18 months

Yesterday I heard Lyra wake up from her nap and call for Adriana. I went in to my bedroom, and there she was in the middle of my bed. She rolled over, sat up, and asked again, “Ana? Ana?” I told her that her sister was asleep and she shouted, “Go ‘way!” at me over and over, giggling and bouncing on her knees there on the bed. I sat at the foot of the bed, finishing the chapter I’d been reading, and finally she crawled over to me, and climbed onto my lap, straddling my waist. Putting her hands on either side of my face, she looked at me and said, “Mama. Mama. Mama.” And then she let her head drop back and giggled while I kissed her cheeks.

And really, is there anything else I need to remember about Lyra at 18 months? I think if I only remembered that one perfect moment, I think that would be fine. She is mostly a happy little girl. She runs and falls, runs and falls. She can jump with both feet of the ground now, shouting “Jump! Jump!” while she does it. She sometimes eats a lot, and sometimes only wants to nurse. Some nights she sleeps well, other nights she is bothered by new teeth coming in or a stuffy nose or something she ate, and she wakes me up hourly. She doesn’t like strangers to get too near, but she loves to wave and smile at everyone. She requests kisses when she bumps her head or bangs her knees (which are always scraped up). She demands hugs from her sister and then smacks her in the face a second later. She yells “Hide!” and ducks behind a chair, then “Find you!” when you find her. She cries when Adriana gets out of the car at school, and won’t let any of the sweet women who work in the YMCA child watch touch her, but clings to Adriana the whole time I’m gone. Two weeks after Brian hung a bike in the rafters in the garage, she still exclaims “Bike! Up!” every time she sees it.

For Lyra, everything is exciting. Everything is yelling and pointing. Everything is full speed and top volume. And then she pushes her face against mine, and says, “Mama, mama, mama.”

15 months

Aaaaaaand once again, this is more of an “and-a-half months” post. Because I am outnumbered.

This month we are all noticing how much fun Lyra is. If she doesn’t nap much, I’m not terribly disappointed because she’s fun to play with. Brian enjoys getting to spend time with her. And when I asked Adriana her favorite part of the day a couple of weeks ago she said, “Playing with Lyra at the park. Now she is not just a sister, she is my friend.” And then I died of the sweetness.

Part of the fun we’re having with her comes, I think, from her language development. Someone asked me recently if she had any new words, and I said every day. I’ve been surprised to find Lyra has more words than signs. Some words she only speaks; some words she only signs; much of the time she does both; and she seems to pair signs for animals with the sounds they make. Every day she mimics something new, and seems to understand it. The best thing is probably that, in addition to “mama” and “dad,” she now says “Ana,” and it’s sweet how pleased Adriana is to have the baby say her name. But everything she says seems adorable to me. When spring really arrived at the end of March, I put a sunhat on her, and she told me “no hat,” her first two word combination. She comes into the kitchen signing and saying “eat eat eat,” so I ask her what she wants and she exclaims “Peet-ya!” (At least one kid shares my deep true love of pizza.) She grabs onto her diaper and tells me “Poop!” and then runs away howling “Noooooooooo!” when I offer to change her. She even tries to say “thank you.” That started one evening as she was handing me books from a pile and saying “tank” each time, and I realized that she knows that we say “thank you” when someone gives us something. She was handing things to me, so I wasn’t sure if she was prompting me, or just wasn’t clear on who says what. Now she seems to understand that she should say it to us when we give her something, but when she gives one of us something, she’ll often stand there and prompt us to thank her until we do.

Since Lyra was about six months old, she’s been in love with Adriana’s baby doll--the doll that Adriana herself is very attached to. When it first started I bought Lyra her own doll, one that was safe for younger babies. Lyra poked at it some, but never became very attached. It had a plastic head like Adriana’s doll, but a fat, stuffed body. Finally a couple of weeks ago as Lyra was becoming more and more determined to get her hands on Adriana’s baby, I bought her a similar one. Lyra has become very attached to the doll. She carries it around, and it seems to be comforting for her when she’s upset. She picks it up in the morning with glee, and if I try to take it away from her when I go to feed her she wails “Baby! Baby!” and will not be comforted until she has that doll back. Also? She still tries to steal Adriana’s when she get the chance.

Lyra is attached to Brian in a way that Adriana wasn’t at this age. She recognizes when he’s leaving for work in the morning and runs to be picked up and hugged. When he comes in after work, she runs to greet him. She demands time on his lap, and sometimes even lets him rock her to sleep. When Brian’s parents were here for a weekend, she was particularly devoted to her Grandpa Andy. She constantly wanted him to hold her and read to her, and when he picked her up to hug her good-bye at the end of their stay, she clung to him and cried as he handed her back to me. Now she points to his picture and tries to say “Grandpa.” I am especially amused by this, because it just sounds like she’s saying “damn.”

She eats so much these days, it constantly surprises me. But then there are days she hardly eats a thing. I know that’s normal, and after Adriana I am less surprised by the days where she doesn’t want to eat much. Yesterday I realized with surprise that she had gone seven hours without nursing. She’d eaten plenty during that time, and then nursed a lot in the evening as if to make up for it, but I was definitely surprised by how long she’d gone without, even though I had offered a couple of times. Her sleep’s been mostly awful lately. I bring her into our bed when I go to sleep, and while I used to barely have to wake up to feed her, she now is doing a lot more crying and shifting around. We wonder if it’s teeth and keep sticking our fingers in her mouth to check. I start to think maybe it’s my caffeine, and am careful not to have any after 10 AM. I try to figure out if it’s something she ate, but since she eats everything and eats so differently from day to day, it’s hard to say. Perhaps our bed is too crowded, I think, but then when it’s just me and the baby, she’s still up every hour. I know she’ll outgrow it, whatever it is, but that’s hard to remember at three in the morning when I’m trying to calm a screaming baby who won’t nurse.

