Claire has been a good little baby these last couple weeks. She is slowly changing from a helpless and simple baby to a complicated little person with desires and needs of her own. (It kind of scares me! Real parenting is about to be necessary!) She has developed the ability to point at things that catch her eye. Sometimes she points at the tiniest or most random things like a strand of hair on my shirt, or a bird in the sky. If I don’t respond right away to help her touch something she wants, she will practically lunge right out of my arms to reach it.
She is practicing her talking all the time. She now says “ma-ma”, “ga-ga”, “gig-gig”, “nay-nay”, “nye-nye”, and “ba-ba”, as well as lots of funny noises with her tongue. Still working on the “da-da”. I am really excited to hear what she has to say to us. I don’t think it will be too long before she is talking like crazy.
Some of Claire’s favorite things right now are her BOOKS, looking at her glow-worm, her toy camera, laughing at Honey, laughing at Daddy, eating baby food pouches, going grocery shopping, her toy hammer, drinking from mommy’s water bottle, watching big kids play, sitting on her scooter, and swinging at the park. She loves books so much, she demands that I read a few with her every time we sit in the rocking chair. She even remembers the pages and goes right for the little touch-and-feel details! She is an expert scholar of “Pat the Bunny.”
One of her least favorite things right now is going to physical therapy sessions. We have gone three times, and the place is great and the therapist is really sweet, but Claire just cries almost the whole time. She has to endure the scariness of being handled by a stranger even as she is forced to sit in positions that are very uncomfortable for her. Mostly the therapist is trying to get her to twist more and get used to being “off-center.” We work on her core and arm strength as well. The therapist and I agree that Claire missed out on building that core strength in her early months when I kept her propped up all the time (to avoid the dreaded spit-up). I think the sessions are helping, at least the therapist says she is getting stronger and more tolerant of tipping/leaning. And its given me new ideas of how to help Claire along a bit. But I’m still OK with her not crawling right now. Much easier to keep track of her that way!
