September | 2015 | shmooples

At 6 months old, Rosie is in the 99^th percentile for weight, 78^th for height and 98^th for head size. She has tried solid foods, yay! So far she’s had oatmeal, banana and apples. The bananas are a hit; the other two are amusing to her. She does this little hehehehe goat laugh when I put it in her mouth. She has started to make the wild cat yelping noises I remember Nora making as a baby. For a while, I thought maybe Rosie was a much quieter baby than Nora was, but she has found her voice, and she is expressing it at 6am when Nora is still sleeping and I want her to stay asleep a little while longer. She also loves to tell me, Thhhh. She tells me this over and over again while feeding. She’ll stop nursing to look up at me and say, Thhhh and then go back to eating eagerly. She does most things eagerly with a little pep in her step, arms and legs pumping. She can roll all the way across the room. She likes to roll over to the magazine stack under the coffee table and chew on some tabloids. I have not yet re-baby-proofed the house but better get on it. She is still sleeping in a bassinet next to our bed, but she is ginormous. She is like a fish that has outgrown its tank—the walls of her bed surround her from head to toe. I know I need to get her out of our room and into her crib, but I also think this is probably our last child, and I start to get all nostalgic and weepy about moving her. This will be the last time there will be a baby sleeping in this bassinet next to our bed! What’s next—college?

Nora has just turned into this kid. She’s no longer a toddler. She has a sense of humor and does things intentionally. Her favorite joke: Knock knock. Whose there? Boo. Boo hoo? Don’t cry! Recently, she’s started doing things a big kid does. She can write her name now! She is good at drawing faces with eyes, noses, mouths and hair. She did an excellent family portrait of us—Mommy, Daddy, Nora, Rosie and of course, our pet giraffe, Marty. She also likes to draw monsters and robots. She is very into wearing her princess dresses. She loves reading Ladybug Girl, Curious George and Pinkalicious. She likes to make pillow forts and pretend to go to sleep. She also loves to hide. Anytime she hears someone walking downstairs, or anytime the doorbell rings, she goes, “Ah! Hide!” and covers herself with a blanket. She is becoming quite the big sister. She can be pretty rigid about what she wants to do and gets frustrated when someone messes with her vision—“I want you to be the monster and come in here and tickle me and then I’ll hide.” “No, I don’t want you to put the purple Lego there! Not right there!”

At night, she wants Daddy and Mommy to tell her a story, after reading several books. The bedtime routine takes forever.

Last night, I said, “There once was a porcupine named Ned.”

“No, no, no!” she said. “Not a porcupine! A crocodile!”

“Okay,” I said. “There once was a crocodile named Ned.”

“No, no!” she said. “Not Ned! Cari!”

She wanted me to tell her the same exact story that Daddy had told her, but I wasn’t in the room at the time so I didn’t know the story, and that was very frustrating to her. I explained that we have to do a little of what we want to do and a little of what others want to do. Just like on the playground today. “The little girl you were playing with wanted the windows of the playhouse open and you wanted them closed. It was important to do what the little girl wanted too, because that’s a nice way to play. A give and take. Do you understand?”

She nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

“Okay,” I said. “So, there once was a porcupine named Ned who had a crocodile friend named Cari. A give and take. Both of our guys are in the story.”

“No, no!” she said, after all that. “Not a porcupine named Ned! Just a Crocodile!”

You win some, you lose some I guess. 😉