There have been some days full of crying, too, which always surprises me. Usually it’s solved by an extra nap, though, and for the most part she’s just the happiest little girl I know, smiling and shouting “hi” as she rides through the grocery store in our cart, running giggling down the sidewalk, and shrieking “wheeeeeee!” in the swing at the park.

How weaning (eventually) happened

After I took the girls for their check-ups in January, I joked with Brian that when the pediatrican asked me whether I’d considered weaning, I nearly answered “Which one?” Because of course our pediatrician was asking about Lyra and of course I wouldn’t have said anything of the sort. The fact that Adriana was still nursing at four years old wasn’t something I was trying to hide, but it wasn’t something I was going around advertising either. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but it’s not exactly the norm in mainstream parenting, and I’m not the kind of person who wants to stand out. And so I debated whether to write about this, but it’s such a milestone for us, perhaps particularly for us, that it would be a shame not to. And I think that, because it’s outside the norm, it’s worth sharing.

We went through stages when people would ask me about weaning. The first was when Adriana was a newborn, and people would ask how long I planned to nurse; when she was a little over year it came up again, since it’s very common to wean around the baby’s first birthday; and finally, people who knew she was still nursing when I got pregnant again asked if I had plans to wean. There were times all along when I considered it, even right at the beginning when I was tired and depressed and had thrush, and particularly when I was pregnant and it wasn’t always as comfortable as it had been. But it never seemed like the right time to wean completely, and it seemed as though it would happen eventually.

She got older and began to eat a bit of solid food, and she backed off of nursing a bit then. There was a point sometime before Adriana’s second birthday when I started pushing her to nurse less in the afternoons, because I found it frustrating to stop what I was doing so often to nurse her (and once I was including her more in what I was doing, she stopped asking so much--what she had really wanted was more of my focus). Sometime around the time she was two and a half, I began to refuse to nurse her in public. And because we were always going somewhere, pretty soon she was nursing only around sleep--to fall asleep at nighttime and naptime, and then when she woke up. That was our pattern when I got pregnant and it worked. She gave up napping not too long after her third birthday, so then those nursings were gone (although for the first couple of weeks, I would still lie down and let her nurse for a bit at what would have been naptime--she seemed to need something like that to make it through the afternoon). I pushed to get rid of the morning nursing, which worked for a few weeks, but then mornings got rough and we added it back in. A couple of months later, we dropped it without much effort.

It feels like a confession of sorts to say that after the baby was born I wished Adriana would stop. I was glad it was comforting to her, but the contrast between nursing a newborn and nursing a preschooler somehow overwhelming to me. I was ready to be done, but I also knew it was the wrong time to stop her. It was what she knew to do. It was reassuring to her. And with the adjustment to having a new baby at home (and then knowing that we’d be moving over the summer) it seemed like too much to ask.

There was one misguided attempt on my part to cut her off cold turkey. In June, I spent three nights in the hospital with a stomach bug of some sort. Lyra was in the hospital with me so she could nurse, but Adriana was at home with her grandma. She fell asleep for those three nights without nursing (but cuddled up with Grandma), so on my first night home, I laid down in her bed with her at bedtime, just like I always do, but this time I refused to nurse her. It was awful. Within a few minutes we were both in tears. Finally I nursed her, sad to not be done, sad to have tried and failed, relieved that it was so easy to make it all better again.

After we moved last summer I began talking to her about weaning. I told her that she was the only one of her friends that still needed “mom milk” to fall asleep, and talked about other ways to fall asleep. On nights when she did fall asleep without nursing (because we were in the car when she fell asleep, or because I hadn’t been home, or because she was tired and fell asleep during her story) I would point it out to her in the morning. Sometime before our move, I suggested that when she was four she wouldn’t nurse any more. I tried to talk about it as casually as possible, and it seemed to work. She began talking about it herself. And it went on for several months like that, and then in December one night she told me that she wouldn’t have milk to fall asleep. I got into bed with her, read her some stories, and then we cuddled up together. After about 15 minutes of tossing around, she told me--on the edge of tears, trying to be brave--that she needed milk after all. I assured her it was fine, and she nursed to sleep. She talked about it in the morning, and didn’t suggest it again.

I teased her the night of her fourth birthday about not nursing. She laughed, and said “Maybe when I’m eight,” which gave me a good laugh. But I knew I wasn’t going to cut her off because she had turned four that day. Then one night about a week later, nursing became uncomfortable for me, so I stopped her. She cried and yelled and hit and kicked, and then she fell asleep in my arms. The next night I stopped her before she was asleep. She cried a little, but didn’t throw the same fit as the night before. For two more nights I read her long stories until she fell asleep. On the fifth night she asked to nurse, and I told her that she was four and a big girl, and that I would stay with her as long as she wanted, but I wouldn’t nurse her. And that was it. That was the end.

I had been dreading bedtime. I was done with nursing and waiting for the right time for Adriana. Now bedtime can be so nice. (I won’t say it always is, because, look, she’s four; sometimes she’s going to fight it, no matter how tired she is.) Most nights I just lie in bed with her and read her stories. Sometimes she falls asleep during the story, and other times she just lies in my arms and I rest my face on her hair and feel the moment when her body relaxes and she falls asleep.

14 months

Okay, fine, fourteen and a half months. Because it takes me that long to write a few paragraphs with these little monkeys around.

