It’s hard to believe that just a month ago Sonia took her first stumbling steps. She has never looked back. Within a week, she was getting up to standing without assistance, then picking up and carrying objects much heavier/bigger than would seem possible (or at least sensible), and playing in a crouched position.
Toward the end of the month she’s started to explore her physical boundaries even more. Some of her favorite games have been going up and down the few small stairs to the patio (learning to go down right, finally!), balancing on objects such as the bathroom scale or a pillow she’s pulled from the couch, climbing onto or into objects such as an Amazon box or her ducky tub, and standing on her head/attempting to do somersaults. Needless to say, there have been a lot of moments like this: clomp clomp clomp, bump!, waaaah, okay?, clomp clomp clomp, giggle giggle. 🙂
Along with all the motor skills, Sonia’s vocabulary continues to balloon! Some of the new words we have noticed this month are: help, please, thank you, baby, food, cheese, blueberry, berry, oatmeal, bread, broccoli, egg, hot, diaper, ribbit (meaning frog), ear, teeth, cheek, walk, outside and again. And this month something new as well; signing! It came on all of a sudden, like I was told it might, and seemed to take her no time to pick up a few key signs: food, more, again, all done, bath, but surprisingly not milk. With the added quantity, though, some of her quality has suffered: ball lost the “ll”, avocado went from “Avo” to “agda”, and out of context a lot of the words do sound alike. Still, it’s pretty amazing how many words she can understand and at least attempt to say in the correct context. This became especially apparent when we sat her down with her Rocket’s Mighty Words book open to a page with a bunch of chalked pictures on a blackboard and started asking “Where is the..?” We were astounded at how many of them she could pick out! Guess we’d better start watching what we say around her 🙂
Sonia’s play continues to mature as well. She has gotten better at her legos and stackadoos, will go get toys like what she sees in a book, and has even started to want to “help” Mommy with tasks such as sweeping the floor. Little by little she’s becoming less of a baby.
All of these developments came despite it not being a very healthy/happy month for Sonia. After we got back from Wisconsin, Sonia’s nose continued to run for another week. She then got a low grade fever for about 12 hrs, and after some investigation we realized she had just cut the 2nd of her 1st molars! After that, she got quite a bit better, but has still not completely gotten over her stuffy nose. There are 2 more molars to go in this batch, so unfortunately this might go on for awhile. We’re not sure, though, if it’s really just the teething, or if there still is a cold and/or allergies at work as well. Poor thing.
A final, and quite major, change this month is that we have stopped nursing. The decision to end it came a week after getting back from Wisconsin. Over that week, Sonia had asked for milk every day just after we had finished nursing in the morning. Having read that supply tends to drop toward the 4th or 5th month of pregnancy, I assumed that process was starting for me. It also began to hurt a bit more, either due to the drop in supply, Sonia’s new teeth, or perhaps a change in her nursing style to get around the stuffy nose. The whole process was pretty quick, 2 days to cut out the morning feed, and another week mostly for me to come to terms with cutting out the evening feed completely. Sonia didn’t seem to mind. A couple times she pulled my shirt out to look for milk there, but went right back to the straw cup. There was not much discomfort for me either, so I was glad we could reach this mutually agreeable conclusion. Another step toward her no longer being a baby anymore. Unfortunately, now I can’t eat whatever I want anymore,either. 🙂