Three months

This gets more fun every day. Adriana is suddenly much more aware of the world around her. This has some downfalls--she's easily distracted when I'm trying to feed her when we're out and about, which makes it harder to be quite so modest--but mostly it's just incredible to watch her notice things. She reaches out to grab the toys handing from her play gym, watches the cat come down the stairs, stares intently at the other babies in our yoga class.

She's stopped minding her tummy time. Now when I put her on her belly, she pushes up and kicks and smiles. Usually. Sometimes she still is pretty sure that tummy time is a vast right wing conspiracy. After I fed her on Sunday morning she accidentally rolled from her side onto her tummy as she was dozing back off. After a few seconds she woke back up grunting angrily and giving me an accusing look.

A couple of weeks ago, she discovered her vocal chords, but can't figure out how to make them stop, as Brian put it at first. She'd been cooing a little bit from time to time, but now whenever we set her down by herself she starts with her noises. A lot of the "words" start with an "ng" sound, making us wonder if we somehow ended up with a Vietnamese baby. She also laughs. I don't remember the first time I heard a laugh, but I remember the first time she laughed for Brian. He was bending into the car to take her out of her carseat, and I don't know what he did that amused her, but she giggled and he stuck his head back out of the car to ask me "Did you hear that?" The next night she laughed at him again. It's a wonderful sound, as are her occasional squeals of happiness when I pour water over her head in the bath.

Recently she's stopped sleeping quite so well: instead of getting up once with her every night, it's usually twice. But she goes right back to sleep, and then so do I. And she's become better at nursing without much help from me, so I don't have to sit up and pull the boppy onto my lap in order for us to get comfortable. For a while I was blaming some of the lack of sleep on teething--she is drooling, her cheeks are red, she is constantly chewing on her hands, and our normally happy baby is incredibly fussy some evenings. I called Brian's mom one night to ask when her kids at gotten teeth. When she told me she thought it had been around three months, I decided that must be what was happening and, after thanking her and Brian for those genes, adjusted to the idea of waking up every hour or two at night. Of course, that night, Adriana only awoke once.

Several people have asked me if I miss my old job. And in some ways I do miss it. I enjoyed the work I was doing and the people I was working with. I know that the next couple of years will be an interesting time in health policy. Last week, Adriana turned 12 weeks old and I realized that under FMLA my maternity leave, if I'd taken it, would be up and I would be heading back to work. I knew that I would miss Adriana a lot more than I miss my job, and that given the way we do things in this country, it will always be an interesting time in health policy. I'll go back at some point--paid employment is a good thing--but for now I am content to make taking care of Adriana my job.