Lyra is just such a loving little girl. She comes running for a kiss, and sometimes just wraps her arms around my neck in a nice, tight hug. When she hears Brian come in from work, she runs to the door to greet him and raises her arms to ask to be picked up (and actually does the same thing in the morning when she sees that he’s about to leave. And it’s not just with us, but with other people she’s familiar with--her grandparents, her aunts, my friends; she raises her arms to be picked up, leans in for a kiss, crawls onto a lap. Sometimes I’m greedy and I want all those hugs for myself, but I also love that she adores and feels loved by so many other people as well.

At fourteen months, Lyra’s expressive language seems to be growing so fast--both spoken and sign. She says (or makes attempts to say): apple, boo, book, boom, bye, cat, dad, dog, mama, no, sit, woof, meow, moo, baa, quack, and roar. She signs all done, ball, bath, book, cat, cheese, dog, duck, eat, milk, more, music, please, and water. I think “no” is the one that amuses me the most. I thought she was asleep recently, but as I went to set her down, she opened her eyes and told me “no.”

She also does a good job expressing her disapproval of certain things through body language. We’ve entered the world of tantrums, the kind where she arches her back, stiffens her body, and SCREAMS. It’s a little horrifying (as a preview of what’s to come), but also kind of funny, because now we know what a preschool-level tantrum is. Compared to a four-year-old, Lyra isn’t very strong and doesn’t have a very long attention span for her rage. We can hold her while she cries, or set her down, and the anger dies out pretty quickly. We are finding her a little harder to distract and redirect than she used to be. If we take away something that she shouldn’t have had, she remembers and protests, even when we offer something (that we think is) equally awesome.

She’s discovered the joy of being a foot taller than she really is, and likes to push Adriana’s step stool around to gain access to the kitchen counter and light switches. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have the sense to not just try to step right off of it, so I’m a little nervous about her climbing on it. She has finally learned to climb down from our bed or the couch safely, which is nice. She’s not necessarily good at it, and often falls as she goes, but at least she’s not crawling off head first.

I feel lucky that Adriana can play independently pretty safely at the park these days. She goes up ladders and down slides, and I don’t have to follow her up or hover right beneath her. She plays games with friends on the play structures and in the sand, or rides her bike without going out of my sight. I don’t know how people do it when their kids are closer together in age and they have to be on top of both of them. Lyra has the ability to climb up all the play structures, but I don’t trust her not to fall right off of them. She runs toward an empty swing with no awareness of the children on the other swings who might bump right into her. She takes off running without looking back, which is completely new to me, as Adriana has always stuck pretty close. She loves playing in the sand (although Adriana wouldn’t touch it for anything at this age), but still hasn’t learned that it doesn’t taste good, and that she shouldn’t throw it.

She is still such a good eater. She eats meals with us, and lots of snacks. I’m constantly surprised by how much food she can consume. She’ll eat pretty much anything we offer her at this point, unless it’s really spicy. She’s got a sweet tooth, which doesn’t surprise me one bit, but she also is a big fan of salty snacks. We were at a friend’s house recently and she was amazed by the introduction of goldfish crackers. As much as she eats, I would sort of expect her to back of nursing a bit, but most days she seems to nurse plenty. Several days a week, though, I’ll realize that she’s going as long as four hours between nursings. At first I was shocked by that and wondered if it was okay for a baby so young to go that long, but then I laughed at myself, remembering that most babies these days are completely weaned by this age. That strikes me as so strange, because she still seems like such a baby, in spite of the climbing and talking and eating. She curls into my arms and is so snuggly and small, and part of me would like to keep her likes this forever. (And then she pitches herself headfirst off the couch or screams because I won’t let her eat the penny she found on the ground, and a pray for her to grow up and get some sense FAST.)

13 months

When I called the pediatrician on Wednesday to ask about the rash on Lyra’s face and her fever and he observed that she was 13 months old, I was surprised, because I’ve noticed that they usually they don’t round up like that. Then I realized that she actually was 13 months old that day.

You would think at 13 months, I would be able to know when she was sick, but I had no clue. One weekend Lyra would only sleep in my arms, so I settled down in my bed with her and we slept for two hours. When we woke up, Brian pointed out that Lyra seemed warm, but I pointed out that we’d been snuggled up under a warm blanket together. It took some time before I registered that she really was too warm and just not herself. I had been enjoying how snuggly she was, when in fact she was snuggly because she didn’t feel well.

Lyra is a good eater most days, but it’s sporadic. When she wasn’t feeling well, she was eating a ton, but then she has days when she hardly eats anything. She’s losing interest in most purees and mashed foods, and wants to feed herself instead, which is slower and messier, but also frees me up. She would love to be able to use a spoon or a fork, but she just doesn’t have the coordination yet. After taking a few stabs at it (HA!), she’ll sit with the utensil in one hand, held high, while feeding herself with the other.

She is saying more words now, but mostly she just says “woof.” She says it when she sees a dog or hears a dog, when she’s pointing at a picture of a dog in a book. She says “boo” and “boom,” as well, or at least approximations of them. She does imitate other sounds when she’s in the right mood, which thrills Adriana, who is delighted when the baby complies with things like “Say ‘poop’ now, Lyra!”

Suddenly Lyra is afraid of loud noises. I took the girls to Berkeley to ride the steam train and the carousel, and the train was a terrifying experience for the baby. Our first ride on it, she was clinging to my neck and screaming every time the whistle blew, and only did better the second time because we sat in the very last car, and she could hardly hear it. She cried one day when I was using the food processor, and now when she sees me bring it out, she begins to wail in protest.

