Five months

One day recently, I was giving Adriana some "naked time"--letting her play around on a thick towel on the bedroom floor. She was lying there completely naked, smiling at me and trying to fit her feet into her mouth, while I put away laundry. I looked down at her and suddenly realized that someday this baby will yell at me and slam a door. Will get a driver's license. Will go off to college. I thought for a moment that I might like to stop time right now and stay here forever.

Right now she is just a wonderful, beautiful five-month old baby who rolls around naked on the floor. She likes when we dance around the house with her and when we sing to her. She likes having raspberries blown on her belly, and playing peek-a-boo. Giggles and growls and coos lead to shrieks and belly laughs as Adriana explores her vocal range. Sometimes I think she sounds like something out of Jurassic Park, but mostly I just try to get as many laughs out of her as I can, because I have never heard a more wonderful sound. I think I need to make a recording of her baby laughs and squeals, so that I can play them back some day far in the future when she yells at me and slams a door.

She charms people wherever we go with her big gummy grins and funny baby noises. "Are you always such a happy baby?" people always coo at her. Sometimes I want to invite them over for one of her fussy days, the days where she still giggles and smiles, but intersperses those with fussing for no apparent reason. One of the days where I think that the only thing I haven't tried is getting up and dancing for her, and suddenly I turn on some music and do a funny dance and she laughs. And then five minutes later she's fussy again because she's hungry, but she can't concentrate on eating for more than a minute at a time because the cat just walked by, or the dogwood branches outside the window caught her attention, or she suddenly realized that the spinning ceiling fan deserves her complete attention. But mostly I say that yes, she is a very happy baby, because most of the time she is. I know that I have a very easy going kiddo.

She lets us pull her up to sitting and sometimes will support herself for a couple of seconds in a seated position by leaning forward onto her hands. She rolled over from her tummy to her back for the first time the day after she turned four months old, and immediately did it twice more when I rolled her back onto her tummy. Then she didn't do it for three more weeks. Recently she's been focussed on going back-to-front, and sometimes, despite my explanations about "back to sleep" and AAP recommendations, she rolls onto her tummy to sleep. On Friday morning when I set her down on my bed, she rolled from her back onto her tummy and saw a blanket that she wanted. So, with a lot of grunting and wriggling, she used her knees and feet to push herself toward it (with her face shoved into the mattress). Finally she grabbed the edge of the blanket and rolled onto her back, shoving a corner of the blanket and her thumb into her mouth. "Am DOOOOOOMED," I emailed a friend. This little girl wants to be mobile, and I see my job getting a lot harder in the near future.

But I don't actually want to stop time right now. Even though it seems that everything is going too fast, every new stage, every new development, every single little change seems so amazing that nearly every day is better than the last.