Five months yesterday.

What have we done this past month? Ingrid has chewed and licked on a lot of things, above all. Hands. Toys. Spoons. Front bar of buggy. Empty milk carton.

In order to be able to chew on things, she has learned to grip them and take them to her mouth. That’s still very much a hit-or-miss procedure – her hand literally misses the thing she wants to grab, or misses the mouth and hits the ear instead. But she understands the concept, she just needs to practice. For now, it isn’t her preferred approach: she would rather dive with her mouth towards the toy than bring the toy towards the mouth.

For a while she was also interested in her feet and was pulling at them all the time, as soon as I lay her on the play mat. But then suddenly lying down became BOOOH-RING!!! and now she only accepts it grudgingly for short periods. She really wants to sit up all the time. And not in the same place all the time, please – she wants new things to play with or look at. Unfortunately she isn’t really able to sit up for very long without being strapped into something or other. Her toys, on the other hand, are not strapped in and tend to fall to the floor rather frequently, so sitting and playing in the highchair can be rather frustrating for both of us. But when I put her down to sit on the floor, where she can reach her toys, she sort of scrunches up into a little uncomfortable heap, and then topples. Sometimes head first and crying, sometimes just slowly and inexorably. Either way she ends up lying down, where she doesn’t want to be.

All this activity is upsetting her stomach – and it doesn’t help that she folds far forward (putting pressure on the tummy) as soon as she is sitting without some sort of support in front of her. She spits up food so frequently that I’ve stopped giving her a clean bib (and myself a clean skirt) after every mess. She gets two bibs a day. My skirts escape some of the messes and last a day or two before they get totally smelly.

Since the world is so new to her, the simplest things can be fun to watch. Me hanging up her nappies to dry. Me folding laundry. Me eating. The plants standing still and doing nothing. When she’s tired and I want her to wind down, I can park her in front of the washing machine, and she watches the clothes go round and round and listens to the soothing sound effects – or I put her in the bathroom and she listens to water gushing into the bathtub.

On the other hand, I believe she’s beginning to get bored with her limited range of toys, and I don’t have much else that she can play with without hurting herself or the object. It needs to be easily grippable, small enough that she can grab any random part and get another part to the mouth, and have no sharp points or edges. Some of the local leaflets and booklets here advertise toy libraries, which I guess work just like book libraries. I think I’ll try to get to one next week, and see what they offer.