My favorite thing these days is her kisses. If she sees Brian and me kiss, she makes a kissy face. She points to stuffed animals and says “mwah!” and then will lean to kiss it when I bring it near her. She chases after our poor cat, saying “mwah tat.” She raises her arms to Brian to be picked up so she can kiss him when he gets home from work, and when Adriana will allow it, she wraps her arms around her sister’s waist and raises her face for a kiss. And best of all she runs toward me from across a room, smiling and making kisses, and then leans her face against mine.

12 months (Or, OMG HOW HAS IT ALREADY BEEN A YEAR?)

I woke yesterday around 3:30 in the morning, with Lyra in my arms, and realized that a year ago I had been up with Adriana in the middle of the night, realizing that I was in labor. Watching Lyra sleep, I was amazed that it’s been so long, but as I studied her silhouette in the darkness, bent to kiss her cheek, leaned my face against her hair, I also realized that life without her is already a distant memory.

I lamented to a friend recently that now people were going to start chastising me for calling Lyra a baby, but she is still so clearly a baby, with her chubby cheeks, the way she reaches for me, the way she calms down when I carry her on my back or rock her in my arms. But she’s also growing up, becoming more kid-like every day. I realized one evening a couple of weeks ago that she was stacking two blocks on top of each other. I was stacking the little alphabet blocks into towers for her to knock over, and I noticed that she was trying to imitate me. She could stack on block on top of the other pretty easily, and occasionally she managed a third, but usually after two (and definitely after three) trying to add a block would cause the whole thing to topple. She began stopping at two and then lifting the bottom one while attempting to keep them stacked. She couldn’t keep them balanced for long, but it was fun to watch her experiment with it.

She is also beginning to work out the art of making mischief. I try to redirect her attention from something she’s doing, such as opening a door on the buffet or pulling cookbooks off the shelf, but a few minutes later she’s back at it. Only this time she’s not just doing it for the sake of doing it. Now she starts to do it, and then looks at me and giggles, waiting for me to come stop her. She grabs my phone and makes she she has my attention before she tries to run off with it.

Lyra’s sleep leaves something to be desired (note the above, where she was sleeping in my arms; that seems to be the only way she’ll sleep much these days), but I know she’ll get better at it eventually. Some days she’s down to only one nap, which is quite nice--it breaks up our day a little bit less, and it means she goes to bed at a decent hour. She is developing a good appetite, and we are often amazed at how well she eats, although her intake of “real food” doesn’t seem to have inspired her to cut back on her nursing at all.

She signs “music” all the time, and “milk” and maybe “all done” on occassion. She says “ma ma ma,” and “da da da” and seems to mean them to refer to us. She’s spent the past month pointing at the Christmas tree and making a “T” sound, but she also did a bit of that looking at fish when we went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium last week.

The aquarium was so much fun. Adriana’s been there several times now (as well as the ones in San Francisco, London, and Barcelona, but we all agree that Monterey is the best), and we always enjoy ourselves, but we didn’t take her until she was two, because we didn’t think she’d really appreciate it sooner. Now we realize that we probably didn’t need to wait. Lyra pointed at the fish, and ran around to the different exhibits. She watched other kids, and enjoyed the toddler play area. We had forgotten to grab the baby carrier on the way out the door and I didn’t have a stroller in the car, so she spent most of the time walking. She refuses to hold hands most of the time and tends to wander, so my mother-in-law tied one end of her scarf around Lyra’s chest, and then she felt as if she were roaming free and ran around with so much glee, that we were just happy to watch her.

I remember this age being a lot of work with Adriana. When they’re one they can do so much, but they don’t have any common sense yet. That means I’m constantly hearing the baby screech because she’s shut herself into a bedroom and can’t let herself out or making her sit down on the sit-and-spin or in the bath, fishing little things out of her mouth or reminding her to be gentle with pretty much everything. It's a little easier this time, because I've been through it before, so I was more prepared for it and I know it won't last forever. And also because there are still the sweet little baby moments--nursing her in the arm chair while she holds a fistful of my hair for security, her funny chuckle when we play peek-a-boo, snuggling her when she’s all wrapped up in a towel after her bath. It’s hard to believe that she isn’t the tiny little newborn I’ve been seeing in the pictures I’ve been looking at from last year, and it’s hard to understand that that little lump in the photos is this funny, adorable little girl napping beside me while I write this.

11 months

Lyra is only eleven months old, but even Adriana is telling me, “She’s not really a baby anymore.” Just after reaching 10 months, Lyra took her first steps and her walk quickly developed from zombie to drunk elf to ZOMGWTFHOWISSHESOBIGALREADY. She still staggers around and falls down a lot, and still continues to crawl much of the time, but she scampers after her sister through the house as best as she can, a big smile on her face. Most of her stranger anxiety seems to be gone, which is convenient because as she toddles around, she doesn’t have to worry about whose leg she grabs to pull herself back up after a tumble.

We’re begin to think we might have a lefty on our hands. My mom was left-handed and Brian’s father is ambidextrous, so it’s definitely a possibility. When Lyra eats finger foods, she mostly uses her left hand, and that seems to be the hand she uses to pick things up, even when it seems to us that her right hand would be more convenient. When she goes staggering around the house clutching a random object (a block! a spoon! a Target receipt! a magnet! a package of dental floss!--all great finds when you’re 11 months old), it’s in her left hand. Wondering which hand she would use to draw or write, I tried handing her a crayon the other day when Adriana and I were drawing, and she took it in her left hand....and then chewed on it.

She eats what seems like a lot to me, although Adriana certainly messed with my perspective on that. She hasn’t mastered a sippy cup yet, but she likes to be offered one, and will also take sips from my water glass (with help, of course).

