Amelia is not what I understand to be an “easy baby.” I don’t know what it would be like to parent such an animal, but here at Chez Wigglet, Amelia is frequently Hard To Please. Granted, she’s in nowhere NEAR the bad mood she was in during The Colic Months, but she still has high standards and still gets really fussy for no damn good reason. Plus, she’s… outspoken.

Of course, no one sees this but Tom, me, and her teachers. In “public,” Amelia is 99% coos, sighs, giggles and calm. Drives us both slightly up the fucking wall, I can tell you – though I would be mortified if she were as high maintenance out in the world as she is at home.

I will fess up to the possibility that Tom and I are huge sissies, unable to stomach even 5 minutes of a crying baby after all those months of inconsolable sobbing. So maybe the monkeys are flying the plane at our house, it’s fully possible, I admit it. We don’t know how else to parent her and keep our sanity, so we mostly just try to keep her happy without killing ourselves. As a colleague tells me with a weary intensity: “You do what you have to, to survive.”

Grim, huh? Yeah, I have a LOT more ego than I thought I did before I handed my life over to the care and feeding of the little tyrant.

All of which is completely off topic – what I am really posting about is how Amelia gives Tom such a hard time so many afternoons. When she gets fussy and Tom is caring for her, she has this weird thing about him having to hold her and walk around with her. He can’t put her down, or sit down while he is holding her, without her starting to fuss. Hours of this.

And then I get home, and it’s all smiles and squeals – which is cool cuz I got the jooce, we all know how that works – except then after Amelia gets her snack, she will sit on my lap and be rocked, or stand by her “pond” and play while I walk away or get a bite to eat or whatever. Which she practically NEVER lets Tom do. And I know from experience, it rankles after a while.

She’s starting to get a sense of object permanence, meaning she now will get some separation anxiety when one of us leaves, or she’ll cry when a toy is taken away from her, but the “dance, Daddy, dance” routine is older than that, and it’s disappointing that she’s still doing it. Especially considering the sacrifices we make to have her with Tom in the afternoons. Is she anxious when it’s just her and him? why would she be, after all this time? Why is she so much more relaxed with me, when I spend less time with her?

Any thoughts? If you could solve this for us, it would totally make our week.

Multi-tasking: standing and holding a paci!

Another supercute thing that I hear about from Amelia’s teacher(s) is how much she and a little boy in her class, L, enjoy each other’s company.  They regularly have “lunch dates” now, in which they both sit at the baby-sized table and eat, babbling to each other all the while.  Lately they’ve gotten even fonder of each other, passing toys back and forth across the ballet bar that they like to stand at.

Amelia likes to hang upside-down after nursing, and L really enjoys crawling over to touch her face when she’s upside down, which Amelia finds hilarious.  L, interestingly, hates being upside-down, grabbing at the adult’s shirt who tries to suspend him in such a precarious position.

Amelia has started moving her fingers up and down over her mouth while making noise, which comes out like “B-B-B-B-B-B-B,” (someday I swear I will get it on video) and L thinks that is just FASCINATING.  He loves watching her do this, and can’t seem to figure it out himself, even though he is older by a couple of months and crawling and signing and things.  Today, I’m told, he stuck his finger in Amelia’s mouth while trying to decipher the technique.  Not to be outdone, she stuck her finger in his mouth, too!

They both get irritated with the 5-month-old baby, M, who is crying a lot lately (my theory is growth spurt).  And evidently, Amelia and L fight sometimes too.  One teacher told me she watched them playing happily with different toys one day, sitting next to each other, when Amelia got mad that she couldn’t reach L’s toy (which was too high up on the wall for her) and started to cry.  L got mad about Amelia crying and started crying too, and they both scooted to where they were back to back, presumably crying because the other was “being mean.”

It’s so interesting to see how interactions of little, little people bears so much resemblance to the interactions of large people.