Thursday, February 1

This was a day of several firsts! Julia turned 7 months old today, and to celebrate, she started crawling! She still doesn’t have the mechanics entirely down – she will make a few crawling movements, then push up on her toes in a leapfrog-like motion, then flop down to her stomach and reach for her target. She also took off hat for the first time. She was in her back carrier on the way to her South End playgroup when I saw her bare-headed reflection in a store window. I wasn’t able to reach the hat, so I had to trust her to continue clutching it until we reached our destination. Fortunately she did, but on the way back home I was stopped by a passerby handing me the hat Julia had discarded. 

Yesterday we attended our first music and movement class at the Community Music Center of Boston. We sing, dance, and play instruments. Julia really enjoyed the class, bouncing up and down and flapping her arms to the beat.

Sunday, February 3

It seems like Julia’s doing several new things every day now. Of course, she’s probably been learning several new things every day all along, they just weren’t as obvious to us – “wow, some things are light and some things are dark”; “hey, if I suck here milk comes out!”; “boy, I keep seeing these same two people an awful lot”; etc. Yesterday she started shaking her head, as if she were saying “no,” although it’s flirtatious rather than contrary.

Today she started saying “ma ma ma” again; she’s done with “ga ga ga” and has moved on to a new consonant. She’s also been smiling broadly when I make the “nurse” sign, but we don’t know if she is beginning to understand what it means or if she just thinks the motion I’m making with my hand is really funny. Most exciting, she’s begun pulling up on the coffee table. She likes to stand against it and play with the remotes. Unfortunately, though humorously, she thinks she can stand , so she’ll sometimes let go with both hands and start to fall backwards – “timber!” Fortunately, we’ve managed to catch her every time, but we’re not sure how she’ll learn to hold on without taking some tumbles.

Saturday, February 10

Julia is suddenly able to crawl on slick floors, without the traction she gets from carpeting, so she can go farther afield now. She moved off the area rug in the living room onto the hardwood floor and kept going for the first time. Seeing her leave the rug, we rushed to get our gate mounted at the top of the stairs! She also ventured over the threshold into the bathroom from the carpeted hall; in the past she’s gotten to the threshold and started to cry with frustration. 

Wednesday, February 14

Not only is Julia progressing in crawling and pulling up, but occasionally she will let go of your hands when you’re helping her stand, and she can maintain her balance several seconds. She’s been able to stand unsupported a little longer each day – today it was long enough for Josh to snap a picture .

Saturday, February 17

We can see that Julia is developing a sense of separation anxiety, which is common at this age. When she’s well rested and well fed, she’s friendly to everyone and happy to let other people hold her. But when she’s starting to get tired or edgy, only Mom will do. She’s usually content to let Josh hold her if she can see where I am – “look, Mama’s just washing her hands” but it does make things more difficult than before. Often, though, she’ll be fine if she and Josh move a different room from me – out of sight, out of mind.

Monday, February 19

Today, Julia did something most impressive! She’s been able to pull up if she grabbed onto something at waist level or higher, but today she stood up from a crouch. I was sitting on the floor, and she did put one hand on my leg at first, but that only gave her a few inches off the ground. She did most of the work with her legs, slowly rising from crouching to standing, and put her arms out to the sides for balance. Once she was standing she quickly grabbed on to the coffee table so she wouldn’t fall.

Tuesday, February 20

This morning Julia sat up from a crawl for the first time. Now she can go from sitting to crawling and back to sitting again. This must be very exciting for her, as she’s no longer dependent on us to put her in the position she wants, unless of course what she wants is to be held! Her crawling is improving rapidly, although sometimes she still thinks her feet, rather than her knees, are involved somehow, and crabwalks around for a few moments.

Friday, February 23

A big milestone – Julia pulled up in crib for the first time today. Now she will never go to sleep; she just wants to stand. She’s also returned to babbling after a hiatus of several weeks, this time with “da da da.”

Sunday, February 25

Although we started feeding Julia “solid” foods in mid-December, when we thought she was expressing a lot of interest in what we were eating, she hasn’t seemed very enthusiastic about baby food. The past several days she had hardly eaten anything, and neither of us was having any fun with it. (Fortunately, since she’s nursing, we don’t have to worry about her needing the solid food for its nutritional value at this point.) So yesterday I thought we might get a better reaction if she tried something with a little more texture – I’d gotten a pretty good reaction several weeks ago when I fed her some avocado I’d mashed up with a hand blender her Great Aunt Pat gave us. So we cut up some banana into small pieces and fed them to her, and she really seemed to like it! I was worried she wouldn’t be ready for non-mashed food, but she gummed it up quite well and never had problems swallowing it.

In retrospect, we suspect that the problem for previous few days had been that the two jars of food we were using were things she doesn’t like. We usually have one jar of fruit and one jar of vegetables open at once, and she eats about 1/3 of each jar every day. The two jars we had going were peas, which we had fed her before and thought perhaps she didn’t like, but we wanted to give them another try to be sure, and peaches, which were a new food for her. Because she was never eating very enthusiastically, it was hard to tell when she didn’t like something. But now she readily opens her mouth for food (including jar food we tried since the bananas yesterday), so I think we’ll take peas and peaches out of the rotation for a while. 

Tuesday, February 27

Julia really entertains herself exploring the house. She likes to crawl around and pull up on anything that seems interesting. She bangs on things with her palm to see how they feel and what kind of sound they make, looks at them intently, and finally puts them in her mouth. On the one hand, this means it’s easier to put her down for a moment, since she doesn’t need an adult to entertain her all the time, but on the other hand you have to watch her constantly since there’s so much more trouble she can get into!

She’s also getting more expressive, with more varied tones of voice. And two months after the first one, she’s finally getting her second tooth, on the bottom next to the other one. We haven’t seen her standing unsupported recently, though, so she may have stopped to work on other things.