Now that she’s loving the cruising, Amelia is also LOVING the coffee table. She can go all the way around the table, chew on the corners and, most importantly, LOOK THROUGH the table. This is a particularly enjoyable exercise, as it involves crouching, bending, and then craning forward to see through a neat hole. Lately we’ve been putting toys in the cubbies to keep the game fun, but these photos were taken before she started to get bored with the “look through the cubbie” game.

Is it just me or is Amelia getting more beautiful every stinking day?

Amelia has been pulling up for weeks now, and creeping for a good week or so, and is still very under-interested in crawling.  At school, I am told that she rolls where she wants to go, flipping from her belly to her back, over and over, until she gets where she wants to go.  Sometimes she does this while protesting and sometimes she does it silently and her teachers look up a few moments later and she’s laying 5 feet from where they left her.

This does not happen at home, needless to say.  I imagine we’re way too responsive to let her complain that long; moreover, her play area at home is much smaller – not so many things on the other side of the room to entice a baby.

What she does a LOT at home is creep.  Though she decided not to perform when I broke out the camera (she TOTALLY knows what a camera is, as do most first-borns I imagine), she frequently starts at the far side of “the pond” (exersaucer) and creeps all the way to the entertainment center and then all the way along the entertainment center until she hits the wall.  The wall has lots of interesting wires and things that babies like to grab for…

This video also has her making some of the awesome sounds she’s practicing lately: the OH! with the glottal stop at the beginning, and the tththththtp sound too.  She learned O and N in the same week, but not in any connection to each other.  Still, I wondered if it were a sign of Words To Come.

We have the funnest baby in the whole world. She just gets more fun and charming the older she gets. I love how she laughs when you tickle her ribs or under her chin! In Tom’s family (I think it’s a Texas thing, but I’m not sure) they call it “stealing her sugar” when they kiss or nibble the baby in a way that makes her giggle.

Amelia’s teachers all agree that she grew longer in the week that school was closed. She has been blowing them away with her new, wide smile and her ever more confident manner. This week she’s started sleeping on her belly at school, which was a big deal and I think gets her to sleep faster there. (This does not work at home, but lots of things that work at school don’t work at home.) I feel really lucky that the women she spends so much time with at the Montessori school are so genuinely loving and interested in our darling girl. It makes me feel much more confident about our decision to have her there, despite the almost crippling cost of it.

It has been a while since I’ve added anything to this, partly because I’ve been swamped with work and keeping an infant happy and fed.  But below is a little indication of why.  The office gave us many generous gifts, one of which was this exer-saucer thing.  The instructions said it was good for 4 month olds and up.  Well Amelia is there so I put it together last night to see if she was ready for it.  I think the video confirms, she is.