I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised as a first-time parent because every stage of Lexi’s life will be new to me, but I am still confounded by the newness of Lexi and the strange way she is learning to do things.
The latest addition to her behavior in the last few days is making chatter. She’s done this in some ways in the past, but this is a new way and a little more sophisticated than the last. It’s just a bunch of grunting and baby “gaga” and “goo-goo” sounds, but they’re formed in a way that is closer to real speech and sounds more like a conversation. It’s fun to talk back to her when she’s doing this, like we really are having a conversation. She just sounds so busy when she’s “talking” like this, like she suddenly has a lot to say while we’re changing her diaper or at other random moments when she has these outbursts.
The way Lexi plays by herself in her chair while Sarah and I are eating dinner and then looks up at us as if she expects us to say something or just pauses to look at us like we’re strangers who have suddenly arrived in front of her just makes me laugh. I’ve said to Sarah several times in the last week or so, “What a strange creature!”
She’s always been a curious baby (well, maybe all babies are like this, but it’s new to me), but it’s fun to see her be more organized and controlled with this curiosity. Like this morning in church, I was holding her against me, with her head looking behind me over my shoulder. She had to get a good look at everyone behind us on one side of me and then move her head to the other side of mine and spend a few minutes looking up and down the pew at the people on the other side. We do recognize this curiosity in her, and we try to cater to it. When we prepare dinner each evening, she’s in the kitchen with us, and when we can, one of us holds her so she can watch the other chopping veggies or stirring what’s in a pot on the stove. We hope she learns to cook this way and learns to enjoy doing things like this.
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