Milestones

What does this look like to you? According to Carrie, it’s “a people!” She told me what she was drawing: “eyes, a nose, a mouth…legs, feet, shoes…arms and hands!” This is the first time I’ve ever seen her draw something more than a basic shape and have it look like what she said she was drawing. I had to take a picture, since it’s not likely we’ll be keeping this piece of paper, but when she becomes a famous artist someday she might want to see her first real drawing.

Coincidentally, we signed her up for preschool today. She’ll be going two mornings a week starting next fall. We had to write a brief description of Carrie on the registration form. How do you sum up a child in two lines? We wrote something silly about how she loves dogs, and books, and books about dogs. And that she’s active and loves to play with puzzles and baby dolls. But we probably should have written something about how self-confident and independent she is, and that she’s caring and polite and adorable and a stinker. Oh, well, they’ll find out soon enough, right? And we have our next big challenge: she needs to be potty trained by the time school starts!

Every first is celebrated in a child’s life. First time sleeping through the night, first steps, first words. Carrie slept in her “big girl bed” for the first time sometime last month. But she slept in her crib for the very last time last Wednesday afternoon.

We took the crib down yesterday. Her room looks so very different, and based on the trouble she’s had falling asleep since I think it will take her some time to get used to it too.

I have such mixed feelings about this transition. On the one hand, Carrie is so very proud of the fact that she’s sleeping in a big girl bed. She tells everyone she sees. And that makes me very happy for her. On the other hand, although she’ll always be my baby…she’s not a baby anymore. Not only because she’s sleeping in a bed of course, but that’s one major sign I’ve noticed lately.

It was so much sooner than we’d planned to move her, but she was ready. I’ve shed my tears over taking down the beautiful crib I so lovingly picked out for my cherished baby girl, and we will pack it away for future hopes and dreams. And I hope I never, ever forget how she looked sleeping in the crib with her little bottom stuck up in the air…my baby.

We’ve been experimenting with the inflatable toddler bed I bought this summer in the hopes that Carrie would sleep in it on our Disney trip. Yesterday we tried starting her out in it for both her nap and bedtime, but both times she asked to sleep in her crib not long after.

Today at nap time Carrie insisted on sleeping in her Winnie-the-Pooh bed. I told her the rule: if she gets out of bed she has to sleep in her crib. She didn’t budge. Two hours later I heard her talking and went up to check on her, and she was still tucked in her bed, talking to her stuffed animals.

She initially wanted to sleep in it again for bedtime, but then asked for her crib. We’ll see how the rest of the week goes – it would certainly be easier to bring the inflatable bed with us on our trip than the pack & play (which she’s technically too tall for…)

I think we have an official first word! Today Carolyn demonstrated that not only does she know how to say “llama”, but she knows exactly what it means. If I show her the llama, she’ll say “llama”; if I ask her to find her llama, she’ll go and pick it up.

If you click on the image, it will open up a video (536 KB) of Carrie saying “llama”. She needed a little prompting for this one, she was too fascinated with the camera to care so much about the llama! (Sorry for the poor quality – the battery on the good video camera needs to be charged so I took the video with my cheap digital camera instead.)

Watching Carrie acquire language – both spoken and signed – is simply amazing. (Although it’s probably not as endlessly fascinating to anyone else as it is to me!)

Today Carrie was standing at my parents’ coffee table, and noticed the delicious-looking cordless phone on their end table. Instead of getting down and crawling over, she took 5 steps to get there, and didn’t fall down at the end! She’d strung a couple of steps together before, but only towards a waiting parent and with tons of encouragement, and it was more like a long forward fall. This was the first time she walked with an independent destination in mind.

It’s really funny that she chose today to officially start walking, because Denis and I had a bet going: he thought Carrie would walk around September 1st, I thought she’d walk around August 1st. Now we both win! (It was our standard bet: the loser has to give the winner two kisses.)

Earlier today Carrie was standing next to the ottoman in her room and she took two steps towards me without holding onto anything. She did it a second time a little bit later, so it definitely wasn’t an accident!

Both times she collapsed into my arms giggling, like it was a big joke that she was walking.

It won’t be too much longer before my little baby is officially a toddler…

Carrie started pulling up this afternoon. She crawled over to my parents’ coffee table, put her hands on the top, and ended up on her feet. She was quite pleased with this new perspective. Now, in addition to all the other general baby-proofing we need to finish, we’re going to have to start securing things to walls.

Is it just me, or does she seem to figure out several new things all at once? And isn’t it much too early for her to be doing all of this? I thought for sure I’d have at least another month or two before I had to start chasing her all over the house.

In other baby news, we started giving Carrie a second meal of solids today. So far, she’s tried – and liked – rice cereal, pears, sweet potatoes, apples and bananas. We’re going to start some less sweet things, like carrots and peas, in the next couple of weeks, so I wanted her to have one meal with something familiar and one with something new.

I should be careful what I wish for. Remember, just a few hours ago, when I said Carrie was going to start crawling because we’d just told the pediatrician she didn’t yet? Yep. She did. I even caught it on video:

Her first successful crawl was directly for the pedals on the piano. I looked up from my knitting (I was just trying to put another row or two on her poncho) and there she was, crawling away. She practiced all afternoon. I thought babies were supposed to sleep a lot after getting shots? Not this one. She apparently doesn’t like it when we tell people that she can’t do things yet – it just makes her determined to show us that she can!

Carseat, that is. Carrie’s outgrowing her infant carrier, and even if she weren’t I really can’t tote her around in it anymore because the seat plus the baby weighs easily 30 pounds. Carrying that in one hand, around knee level, just isn’t all that great for my back! Since I’ve taken to leaving the seat in the car and just toting the baby around anyway, we decided to upgrade sooner rather than later.

So, we bought a Britax Marathon. Not a cheap seat, but she ought to be able to use it until she’s around 4 or 5, at which point she’ll be safe in a belt-positioning booster seat. It does take up a lot of the backseat of the wagon, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

I’m going to miss a few things about the infant seat. Mainly that, in a pinch, I could snap it into the stroller or carry it into the house and let her continue napping when she fell asleep in the car. Now I’ll have to interrupt naps to get her out of the car. Also, the sunshade was really useful, and there isn’t one on her “big girl” carseat. Oh, and in the winter, we didn’t need to bother with coats because we had a nice toasty carseat cover. I will definitely miss that this winter!

Plus, it means she’s getting bigger, and we all know how I feel about that. Can’t she stay small just a little longer?

Dear Carolyn,

Of course, the day after we told the pediatrician you weren’t rolling over yet, you decided it was time to. And of course you couldn’t do it while anyone was watching, could you? Daddy put you down on your back and sat down at the piano, and a few minutes later he looked over and you were on your tummy!

This is the end of the easy part, isn’t it? Before, if I put you down somewhere, I could be reasonably sure that you’d still be there when I came back – you could sort of rotate yourself around, and creep at about an inch an hour, but now…once you figure out how to roll from front to back you’ll be able to roll your way across the room.

I guess it’s time to start getting serious about the baby proofing stuff, isn’t it?

Love, Mommy