toe sucking that she's supposed to be doing.  She needs to wear a sock under the splint so that it doesn't rub directly on her skin, and then we may have to add a second sock over the split to keep her from pulling on the velcro straps.  Yes, sometimes my child wears socks on her hands, and sometimes she wears a pair both on the same foot.

In other Addy news, she's been doing really good with eating the rice cereal.  Tonight I mixed it with some pear juice, just to spice things up a bit.  Soon we'll be trying out real baby food.  Oh the mess we will make!

Mmmmm... Coffee

We survived the record-breaking tornadoes from last week completely unscathed.  The only thing we lost was the contents of our refrigerator due to the power outage and we're very thankful for that!  Our house now has power restored (a little earlier than we'd expected) and we're all glad to be done living like domesticated cavemen.