Milestones

Last week Harper reached a couple of baby milestones. First, she slept through the night on Friday. She's been sleeping about ten hours for months now, but since she goes to sleep at 6pm, that means our "morning" has been starting somewhere between 4 and 4:30am. Friday night, however, she slept from 6:15pm to 6:15am. That would have been wonderful, except that I fell into the universal parent trap of "It's 4:30 and she's not up yet." First I thought, "This is great, she's going to sleep longer, so I can too!" which was followed by "It's 5am and she's not up yet. Oh my god, it's 5:30 and she's not up. Now it's 5:45. 5:50. Doesn't she need to eat? 5:57. She's actually going to sleep through the night! 6:03. How much longer can she go? 6:07. When should I just wake her up? 6:12. Don't get up and stand in her room. She's fine. 6:14. Don't get up. 6:15. Thank god, she's awake!"

For those nursing moms reading this, you'll also understand that this meant 12 hours of no feedings, so the last two hours weren't exactly comfortable, and there was a parallel conversation in my head of "Oh my god it's 5am and she's not up yet. How much longer can I go? Should I pump? If I pump now she'll be up wanting to eat 10 minutes later." Once it was 5:30 and I'd upgraded from baseballs to softballs and lying on my side was no longer an option, I finally did get up. I look forward to the days when sleeping in isn't such a complicated and stressful event...and might even be defined as sleeping past 6:15am. For now, though, 6:15 will work, especially since the 12-hour sleep only lasted for the one night, and the past two nights we've been back to starting our mornings at 4:30.

In the last few weeks we've started giving Harper some rice cereal in the evenings, and on Friday she finally figured out how the spoon-and-goo process was supposed to work (which maybe contributed to the big sleep). Last night she had her first taste of squash, which went over much better than I thought it would. At first she was confused and just held the food in her mouth, staring at us with big eyes that said, "What did you just do to me?"

After a few bites, though, she figured it out again and started "helping" with the spoon, which included sucking on it like a bottle and shoving all her fingers into her mouth after the squash. Then she started playing and waving her arms around, which helped us achieve the milestone of "baby needs a bath after feeding."

 

 

And finally, she'd had quite enough squash and tried very hard to arch her way out of her infant seat. The double arms and legs flailing caught Joe and his loaded spoon by surprise, which led to the next milestone of "parent also needs a bath after feeding."

After we'd cleaned her up and gotten her pajamas on, she threw in one last achievement for the day: a sit-up. I'm not sure I can say she sat up on her own, because she only lasted about three seconds once she was upright, but while she was lying on Joe's lap (supposedly going to sleep) she managed to do a sit-up all by herself. I saw her sit up and I looked at Joe with a mix of wonder and frown, just in case he had propped her up to see the football game when he was supposed to be putting her to sleep. He saw the frown and raised his hands above his head to say, "Look Mom, no hands" and prove that she was doing it all on her own. She did it one more time, and then it was off to her bedroom with Mom for the real bedtime. Besides, someone needed to spare her the pain of watching the Vikings tank.