Saturday, October 09, 2010

Nine months

I keep saying that Lyra is becoming more “interactive,” but this time I swear it’s true. She’s begun to sign “milk” on occasion, and she waves to people, in addition to the smiling she always does when anyone talks to her. She has begun to play peek-a-boo, pulling a blanket or her dress up over her face (not always very successfully), and waiting to hear “Where’s Lyra?” before popping out.

She is an excellent crawler and this point, going anywhere she wants in the house very quickly. She can pull herself up to standing easily now, and is experimenting with cruising, although she only takes one or two steps at a time that way. All her activity has caused her to slim down a bit, I think. At her check up she weighed in at 18 pounds, 7 ounces, which puts her in the 42nd percentile, down a big from the 80th percentile she was at a few months ago (although she’s stayed up there for her length), but the doctor wasn’t concerned. She’s about a pound and a half lighter than Adriana was at this age, but that’s about the difference in their birthweights too, so it seems normal to me. Lyra is just a smaller baby, which I never really realize until seasons start to change and I find that the clothes Adriana was wearing at this age are still a bit too big--something I didn’t suspect would be an issue with both of them having January birthdays. But at least we live in California, so Lyra’s got some time to grow into all the cool weather clothes I have stored away.

She eats well, and instead of just giving her mashed or pureed fruit, I’ve been putting more of our foods through a little food mill that I bought. Mashed avocado or pureed zucchini were fine, but she would rather reach for a nibble of my peach or open her mouth wide to invite me to give her another spoonful of the garlicky stew I’ve prepared. Of course, she also puts everything she finds into her mouth--leaves and pebbles and big chunks of a couple of rubbery toys that Adriana leaves around--requiring me to be much more vigilant with her than I was with her older sister, so having a kid who likes to eat has been sort of a mixed blessing.

Lyra’s sleep is...not great. She does at least fall asleep more easily than I remember with Adriana. Lyra passes out in the carrier on my back or in the car. She even falls asleep sitting up in her high chair, which I know never happened when Adriana was a baby. But staying asleep seems more of a problem. Some of that is my fault: naps are interrupted frequently because Adriana and I have plans. And sometimes I don’t mind that, because if she doesn’t get in a long morning nap, she’ll sleep for a solid three hours in the afternoon--which is heavenly on the afternoons that Adriana is in preschool. But nighttime sleep is hit or miss these days. She had been going to sleep earlier, and now she seems to enjoy a thirty-minute nap around six or seven in the evening and then stays up until ten. I’d been spoiled by the early bedtimes, and just need to adjust my expectations. I thinks she is a more wiggly sleeper than Adriana was, so I wake more as she rolls about in bed, and I think I cause her to wake up when she was just moving in her sleep, because while I am still half asleep and sensing her movement I automatically try to feed her, which wakes her.

Lyra responds to music in a way that I don’t remember Adriana doing at this age. Now Adriana loves music--she plays her little guitar, and asks me to put on her Lisa Loeb and Elizabeth Mitchell CD or to play Simon and Garfunkel in the car, and makes up silly songs--but was she like this as a baby? Lyra is obviously soothed when we sing to her. I signed us up for Music Together, and at the first class Lyra loved crawling around after the other kids, and climbed right onto the teacher’s lap and reached for her mouth as she sang.

She is a mama’s girl like her sister, reaching for me all the time, but she adores her older sister. Brian gets up with Adriana in the morning, and once Lyra hears that Adriana is awake, she is not content to snuggle in bed with me, even when I’m pretty sure she’s hungry. So as soon as I hear that Brian has Adriana relatively calm, I set the baby on the floor, and listen to her hands smacking the wood floor, pat-pat-pat, on her way out to find her older sister.

2 comments:

Christina said...

I love this, the comparisons. I often feel like I'm being unfair to their individuality to compare them but it would be impossible not to. Once you've been through it with one, the experience gives you a way to measure progress. Would I be so impressed by Vivian's potty-trained age if I hadn't already bragged about Emily's for the last 6 years? Would I know that Emily is so sneaky without the older, in-your-face William to fill out the perspective? Would Vivian still seem so sweet if she hadn't been proceeded by Morgan's sass?
Hard to tell.

SaturdayShiraz said...

What exactly qualifies as "cool weather" clothes in California?
We definitely have a matched set of kiddos - Reid eats everything we do and LOVES to dance to any music he hears.
PS: Choking hazards are SO annoying.