Lyra babbles a lot now, and so much of the time it sounds like she’s talking because of her different sounds and the inflection, but the only real word so far seems to be “mama.” She repeats sounds when asked (when she’s in the mood)--b, d, f, m, and s. She likes to pretend to talk on the phone. It started when she would grab my phone or a toy one, but she’ll do it with a block or another toy, or even just her hand. She holds whatever it is up to her ear and shouts vowel sounds. Sometimes she does seem to approximate “hello” (ah-whoa), but that might just be my imagination.

The phone trick seems almost like sign language to me, and I know I need to start being better about signing with her. Lyra does a little bit of signing, but nothing consistent yet. She’s had “milk” off and on for a few months, and I swear she signs music. Today I started noticing that when she was looking at and exclaiming over the cat she was patting her cheek, which seemed like a start toward the sign for cat.

For a while I thought we might have a better sleeper on our hands this time around, because Lyra seemed to sleep better on her own in the cosleeper than Adriana ever did, but now Lyra seems to sleep for extended periods of time only when snuggled up with me. As she’s struggled with a few minor colds this fall, she’s spent lots of time sleeping in my arms, which means I end up with a sore back and shoulder some mornings, but I haven’t been too inclined to do much about it, because waking up to find her still in my arms, my cheek on her hair is awfully nice.

She is a lot of work now: she doesn’t nap as much as I might like, and she gets into everything. I’m lamenting the fact that she’s no longer a tiny baby that rides in a stretchy wrap on my chest and sleeps most of the time, because I really do love the newborn days. But she’s fun now, even as she’s knocking down a tower of blocks that Adriana has worked so hard on or pulling bags of cornmeal and sugar out of the kitchen cabinet that didn’t latch properly. And when she was a newborn I couldn’t ask her for a kiss and have her lean in sweetly to give me one the way she does now.

10 months

Each month when I sit down to write about Lyra, I can’t help but peek back about what I was writing about Adriana at the same age. I so often think that they have different personalities, but most of what I wrote about Adriana at ten months holds true for Lyra as well: she’s cruising, clapping her hands on cue, and sitting longer for stories.

These days Lyra loves to stand up, and pulls herself up constantly on my jeans or the furniture or Adriana’s hair. She lets go and balances quite well, and when she applauds herself she hardly ever loses her balance anymore. Until this past weekend, Lyra showed little interest in walking--she would take a step or two while holding the couch if she thought she might finally get the cat, or step carefully from the bathtub to the toilet to try to splash in it--but other than that she wasn’t cruising. Then while we were in South Pasadena for Halloween, she began moving herself along the furniture, and when we got home she discovered that the felt pads on the legs of our small end tables make the tables glide easily across the floor and she can move about upright quite easily by pulling herself up on them and pushing them around.

Lyra seems fascinated by music, moreso than Adriana was at this age, although perhaps I’m not remembering correctly. I just told someone the other day that Adriana didn’t cruise much, but according to my blog she did. I signed up for a Music Together class with both girls, and Lyra in particular loves it. She adores watching the other kids, of course, but she also is thrilled by the music. She likes to pound on the drums and shake the rhythm instruments. Her stranger anxiety isn’t nearly as strong as it was a couple of months ago, but it is definitely still there. But even on the first day of class, she was willing to go to the teacher when she sang. When we put on the CDs at home, she pulls herself up and bounces in time or claps along. She is soothed by singing or by music being played.

Lyra loves water. She comes crawling to the bathroom when she hears me running the bath. If I'm not bathing the girls together, she loves to stand next to the tub while Adriana's in it, splashing. When it's her turn, she crawls around chasing after toys, and then lies back calmly while I rinse her hair. A couple of weeks ago she lunged for a toy and ended up face down in the water. I pulled her up quickly, and she choked and sputtered for a minute. I waited for a moment, sure that she would cry as soon as she caught her breath, but instead she laughed and hurled herself face first into the water again.

Her sleep is unpredictable. While Adriana's nighttime sleep was erratic at this age, I think her naps were at least fairly consistent. But Lyra is always being forced to nap on my back while we shop, or picked up during the nap when it's time to go get Adriana from school. She does seem to take a late nap a lot of evenings, around six or seven, which means she is often up until ten o'clock. Adriana was a night owl, too, until she gave up her nap last winter, so even though I enjoyed having both girls asleep by eight, this isn't totally foreign to me. And most nights I’m honestly not sure how well Lyra sleeps. I know she usually wakes up around midnight and then I bring her into bed with me. After that I’m usually not sure whether she wakes up or not. She does seem less dependent on nursing to fall sleep initially, though. Brian is able to get her to go to sleep more easily than he ever was with Adriana, and sometimes to get her to sleep even I end up rocking or bouncing her on my back.

My favorite time of day with Lyra is morning, I think. Some days she nurses and then falls back asleep for a twenty minutes or so, and I'm awake beside her when she first starts to wake up in earnest. She stirs and then her eyes slowly open. It takes a few moments before she turns and sees me, and then she smiles and crawls closer to me, to play and snuggle. If Brian's still in bed, too, she crawls to him as well, pulling on his nose to get his attention.

Unlike Adriana at this age, Lyra seems to be a good eater. Of course, because of my experience with Adriana, my expectations are low, so when she eats even a few tablespoons of food, I think she's an awesome eater. She'll eat pretty much anything we eat if I run it through the food mill, and she is getting the hang of finger foods. I think I'll be disappointed when she moves entirely to feeding herself, because the way she stretches her neck forward with her mouth open, a little bird waiting to be fed, so adorable.

