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.

A Wrestling Match

We had moved Lexi's changing mat down on the floor several weeks ago since she was wiggling all around when we changed her. Now when you go to change her diaper, she likes to roll over onto her stomach - and sometimes, nibbles on the edge of the changin mat. You turn her back over and she quickly reverses again. Do you know how hard it is to put on a diaper bottom side up?? It's not easy! I have now figured out why Jane gives her the baby bottom bottle as a distraction. With that in her hands, she isn't rolling over on you.

It was very odd to spend 3 nights away from her and Stephen. They did very well together and Lexi is sleeping better at night, though still getting up once. She is also napping longer during the day which we also appreciate. When I got home later Friday afternoon, I think she did recognize me right away - she squealed anyway and flapped her arms like she does when she is excited. She has also been very cooperative at meal time which she wasn't when it was just Stephen alone with her. So maybe she recognizes that I am home.

A mind of her own...

We definitely need to baby proof the house. Even though Lexi isn't walking or crawling yet (but she's working hard at trying!), she is VERY mobile in her walker and can pretty much scoot around wherever she wants. We have a small chalkboard that sits on a low easel. We had already moved the chalk and eraser, but now we need to do something with the chalkboard itself. Lexi wheeled herself up to it tonight and started hitting it with her hand. I was afraid that she would cause it to topple and bonk her on the head.

She also found my book of Suduko puzzles that was sitting on a low end table and tried to open the doors on the credenza that we have in the living room. The water cooler is also a potential trouble spot - she can just about reach the water spouts - and one is for hot water! And just to let you know - when we steer her away from one of these 'trouble spots', she throws a royal fit. "Don't you take me away from that/take that away from me!! You are ruining my fun."

Our girl is growing up...check out the latest photos in the link on the right - March ones have been added!

Next she'll be learning Chinese

Two things to report:

Lexi's development is really happening fast, even by the week and day. Case in point: When she has dropped something that she was holding, she can now recognize where it went and look down and, if it's reachable, pick it up again. This was not happening even as early as last week. And already, in just a few days, she is pushing herself forward in her walker chair after doing it only backwards for a couple of weeks and can get through doorways or over to a shelf or the stove to play with things (like the dish towels hanging from the oven door handle). We need to do some baby-proofing around the house.

Second, yesterday I was sitting at the dining room table, eating my lunch. Jane (our nanny/househelp) was in the pantry, sitting on her plastic chair (don’t ask my why she relegates herself to this confined spot in this huge house, but yes, the pantry off our kitchen is big enough for shelves of food, a clothes-drying rack, and a tiny sitting area for Jane), with Lexi on her lap, feeding her her lunch. Lexi made one of her noises, a repetitive sound that I’ve heard many times before (though not a lot lately). Jane did it back to her, and then I realized – it’s the same sound the birds in the trees above our backyard make (well, Lexi doesn't squawk exactly like them, but she makes the same rhythm)! Jane said that yes, Lexi has been imitating these birds for a while when they sit outside on the plastic chair together, which they do a lot every day.

This also explains Lexi's constant arm flapping – she’s trying to fly! We've got a baby bird on our hands here! We've been trying to raise her as a human this whole time. How did we get it so wrong? And how did we end up with a young one of a different species?

Leaving Lexi with Dad

On April 1st, I will be going to Sudan for 4 days for work. This will be the first time that I have not spent the night in the same building as Lexi. I am a little concerned about Stephen handling her alone for 3 nights. I am afraid that he might get little sleep! Her sleeping habits had improved (or maybe I am just kidding myself) and she did well while we were in Uganda too. Basically, she was only waking up once a night - which is something I can live with as it is an improvement!

But the last nights here at home have been bad. She has woken up midnight or so and then 4 AM and sometimes, she really doesn't go back to sleep. She isn't hungry in the wee hours of the morning. I am thinking that maybe she is cold (Oh, how I wish she could TELL us!). It is fall here and definitely cooler in the house which has no heating system. We have a small heater in her room, but we are nervous about leaving it on when the whole house is asleep. We could put blankets on her, but she rolls around so much, they would soon fall off. I think I might try putting a hat on her tonight....wish us luck!

