In fourteen days, I will have an accurate height and head circumference to give you, but in the meantime, I have only a weight to give you an idea of how giant my baby is. As of this Tuesday, Amelia weighed a jaw-dropping 23 lbs 10.6 oz. My dad tried to measure her length with a tape measure and he got approximately 29 inches, but this might not be entirely accurate. She is wearing 12-month pants, but 18- to 24-month everything else. And 2T dresses fit surprisingly well.
All this means that whenever I'm stupid enough to take Amelia on a walk without a stroller or baby carrier, I get insanely jealous of my friends who have babies just as small as Amelia is big. On the other hand, my biceps are insanely grateful that Amelia has given them a reason to live. They used to be shriveled up pieces of limp bacon in my arms, but now someone might even venture to risk calling these babies muscles. Huzzah!
Just before Amelia and I left for our Utah-Arizona adventure, our home visitor from Healthy Start1 gave her an eight-month developmental assessment. She had extraordinary fine motor skills... but on the other hand, there were some things to worry about. Namely, Amelia had roughly zero interest in food (or even putting anything in her mouth as it seems most babies her age do incessantly) and roughly zero interest in mobility. They gave me tips on how to encourage her to move2 and to mouth things, but I feel like these were fruitless attempts at getting a horse to drink the water I just led it to.
WELL. Fast forward to now. Apparently there was absolutely no need to worry, because now does exhibit interest in these things. It happened suddenly, too... like somebody flipped a switch in her brain.
Amelia is a voracious food-lover, despite having a zero tooth-count3. If I'm eating it, she's gotta have it too. Her first actually swallowed food item was a few soggy green beans from a beef soup at Sizzler while we were in Provo. I wasn't sure whether to believe the disappearance of these green beans meant Amelia had actually consumed them--until, that is, I rediscovered them in her diaper, smelling like decaying flesh.
Zoinks, solid-fed baby poop is exponentially worse than exclusively-breastfed baby poop. I am thus now more enthusiastic than ever about elimination communication. As satisfying as it is to flush breastmilk poop down the toilet without having to wipe more than a dab of it off baby's bum, it is that much more satisfying to NOT have to wipe caked solids poop out of Amelia's many rolls and crevices. Plus, when baby poops directly into the toilet, the blessed water covers the fetid waste so you don't have to smell it so much. Viva toilet seat reducers!
Forgive the TMI tangent there.
Anyway, Amelia has enjoyed everything we've given her tastes of. We've decided that, given her personality, Amelia will do well with baby-led weaning4, so we'll be skipping the pureés entirely. I didn't know there was yet ANOTHER5 nonconformist parenting method we could practice, but there you go. I found yet another. I really need to start hugging trees or something.
Amelia's diet is still mostly breastmilk and I'm hoping to keep it that way at least until she's one year old. And then I will continue to breastfeed on demand until she finally weans herself entirely. There are so many benefits for doing so that I just couldn't imagine weaning early (prior to two years old).
That said, the one disadvantage of breastfeeding (besides Amelia's constant sour cream breath) is that the high prolactin levels my body is producing while breastfeeding are preventing me ovulating still. So no more babies yet. Problem is, I am so pumped and ready for baby number two, it's not even funny.6
I suppose some (or even most) might see lactational amenorrhea as a huge boon, but after heavy consideration I have decided to listen to my instinct: I think my body won't do as well with pregnancy as I get older due to my scoliosis and Harrington rods. A few of my health providers suspect this as well. So in that regard, it will be wiser to have all7 my babies ASAP. James is okay with this plan, so hopefully the next kid'll come soon.
Gosh, I'm just going on all sorts of tangents today. Back to Amelia consuming stuff.
While Amelia and I were in Arizona, she fussed a bit more than usual. At first I was confused, but thankfully it didn't take me long to figure out what she was trying to communicate: I'M RIDICULOUSLY THIRSTY, MOM! PARCHED! I'M SHRIVELLING UP INTO A BABY RAISIN OVER HERE! SAVE ME!
So, she picked up water-drinking skills fairly quickly. She's now fairly proficient at using water bottles and regular cups. She doesn't really get straws, and we haven't even tried a sippy cup yet. But cups and water bottles? Oh man. "Drink the Water" is the best game ever. She'll actually pull the cup or bottle back if you try to take it away, even if her thrist seems to be momentarily quenched. If she's already gorged on water, she'll take more sips anyway, and spit it out all over herself.8
Amelia is... quasi-mobile. By that I mean that she can't purposely move from Point A to Point B. But she definitely moves. She can thus far only scoot backwards while on her hands and knees, so she usually gets further away from her intended destination. This seems to frustrate her to no end.
