Eight months.

(This post is several days late but we’ll call that a rounding error.)

After sitting and rolling, Ingrid is now focusing her efforts on crawling. While she can move around, it still takes a great effort and she doesn’t have as much control as she would like to: she ends up in the wrong place, or cannot reach quite as far as she wants. She is very close to mastering real crawling now – in the last few days she has discovered the classical crawling position (on her hands and knees) and is just about to figure out what to do next. Right now she assumes the position but doesn’t yet move her hands or legs forward.

In the meantime she has been preparing for the next stage, which is standing and walking. One of her favourite games is to hold on to my hands and pull herself from sitting to standing. Initially she got sort of stuck in the standing position: her legs would get tired and go wobbly, and she would look a bit miserable, because she didn’t know how to sit down. But she’s figured that out now. She’s even experimenting with letting go of one hand, or holding onto my arm or knee or some other suitable thing (or unsuitable, such as the edge of my clothes, which don’t give her much support at all).

Sometimes she blithely lets go with both hands even though there’s no chance she can stay upright with no support, because she has no real concept of falling or hurting herself, and very little understanding of cause and effect. Anything that hurts her probably comes as an unpleasant surprise every time: I imagine it would feel as if the floor had suddenly hit her, or the world suddenly hurts. I’m in no hurry to teach her about those concepts yet. If she hurts herself by things that she does on her own (like kicking the floor), that’s one thing, but while she is playing with me, I’m happy for her to rely on me.

She seems to have learned to kiss. At least that’s what I think she’s trying to do. Her kisses are very wet and mostly open-mouthed, and sometimes mutate into a half-bite, half-kiss thing, but they are generally aimed at my face and she seems very happy when she does it, so I guess it’s kisses. It is really sweet.

Today I discovered the first tooth. I wonder if that will lead to even more chewing. It would seem impossible for her to be more chewy than she already is, but I’m sure she can surprise us.

We’ve been experimenting with food quite a bit. Ingrid has tried both chicken and fish, and rice and pasta and potato, and yoghurt. She likes drinking water and sucking on Finncrisp rye crispbread. Some store-bought baby food jars proved unexpectedly popular, while some things that I thought would be no-brainers (nectarine and apricot) were rejected immediately and decisively.

She has also rediscovered her ability to make sounds. She was making simple vowel sounds (aah and ääh) several months ago but then stopped and went quiet. Now she’s clearly trying out a new range of sounds again. Da-da-da is a common one, as is hä-hä-hä. The former could easily be interpreted as the beginnings of “daddy”, if it wasn’t for the fact that she says it in all sorts of situations that don’t involve daddy, so it’s really just vocal gymnastics.

Separation anxiety comes and goes. At times she is happy playing on her own, other times she gets upset the moment I leave the room and she cannot see me. On the other hand she is happy to go wherever I am, and doesn’t mind playing on the bathroom floor or sitting in the kitchen watching me make a sandwich.