These days so much changes so quickly that I am often thinking of the little things I'll miss: the sight of the fat diapered bottom crawling away from me once she begins to walk, the way she grins up on me when she pulls up on my jeans, the way she plays with my hair while she nurses. Everyone loves to tell me “It all goes so fast,” and it’s a cliche, but I always know they are right, but there are instances when I am just completely in awe of the sweetness of all of this and I wish I could slow it down.

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.

Eight months

In the past month Lyra became actual work to take care of. I guess she had been work before, but not the kind of work that I’d noticed. But she crawls now and her sleep is erratic and she is busy and alert so she nurses for about a minute before getting distracted and losing interest, only to be fussy and hungry ten minutes later. Without someone keeping a close eye on her, she gets into things we wish she wouldn’t--taking toys that Adriana doesn’t want her to have, or tipping over the cat’s water dish, or chewing on my sandal that I left by the door, or pulling open drawers seemingly only so that she can then lean on them and make them slide in, all the better to pinch her fingers or land face first on the floor.

She started crawling a couple of weeks ago. She’d been experimenting with it since six months (and at six and a half months had crawled a couple “steps” at Adriana’s gymnastics one day--I think the mats made it more comfortable and easier), and I was sure she’d be crawling by the time she hit the seven month mark, just as Adriana did, but we had another couple of weeks of rocking with hands and knees being tentatively lifted from the floor, followed by face plants (which got louder but seemingly not any more painful when we moved into our new house with hardwood floors). We had a few days of watching her crawl a little bit here and there, and then there she was across the room, and I would hear her thumping after me if I set her down and walked away for a minute.

The crawling is hilarious to me this time around and I need to take video. Lyra actually seems smaller to me now that she’s crawling. She is definitely a smaller baby than Adriana was (I can tell from the hand-me-downs that still don’t fit), so it may be in part that it’s funny for me to see so little a baby moving. But the size difference isn’t that huge and my memory of Adriana’s size at this age is not really that clear, so I think it’s just seeing how small Lyra is compared to Adriana now. At any rate, I am regularly amused by the little baby crawling around after a toy that has rolled away, or the cat, or her big sister. When there’s something she really wants--like following her sister out the open door--she puts her head down and crawls determinedly as quickly as she can. When she comes to find me she crawls to find me and then sits back on her knees to look up at me and give me a huge four-toothed smile. When I have to set her down when she is upset, she crawls after me, crying “ma ma ma ma.”

For the record, I don’t really think the “ma ma ma” babbling is actually intended as “Mama.” Lyra has two sounds she makes, “ma” and “ba.” “Ba ba ba ba” is her contented chatter as plays with a baby doll or chews on the spout of a sippy cup or sits on my lap at the park while I talk with my friends. She switches to “ma ma ma ma” when she is upset.

Stranger anxiety has emerged in the past month, taking me by surprise. Did I not hand Adriana to people as easily as I do Lyra? Or is Lyra really just that much more upset by strangers? Because I don’t remember handing Adriana to someone to have her immediately burst into tears the way Lyra does. Lyra is still a happy, social baby, smiling at anyone who speaks to her. But I handed her to a man she’d never met before when we were at a baby shower a few weeks ago, and she became instantly fussy. The next week, Brian’s parents were in town, and she cried when her grandpa picked her up. But that right there is the main theme of the stranger anxiety: it’s men. How does she know? Is it their deeper voices? A different smell? I just know that she seems to know, that I can hand her to another woman to hold and she’s fine, doesn’t even need me in her sight (usually).

Although she’s more work at this age than she was a few months ago, she’s more fun. It’s fun to have a baby who likes to eat (she grabs for food out of my hands now in addition to always leaning forward to accept what I’m spooning into her mouth), even though that means thinking a bit about having food for her and cleaning her up afterwards (and, ahem, afterwards). The sister relationship is growing nicely. Adriana is still sometimes obviously jealous of and other times understandably bothered by her sister. But she is very good about bringing toys to the baby and tells me how to take care of her. Adriana is likely to yell “Lyra has a choking hazard,” at me when she sees Lyra with something small, and usually responds to my suggestion that she take it from her (if it were one of Adriana’s toys that Lyra had, you know she would just take it back) by yelling “Mom, Lyra has a choking hazard!” Which...fine, I guess I won’t let the three-year-old care for the infant. But there are times when they are so sweet together. Adriana lies on the floor letting Lyra crawl all over her back, and she asks if I will put Lyra in the swing at the park so that she could push her baby sister. They splash together in the bathtub and giggle at each other in the back seat of the car.

Six month stats

For the record, because at some point I will want to know and willl check here first because it’s easier than digging out the baby book, at Lyra’s six-month checkup yesterday, she measured 27 inches long and weighed in at 17 pounds 2 ounces (85th and 68th percentiles). She is the same length that Adriana was at this age, but more than a pound lighter. She was wearing nothing but her diaper last night when I mentioned this to Brian, and we looked in amazement at her neck folds and chunky thighs, and wondered how big Adriana had been exactly. We concluded that Adriana had chubbier cheeks. That explains the missing 18 ounces on Lyra, right?

Six months

When Adriana was a baby I would say every month, “This month is better than last! I want to keep her this age forever!” And I am doing the same thing with Lyra. Six months seems just about perfect to me. She is sitting up and smiling and cooing. But she’s still not going anywhere (at least not too quickly) or making any mischief (at least not intentionally).

