Baby Days

With a break in piano lessons, tennis, and a small lull in church duties, I've been loving time at home with Jessica. She is a great baby, and has started smiling just a little when I talk happy right next to her face. We tried a name brand formula (a gift), plastered with labels of all the wonderful things inside it. But her digestive system detected it's not "gentle" or "soy" and so has been she's been verbalizing to us to get her diet right.


Jessica's neatest feat lately is that she has slept 6, 7, or 8 hours for the last 4 nights. I still have to get up at 4 am, so I'm still a little off-kilter (read: don't get out of my pajamas til late morning.) Smokey likes to snuggle against me when I'm feeding the baby on the couch. Gratefully he doesn't try to sleep next to her.

Jessica loves her nightly bath; her little belly is round as a cantelope now. Dave noticed if you tickle her, her stomach tightens and her belly button pops out even more!

She is starting to be more patient when I make her bottle: she stares at the lights in the kitchen, then listens to the water run, then sucks her cherry gas drops out of the dropper, then puckers up tasting it. (I'm narrating the whole procedure to her, and mixing the bottle and bouncing her because she's usually desperate for food after a nap.) Then she waits while I put on a bib, and shake the bottle in front of her face. She can usually make it through all that without crying now, so hooray for routine and her learning brain.

She also twists her body during her diaper change and waves her hands at the hutch shelf. She used to pull down all her big blankets, so I had to move them, and I replaced it with a rattle giraffe. We play this little game of who can be first: me changing her diaper or her knocking over the blue toy. She usually wins. Either she's very smart : ) or just has great helicopter arms (Grandma E's favorite baby feature.)

Big thanks to Grandma & Grandpa R for buying us a lovely, soft, machine-washable, reclining, tall-enough-for-Dave, super-cushy glider rocker and ottoman. It is heaven to sit in, and we volunteer more often to rock the baby in it.

Here's Jessica, just after a neck-stretching yawn. She got a sleeper outfit from a family at church, and it reminds me of a book I used read as a kid: but we'll keep her with us all the same.