However, there are signs that she will be fully mobile soon. The desire is clearly there. I've seen her rocking back and forth on her hands and knees several times. Once, after a several-minute concentrated effort of intensely deliberate coordination, I saw her bring one of her knees forward--and then she collapsed. So close, and yet so far.
Amelia also has been experimenting with what I call the Spiderman pose. Both hands on the ground, one leg bent up with foot on the ground, and the other leg fully extended out to the side. Spiderman pose. Part of me hopes she somehow adapts this into a Spiderman crawl, because we'd get so many nerd points that I'd cry many tears of intense parental nerd joy.
On the other hand, there is a slight possibility she may start walking and skip the crawling altogether. She'll take a few steps if she holds onto my hands, though she isn't cruising along the edges of furniture yet. The girl IS pulling herself up to stand... and sometimes, just pushing up off her feet from the sitting-on-the-potty position directly to the standing position, with nothing to hold onto. Thankfully, she can't maintain that for more than a few seconds yet. We may yet have time.
Amelia is quite talkative and makes all sorts of speech-like sounds. She does say, "MAMAMAMAMAMAMAAAA!" when distressed, but I don't feel she equates "mama" with me yet. Oh well. My mother is convinced Amelia is starting to imitate our speech because she'd say "gooh" over and over again after reading Goodnight Moon; I, however, remain unconvinced. Though... I will admit that by the end of my visit to Arizona, I did find myself wondering if I was just imagining her saying "geeyuk" everytime she saw a cat and "guhg-guhg" everytime the dog came to visit her. And this morning, I said, "Good morning, Amelia!" and smiled smiled real big and responded, "Gooh!"
So far we have been spared stranger anxiety. For this I am immensely grateful, as travelling alone with a stranger-anxious baby could have been overwhelming. Instead, she is totally confident in herself and flashes grins at all the old ladies everywhere we go. And also any novel-looking people who have such unique qualities like beards, tattoos, sunglasses, or lots of jewelry. Thus, going out and about is always a treat.9
I guess besides Amelia getting wiser and stronger everyday, the only other news is that our family has decided to start eating nutritarian again. Permanently. Yay! I might do another post a bit later explaining what this means and why we're doing it, as well as how we plan to teach Amelia to eat well too. However, I'm beginning to tire of typing, so I'll save that subject matter for yet another day.
Love and nutrients,
Jenna and Amelia
1 Someone comes over every week to see how Amelia and I are doing. They also inform me about stuff going on in the community that might be helpful. To be honest, I decided to do the Healthy Start program because they give out free kids' books. What can I say? I'm a sucker for free books.↩
2 One of the most common pieces of advice I've been given to help Amelia develop gross motor skills is to put a much-desired toy just out of her reach. This has been largely ineffectual. I've discovered though that she is most enthusiastic to get to ME if I am just out of reach.↩
3 I don't know when her teeth will suddenly appear. It's supposed to be largely genetically determined. My mom tells me my teeth started coming in around six months, Becca's a bit after that, and Jessi's were latest around nine months. I don't know when Dilts babies usually get teeth.↩
4 Not to be confused with child-led weaning. Which we are also doing.↩
5 Besides cloth diapering, that is. Thus far, we haven't been doing it solely because it would cost us $3 per load in our apartment complex's communal laundry facilities. Otherwise we'd have done it from the start. We're excited, though, to start cloth diapers in December once we live in a place with washer and dryer hookups. Woot! We are moving up in life! Washer and dryer!↩
6 How this feeling came about, and more specifically, how it lived through Amelia's six months of colic, I couldn't begin to tell you.↩
7 My current fantasy is ten babies. Yes, you read that right. And yes, while I was pregnant, I was the one saying I don't know if I could do it more than one more time. It'll be interesting to see how I feel during my second pregnancy.↩
8 This apparently deliberate spitting makes me wonder how futile a sippy cup would be.↩
9 For Amelia anyway. Sometimes I miss being able to go out in public without people being friendly and talkative at me. Amelia seems to be a people-magnet.↩
