Ten months

Time goes so fast when you have a baby. I am pretty sure that just last week I was sent home from the hospital with a new born, and now it's like we have a little person around here. I mean, sure, she's a little person who poops her pants and can't get to sleep without help and whose audible communication skills are fussing, crying, and shrieking, with the occasional raspberry and "ba ba ba" thrown in, but still, she is noticeably moving from baby toward toddler.

Not that she is a toddler yet. In spite of dire predictions from various family members, Adriana is not yet walking. She cruises quite well these days, but still prefers to crawl if she wants to move quickly. I'm actually sort of excited for her to start walking. Yes, I know that comment is going to come back to bite me at some point, but I just think that if she's going to be mobile it would be easier, especially when we're out and about, if she were up on two feet instead of crawling.

Adriana is more fun to play with every day. She puts blocks into a box now, instead of just dumping them out. We have a stuffed monkey that she hugs and pats (and sits on and waves around). If you sing "If You're Happy and You Know It" she claps her hands, although not at the right time. She likes to chase and be chased, although it seems funny to call a version of the game that moves so slowly "chase." She likes the swings at the playground, and splashing around in the bathtub. She sits still for stories sometimes, and seems to particularly like the books we have with photographs of babies and children.

She is finally seeming to enjoy food a bit more. She never eats very much, but she is willing to try, and that is progress enough for me. In the mornings, she and I share a bowl of oatmeal. At lunch we usually have some yogurt with fruit and flaxseed. Snacks are Cheerios and slices of fruit that she feeds herself, or sometimes we feed each other. At dinner time, Brian and I feed her from our plates. The other night she ate lentil soup with great gusto and I wondered if the main problem with all the food I'd been offering in the past few months had been the lack of cumin, but the next night when we had leftovers she barely ate any at all, so I once again have no idea.

We go back and forth with sleep. For a few days last week, she was waking up too often at night, and I was exhausted. When she woke up "only" five times one night I felt refreshed--after all, that was better than waking up eight times--but that feeling was short lived. The past few nights she seems to be sleeping a little better, and both nights there has been a four-hour stretch that is absolutely heavenly. I know there are going to be good spells and bad spells. The problem is that when we are having bad spells I am too exhausted to try to fix things, and once we get through the bad spells, I think that things are going well and there's no need to worry.

These days, my favorite parts of the week are our yoga classes. The best one is the Friday morning one, which isn't as well-attended as the others. Adriana is usually the oldest baby there. She plays with the other crawlers, and investigates the smaller babies. And on Wednesdays when there are often older children there, she watches the toddlers with great interest and follows them around the room (usually picking up the Cheerios they drop behind them). She climbs on me as I do sun salutations, and cuddles up to nurse during the relaxation time at the end. Unless she curls up to nurse with me while the rest of the class does sun salutations and climbs on me (or one of the other moms) during the relaxation at the end, which isn't too bad either.