Our squirmy wormy

As with anything, you usually gain a new perspective in a situation you’re in when somebody from the outside enters the situation and tells you their observations. So it was with the visit of my sister for the past three weeks from Seattle (she left on Tuesday night). One of the parts of her visit that she was looking forward to the most, besides visiting Africa for the first time, was seeing Lexi again and spending some quality time with her. She last saw her when we visited Seattle in late October last year, so she was in a good position to notice a lot of changes in her growth which we have probably not observed as closely as we are with her daily and see these developments only very slowly.

The major observation she made about Lexi was how active she is, that she is constantly moving around – that she’s very squirmy. As we have mentioned many times on this blog before in our own observations, because this is our first baby, we don’t necessarily know what is normal for a baby in each stage of development. Not having been through this process before, we don’t have any other babies of our own to compare Lexi to. Of course, we know plenty of other people who have had babies as well around the same time Lexi was born, and we are more observant of other young babies now too when we go out or travel. But we’re not with any of these babies enough to know their minute-by-minute behavior and habits, which we know with Lexi. Comparing Lexi to the closest baby, the one who lives physically nearest to her, Freddy, the youngest child of the British family who lives at #7 in our compound (he’s a month or two older than Lexi), Lexi seems dramatically more active with her bodily movements. When we see Freddy, he’s always sitting very still and simply gazes up at you with big blue eyes with a very questioning look. Freddy is bigger and chubbier than Lexi and just seems to be a sack o’ potatoes who doesn’t move much.

Lexi is always moving her body. She often flaps her arms like she’s a bird trying to take off, which sometimes expresses her excitement or that she wants to play at the moment. We’re trying to teach her to bring her hands together to clap when she flaps her arms like this. Or she is moving her head, looking around, no matter where she is, being held by someone or sitting in her bouncy chair. Her head and eyes spend only a few seconds at a time looking in one direction before her attention is quickly drawn to something else. And when being held in someone’s lap, she is just generally squirming her whole body. She hasn’t yet figured out what adults know – that your body won’t necessarily move in any direction or shape or do certain movements or move in any relation to another object or person (or that, as much as you’d like it to, your upper body won’t do a full 360 at your waist). So if she has that primal urge to be over there, yet her body is facing the opposite direction or if there’s no way to get over there without an adult moving her whole body over there, she simply twists and contorts her body to try to get it where she wants.

Part of this, we know, is simply a normal part of learning about her body, and she’s very close to figuring out how to crawl. And I know that young children love to just roll around and push themselves around while lying down – squirming by themselves or wrestling with each other.

So again, we don’t know if all of this behavior is normal or unusual, but we’re so much more aware of it now that an outsider, Auntie Lora, has pointed it out to us. Now I have a bit of fear that some doctor will eventually diagnose Lexi as being hyperactive or having ADHD. But for now, I’m just content to know that she’s probably just a very curious baby with a lot of energy and can’t absorb all the new things she’s discovering in the world around her quickly enough. I have told her that there’s plenty of time to learn new things. After all, I’m still enjoying traveling around the world or observing the news and learning fascinating things that I never knew existed a full 35 years after my birth, and even though I finished my schooling many years ago. Well, I know there are many basic things that she needs to fill her mind with in her first several years just to function at a “normal” level.

Even after almost eight months, much of my fascination of this young creature, this emerging person, has still not worn off. It’s still baffling to my mind that this thing, a person, a human being, something so complex and priceless, could be created from essentially nothing. (To me, a writer and a journalist, whose business and skills are to observe and articulate in written words, it’s still a struggle to describe these thoughts here. It’s like trying to describe love in words. How can one really do that?) It’s still so amazing to see how a person develops and acquires the skills and behaviors she needs to survive and simply be in the world. As adults, we take so much of what we do, think and behave and how we move our bodies for granted. Dish towels are so ordinary to an adult, or you never think about how being in water (in a bath or a swimming pool) is different than being out of water, but to a 7 ½ month old baby, these things are really new and different, and there’s a lot to experience by touching, feeling and trying out with them!