The last couple of weeks have been horribly busy and tiring, and I haven't been able to post blog updates nearly as often or in as much detail as I would prefer. I'm throwing a bunch of items into this update, and then hopefully get back onto a reasonable schedule from here on out.
Last week was pretty difficult for us, because Dorothy was often waking up at 3am, all ready to play for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, Mommy and Daddy weren't in the same mood. I think I just convinced Elizabeth to write an entry about the whole sleep thing, though, so I'm going to skip those details for now. Look for details from Elizabeth tomorrow.
Monday, September 6th was Dorothy's six-month birthday! She's been around for six whole months. Time has flown by and dragged by, all at the same time. It's amazing to think of how big she is, compared to when she was born. At birth, she was just under 8 pounds. Now, she's probably 18 pounds (we'll find out next Tuesday at her six-month check-up), so she's easily doubled her birth weight, and then some.
What else has she been doing? She can now sit up for extended periods of time, at least 10 or 15 minutes before some random wobble will go a bit too far and she'll topple over. She strongly prefers sitting up, most of the time, to laying down. If you lay her down, she'll often fuss until you sit her back up. And she likes standing even more. She's been able to pull herself up to a standing position for over a month now, probably more, if she can grab your fingers. Recently she's learned where your fingers need to be for standing (versus for sitting), and if you're not letting her stand up, she'll push your fingers away to where they should be for helping her stand.
Dorothy can get stuff to, and often in, her mouth (more on that below). Drooling has also become a major pastime. The little goofball will smile and flirt with everyone who gives her half a smile. And literally the first thing just about anyone comments on when they meet her for the first time is her big, beautiful blue eyes. She's also been expanding her repertoire of sounds, most recently to include the Death Rattle (an inhalation noise that sounds as if you're gasping for air). And of course she's been teething. The two bottom teeth that appeared a while back have slowly been working their way up. To be fair, for the most part Dorothy hasn't seemed too upset by the whole thing. But occasionally, she'll get extremely fussy, practically inconsolable. Then we need to break out the Tylenol or Orajel. The first real big fussing time took us a couple of hours to realize it was probably teething. The episode was frustrating because she would calm down and appear to fall asleep in my arms if I held her a certain way, but if I moved towards the crib to lie her down, or even shifted her position much, she'd erupt into screams. Luckily, that situation hasn't occurred often.
On the topic of grabbing things is the matter of object translation. Once she could grasp objects, Dorothy was able to take them and bring them to her mouth, if they were directly in her hand. She couldn't quite understand that if objects have any great length to them, instead of bringing her fist to her mouth, she'd have to bring her fist nearby her mouth, offset (translated, in geometry-speak) by the length of the object, in order to get the interesting end of the object into her mouth. She now seems to have the translation concept mostly figured out, but rotation is the part that still needs to get worked on. She doesn't yet seem to understand the orientation of objects and how to fit them into her mouth properly. I was watching her try to get a figure-eight shaped teether into her mouth sideways, instead of end on. Her mouth is pretty big, but it wasn't quite big enough to fit the teether in. And she'll pick up cardboard baby books or similar objects, and bring the wide, flat part to her open mouth, and try to fit it in, but it never does...
Posted by Tom Nugent at September 10, 2004 09:57 PM