It wasn’t until right at six months that Lyra was sitting up well (and she still can’t get there on her own), while Adriana was sitting well at about five months. But Lyra already seems more mobile than Adriana did at this age. Lyra rolls everywhere, and wishes she could crawl--pushes up, but can’t get her knees under her, and just ends up shoving herself backwards. This mobility is enough that we now have to be strict with Adriana about little toys on the floor. For the most part she’s been quite good about keeping pop beads and doll shoes and various little bits of Hello Kitty-themed plastic off the floor. She’s been dismayed, though, to find that Lyra can get her hands on bigger toys. Adriana has always been pretty good with younger children and toys: she knows that if they take something she doesn’t want them to have, she can usually trade with them for something she is willing to share. But that’s apparently a lot to ask when it’s her own younger sister in question. It just seems unfortunate to me that this issue is coming up at exactly as Lyra has reached an age at which she objects to having a toy taken away.

Lyra has continued to be one of the happiest babies I’ve ever met. She seems very social, always smiling when she sees people, and taking an interest in board books with photos of baby faces. She’s been somewhat fussier the past month as her first two teeth came in. I was surprised by Adriana’s first few teeth; she would just wake up in the morning with a new one. Lyra’s teeth, however, hover below the surface of her gums for several days, and she is vocal about her discomfort. Luckily, she has an older sister who likes to bring her cold teething rings, so most of the time she is still very smiley.

Five months

Lyra is ever the happy baby. She smiles at anyone who smiles at her, and chuckles when I bounce her on my lap. We tickle her, too much probably, because we like to hear her laugh. She isn't a baby who never cries, but when she does, it's usually not for long and she is easily soothed with singing or snuggling or milk.

I don't remember noticing Adriana become social, although I do recall that she would smile at herself in the mirror. Lyra does that, of course, but she also just seems fascinated with people in general. She watches everything we do, and loves it when people talk to her. At the library last week Adriana got out a board book with photos of baby faces, and Lyra seemed to be paying attention to the pictures and smiling back at the babies in the book as we showed it to her. And I've noticed that when she is nursing she wants my attention. If I am reading or writing while she nurses, she keeps stopping and fussing and wiggling and grabbing at my face, but when I stop everything else and just look at her and talk to her, she settles down and looks at me and nurses.

She wants to move, and can roll easily across a bed now, so I am careful where I set her down. When I set her on her playmat she occasionally reaches up and pulls on the toys, but she usually rolls over onto her belly and lies there kicking and wiggling, as if swimming. She grasps my fingers and lets me pull her up to stand, and she can sit unsupported for a few seconds before she topples over to the side.

Lyra's sleeping and eating are starting to become more organized, or would be if she weren't the second child and always being toted somewhere. If we're just at home, I can predict pretty easily now when she'll sleep and for how long and when she's going to need to nurse. But we go out to the park or need to get errands done before we meet a friend at the library or have to go to preschool, and so the sleeping baby is woken up as I take her down to the car or she nods off to sleep because I am walking quickly with her in the wrap, or I know she's tired and would probably fall asleep if I would just let her nurse for comfort but first I have to help Adriana get ready.

Lyra already adores her older sister. It's hard to feed the baby when Adriana is in the room, because Lyra keeps turning to see what Adriana is doing. Adriana jumps on our bed, and Lyra watches with big eyes and her mouth open in delight, squealing when Adriana bounces closer. And no one can get the baby to laugh more easily. Watching their relationship form is one of the best parts of this.

Four months

At three months, Lyra was sick with some sort of virus that left her feverish and me exhausted, and I kept thinking of what I should write and never actually put anything down. So now it is a week past four months, and here is everything I can think of all at once, so that I can just post this and not forget what this age is like:

Lyra smiles back at anyone who smiles at her, and we easily coax big, toothless baby grins from her. I've managed to get a few chuckles out of her with little tickles, and one day when it was hot and I turned on the ceiling fan, she sat in her chair laughing at it for five minutes straight. She's been rolling over for several weeks now, mostlly from her back onto her front, though she can go the other way too. She holds up her head easily when I have her in a wrap on my chest, looking around at everything. She doesn't sit unsupported yet, but she grabs my fingers as she lies on her back and lets me pull her to sitting, and seems to like it when I set her sitting on the bed and let her fall gently to the side. She likes to be snuggled against me in a wrap and falls asleep easily that way, but after being wrapped up and dragged around with Adriana and me all day, she always seems glad to be set down, stretching her arms out over her head, straightening her legs, then grabbing her toes and rolling to the side. She studies one hand, opening and closing her fingers, while sucking on the other. It has seemed all along to me that she coos more than I remember Adriana doing, but she has lately become much more vocal, making lots of sweet little baby noises (that are getting a bit louder than they have been in the past). And we have reached the perfect stage of nursing, where she looks at me while she eats, sometimes pulling away to smile at me or to make her funny baby sounds, and she seems happier when I pay attention to her while she eats, so when we are alone I sing to her and we focus on each other's faces and it is perfect and sweet and lovely.

Two months

I read somewhere a description of life with kids: the days drag on and the years fly by. I thought that was true with one, but it is standing out so clearly to me now with two. Each day I am going back and forth between two people who need me, trying to balance and juggle those needs, while trying to have fun with them. And at the end of each day we have had fun, but I am tired and watching the clock and wondering if I'll ever be able to get anything more done than just keeping us fed and moderately clean. Still, I'm also shocked to find that it's already been two months. I see the brand new babies of friends, and Lyra, who was 11.5 pounds and 23 inches long at her checkup on Tuesday, seems so big, and I find myself missing having a little baby. I remind myself of that while I try to keep Adriana out of trouble while she helps me in the kitchen at dinnertime, and I catch myself wishing that Lyra were big enough to be carried on my back, instead of on my front, which makes cooking awkward. Then I chide myself for wishing her bigger, wishing away this time with my tiny one.

