maddie diary      december 1997

7 months old on 29 december

this month
     - trying to crawl
      - rolling over both ways
      - eating pureed meat, fruit, veg

size
      -

activities
      -

interests
     - examining things
      - then putting them into her mouth

General Activities (12/31)
When I come home, Maddie greets me with a big smile, a little scream, and a quick flapping of rigid arms.  I give her a kiss, but by the time you get that close she's more interested in the second-closest person, frequently Augie.  After we feed her, we take her upstairs so we could change.

I tend to sit her on the bed and lay out a toy to occupy her.  I try to put the toy slightly out of reach so she'll get used to being able to strike out and go after objects.  If she's grumpy or not particularly occupied by the toy, I'll change gradually, jumping out of the closet occasionally and yelling "boo", which is a huge crowd pleaser.
 
Childcare is an elaborate tag-team ritual without the actual tagging.  Whoever is last in the room with the baby is now in charge, usually without anything said.

We eat dinner while Madeleine bops around in her exersaucer.  She's never terribly interested in the built-in activities on her saucer, so we generally supply her with a few rattles and other items that she handles for a while, scrutinizes, and then waves around excitedly, ultimately dropping them on the floor-sometimes by accident (after which she looks over the edge curiously), sometimes almost by design.  Eventually, she grows tired of being in the saucer and one of us has to pull her out and attempt to finish our dinner while balancing her on one knee.

Mobility
Maddie's now lurching forward from a sitting position after minutes of trying to get over her seemingly massive (in this maneuver, at least) feet.  Then she's in the initial crawling position, but she can't reconcile her arms' desire to move forward with her bodies' need to have them push backwards for the greater good.  So she stays on her arms and (partly) knees, rocking slightly forward and back.  After a few minutes, not seeming frustrated yet, she lowers herself onto her face and seems to rest for a few seconds, only to push up again and start all over.

If she doesn't lurch forward from sitting, she kind of pivots, always counterclockwise.  She also does this from the pushup position instead of rolling over.  She slowly moves around in a big arc.  

If you put something just out of reach in front, she can writhe and eventually reach it, although I can't tell how-it looks almost as though she's actually elongating herself. 

When she gets onto her back, she spends a lot of time grabbing her feet and stuffing them into her mouth.  We've got her sucking on a pacifier pretty frequently (and almost all night), partly because she would otherwise jam anything in her mouth, resulting in lots of spit down her front.

She likes to study items carefully, then plunge them into her mouth.

Sleeping
The bedtime routine: change her into pajamas, then let her suck down the better part of 6 ounces and start to drop off, and cradle her until she's all the way out.   She wakes up occasionally at night.