Onward or upward?

Lexi is continuing to become better at moving herself around. A few days ago, she showed us that she can now pull herself up to a full standing position in the crib we have downstairs. She is quite proud of herself for being able to do this! This morning she did the same thing by pulling herself up on me while we sat on the couch.

The question now is if she feels she needs to go straight to walking and bypass crawling. But for crawling, she’s so close to being able to do it. She just can’t seem to dig in her knees enough to push her forward, and we think she realizes what needs to happen and how she needs to get all her limbs coordinated because she gets frustrated whenever she tries to crawl. We encourage her to keep practicing, however.

There is no sign of any teeth yet, although she can now eat things like pancakes and waffles when Mommy and Daddy eat them. She pretty much has the hang of picking up morsels and putting them in her mouth and chewing them, but this took some learning.

I "eight" well yesterday!

Lexi turned 8 months old yesterday.

She is just so curious about everything, and we’re doing our best to feed her appetite of curiosity about the world – including her literal appetite for food. She’s on quite the varied diet now, having at least tried all sorts of fruits and veggies – paw paw, mangos, garbanzo beans, bananas (her favorite), sweet potatoes, butternut squash, and carrots. And now we’ve introduced her to yogurt and cottage cheese. She doesn’t have any teeth yet, but we’re trying to teach her to chew her food, so we’re giving her tiny chunks of banana, sometimes for her to pick up with her fingers herself, rather than mashing it up and feeding it to her with a spoon. We’re also giving her Cheerios as a sort of dessert after dinner. She enjoys the challenge more of picking them up with her fingers, and we figure that everything she picks up gets put in her mouth anyway, so giving her food to do this with would serve another purpose. Well, she doesn’t quite get the concept of putting food in her mouth and keeping it there yet.

What gets me laughing out loud about her behavior these days is the faces she sometimes makes when trying a new food that has a strong or distinct taste. (Just think about trying some foods for the very first time – nobody could tell you that this or that tastes fruity or like chicken if you don’t have those tasting/eating experiences to draw on.) Only a young baby doesn’t have the inhibitions that would prevent her from showing how strange (or awful) something tastes.