Teeth! or rather, tooth!

Finally yesterday, after months and months of “I think she might be teething”, I felt the top part of a tooth. It is extremely sharp. It is your bottom right tooth and I’m expecting the bottom left one to pop up any minute now.

You are still drinking bottles and eating mashed up baby food, but I’m slowly moving you towards more solid food. Your newest is just eating bits of soft bread. Or other crunchy things that can dissolve in your mouth. You look angrily at us whenever we eat now but there’s not much we can share with you yet!

This morning, Aba said, there are only 3 things she likes to do: play with shoes, crawl into the bathroom, and climb the stairs. Because, of course, those are things we don’t want you to do. It seems like they are the only things you ever want to do!

Also yesterday, you took 3 or 4 steps while holding onto the couch. You are getting so much bigger every day.

You are my fearless girl. Already, you can climb the main staircase in the house. You just take it one step at a time until you get all the way to the top. And I can tell that you feel like you’ve made an accomplishment – you didn’t get up there on accident. You squeal and giggle when you make it to the top. I do admit it feels dangerous to me. I never know what you’re going to attempt to climb next! You also try to climb in/out of the bathtub.

Your babble sounds come and go. The most consistent one is Baba or Aba. So Aba wants to claim that Aba is your first word. Recently you’ve also started to say Nuh Nuh and I’m trying to figure out if you mean Noam when you say it. I haven’t heard Ma sound again since the first couple of days so I am anxiously waiting to hear that one again, of course!

At this point you can definitely understand more than you can communicate. It frustrates you, making you scream and scream. Especially when you see something you want, you just start screaming – sometimes it’s in excitement, sometimes agitation.

There are things that you really like to do that we don’t want you to do like playing with shoes, crawling into the bathroom, or crawling up the stairs by yourself (you don’t know how to get down). So when I call out to you to come back, you stop, turn around, give me a knowing smile… and then… keep right on going. Occasionally I can get you to come back but it’s rare.

My dear, dear girl.

I think maybe you’re teething right now. It’s hard to tell but you are clearly uncomfortable and not sleeping well. I don’t know what’s bothering you and it makes me feel so bad that I can’t help you. Last week, I took you to the doctor and he didn’t find anything wrong.

You are still at the stage where you put everything in your mouth. So it’s still very difficult to read books to you. But I finally succeeded a couple days ago with a short baby board book that you did not try to eat at all. It’s a book that Noam chose to get for you as his summer reading prize at the library instead of choosing a book for himself.

Today when I read that book to you, I said “duck” and “baby” and other simple words to describe things in the book. I also said “bath” and for no particular reason I also said bath in Hebrew. I guess because I wanted to make sure you understood. Aba always takes you up for your bath so I knew for sure that you know it in Hebrew. Anyway, when I said that you actually stopped looking at the pictures, turned around, and gave me a very puzzled look. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe my pronunciation was way off or maybe you just knew that it was a different language. Smart girl!

Babble! You’ve been shrieking and blowing raspberries for weeks. Then all of a sudden today, when you woke up, you were babbling real consonant sounds, like mamabana.

You’ve also been pulling yourself up to standing. So things on the coffee table are no longer safe, out of your reach.

I think Noam is afraid of you. You love him so whenever he is within reach, you try to grab him but you don’t know how to be gentle. So even if you are trying to give him kisses, you are basically mauling him, pulling his hair and pinching him. He does really enjoy bringing you toys, doing forehead “boots” and even reading to you.

You are giving me sweet slobbery kisses every day. Usually it’s when you’re just seeing me again after some time apart, like in the morning or after the nanny. It’s great how happy you get to see me. It lights up your whole face.

As of 2 days ago, I would say that you can officially crawl. Actual crawling on all fours, not just you pulling yourself along. And when you’ve only barely just mastered that, you’ve already moved on to trying to pull yourself up to standing. You can’t quite do it by yourself yet, but you will be able to do it soon.

No first words or hand signals yet as far as I can tell. But you are trying to communicate through sounds. Sometimes you get loud and shrieky but just today you’ve started to make single grunts as if they’re words. Maybe soon you’ll make syllable sounds!

My dear, dear, baby girl.

It feels like every day I say, she is so cuddly! She is so cute! You have the most amazing smiles. Sometimes your smile is so big you have to squint. But you get so cranky when you are tired. You are the sweetest first thing in the morning and after naps. Evenings are touchy.. depending on how much you’ve napped.

Now you are 7 months. You spend most of your time on your tummy trying to crawl. As soon as you learned how to flip from your back to your stomach about 3 months ago, you have not stayed on your back – not even for diaper changes. You don’t even know how to flip back. And when I leave you sitting, you end up on your stomach within minutes.

This week you have started to get really mobile. You see something you want, and you go for it. It doesn’t even look like you’re moving but you move pretty fast. Your uncle Richard says it looks like you are swimming on land. I think you look like an inchworm. You push up onto your knees, sometimes even up to your toes and then flop forward.

You started smiling when you were about 1 month old and you’ve been laughing for a few months now too. But you’ve just starting social laughing, like making conversation with a laugh, just a couple of weeks ago. When you first started cooing, you also tried to talk by making noise during a intake (Aba calls it oocing). Now you make a lot of sounds like a sheep baaing, which always makes me smile. I can’t wait for you to start making syllables like mamama and bababa! Sometimes you just start shrieking and boy can you get loud. It’s not from being upset though. We think that you think you’re talking.

You save your biggest smiles for Noam. He can make you smile and make you laugh while barely trying. But he is a busy boy and doesn’t try very often. Now he is actively trying to get away from you because you go after whatever he is playing with and try to eat it. Today he actually played peekaboo with you for 5 minutes with both of you giggling wildly.

We have started you eating solid foods and you are up to 1.5 meals a day now. You don’t like rice cereal at all and tolerate oatmeal. Your favorite so far is carrots.  About 2 days ago, you’ve start sticking your tongue between your lips and blowing our your cheeks. And then you make that PPPhhhhhlpppt  sound. Sometimes you get a little cross-eyed or red in the face. You look so cute doing it but it makes feeding you really challenging.