Lyra spends so much more time awake now, and I know I said that when I was writing a month ago, but at least now she seems more happy about waking up to the world around her. We get big smiles now--beautiful gummy baby smiles--when she is in the bath, when she is eating and pulls away for a moment to look at me, and sometimes when she's just awake and happy. She coos, too, which is interesting and fun for me, as Adriana never did much of that.

There are times when she fusses and cries, of course, and, as with Adriana, I wonder how on earth parents of colicky babies manage to cope, because after five minutes of crying we are usually in a panic, because clearly something must be horribly wrong. Even though the solution is always the same, we still can't quite remember it at first, so I try feeding her again and we change her diaper, and maybe even her clothes, because what if there's a tag or a seam somewhere that's bothering her? And then we rock her and bounce her and start over again, until one of us remembers that Oh! The last time this happened, putting her in the pouch worked! So we get the pouch and drop her in and within a minute of being held close and tight like that, she is content again.

In that way she is very much like Adriana. I remember someone commenting to me when Adriana was only a few weeks old that she seemed to be a very needy baby, always wanting to be held, and even at the time I marveled that that would seem like a very big need. I mean, if being held is all that it took to make her happy, I thought I had it pretty easy. I get the same feeling with Lyra. Yes, she needs to be held a lot, but now with Adriana not wanting to be held some of the time when I would love to hold her (and, of course, demanding I hold her at times when it is highly inconvenient for me), it seems more important to snuggle Lyra while I can. We do still keep commenting on the differences between the two girls, though: Lyra loves her bath and coos when she is happy and awake, as I've said, but she also loves "tummy time," which Adriana generally seemed certain was a terrorist plot, and when I had a dentist appointment last week, Lyra willingly took a bottle the first time it was offered, while we tried for months to get Adriana to drink from one before giving up and wondering why we'd even cared.

Not that I'm going to be giving Lyra a lot of bottles. Nursing is still one of my favorite parts of this stage. I mean, Adriana is still nursing a little bit, too, and that's nice, but there is something special about cuddling a little baby when she is hungry, watching her close her eyes and relax in my arms, feeling how tiny and warm she is, that I can't really explain. I get a little less of that this time as it is, since half the time I'm nursing I'm also reading Pooh stories to Adriana or helping her put together a jigsaw puzzle. And that just makes me appreciate mornings like today, when Lyra and I were the first ones up and we snuggled together in the arm chair while she ate, even more.

One month (and a few days, because honestly, I have TWO now--nothing happens on time)

Coming home with a new baby a month ago seems so far away. Was it only a month? Really? But then again, I can't believe it's been a month already. Lyra seems so big already, so much sturdier. We all seem to be getting used to having her here. We are finding a sort of a rhythm--albeit a chaotic one--as a family of four, and it's hard to remember exactly how things worked before she was here.

In some ways, she is very much like Adriana. I suppose all newborns are mostly alike--they sleep, they eat, they poop. Lyra looks looks like Adriana did as a baby, with chubby cheeks and her head of wild, dark hair. Like Adriana, she's happiest when she's being held snug and upright, close to us in a pouch or wrap. She doesn't seem to be as big a fan of being swaddled as so many newborns I know. If we swaddle her up in a blanket, she usually fights her way out of it quickly and then calms down. And like Adriana she so far seems to refuse to be very regular in her eating and sleeping patterns. But there are differences, too: Adriana screamed about baths for at least the first month (enough to traumatize Brian enough that after the first few baths, he didn't give her another for a good year and a half). We put a fussy Lyra in the tub when she was a week old or so, and remembered that my friend Lyndelle had suggested making Adriana more warm and secure in the bath by putting a washcloth over her body. I did that and Lyra instantly calmed down, but I think it was just being in the water that was calming for her. Now popping her in the tub is the quickest way to make her a happy baby. She waves her arms and legs around while I pour water over her, and just generally seems content.

She is spending more time awake now, and she seems unhappy about it. I had forgotten how much new babies sleep, and spent the first couple of weeks wishing Lyra would wake up more so that I could see her eyes and maybe interact with her a bit. But now that it's happened, I'm unsure what I was thinking. Interact? She doesn't do much when she's awake. And when she is awake she's mostly fussing for something. Still, we do get to spend some time playing with her little hands and feet and tickling her cheeks and chin to get her to make funny faces.

She is growing well. She has been a good nurser from the beginning, but I was still anxious about her weight gain, so I put her on the scale when she was two weeks old, since we were at the pediatrician's office for Adriana's three-year check-up. At that point a baby should have regained her birthweight, and since that was all I was really hoping for, I was pleased to see that she was 12 ounces over. She still seems like a little baby to me, having been born three inches shorter and almost two pounds lighter than her sister, but Lyra is finally filling out the clothes that fit Adriana at birth. And I can already see her emerging from what a friend called "the potato stage:" she tries to hold up her head (and is sometimes successful; she gives little smiles that at this point I think are real; and I watched her eyes track the cat all the way around the edge of the cosleeper last night--all little things, but things that weren't happening a month ago. Then I watch Adriana jump off the couch and give me my line in the game she wants me to play with her and it's so strange to remember that she was a little lump like this once, too, and to imagine Lyra in a few years as an active, creative little girl. I'm looking forward to that day, but for now I'm mostly enjoying this feeling of having a newborn again. This time I am so aware that it's not going to last long.

Three

Sunlight and singing

Lyra Noelle

January 2, 2010

3:57 PM

8 pounds, 1 ounce

19 inches

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i

like you better than everything in the sky

--sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere

with such a silence and such a darkness

noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year--

and if what calls itself a world should have

the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such

sunlight as will leap higher than high

through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearerness)everyone certainly would(my

most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

-e.e. cummings