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.

The first tooth is now appearing!

(Just about 4 months after we first started guessing that she might be teething, because of her incessant drooling and fondness for chewing on everything.)

Just after 9 this morning I got a phone call from the nursery saying that Ingrid had “gone floppy and her eyes rolled back”. Very scary, and not the kind of news you want to get about your one and only baby. (Not that you’d want it if you had more than one baby, either, but you know what I mean.) She recovered quickly and seemed fine, but just to be on the safe side the nursery called an ambulance (and me) and we took her to the hospital (Royal London) to be checked.

Nothing interesting was found but they wanted to keep her for observation. Nothing interesting was still found after a full day of observation and various tests, and the best they could tell me in the end was that “these thing sometimes happen and quite often we have no idea why, and it never comes back”. So I hope it’s one of those cases.

Useful outcomes:

• Blood tests were done and while they didn’t show me any of the results (of course – for some reason doctors here very rarely share any information unless they absolutely have to), they did mention that her iron values were a bit on the low side. Leafy green vegetables, coming up!
• Ingrid can sleep quite well in the Connecta if needed.

Outcomes that aren’t exactly useful, but are nevertheless interesting

• They measure babies’ blood pressure around the calf, and the pulse on the foot.
• They also take blood from the foot.
• Some nurses and doctors, despite working in the pediatric ward, seem never to have handled an actual live baby. They spent an eternity trying to stick electrodes on her for an ECG while keeping all the cables in a tangle just in front of her kicking feet, so of course she kicked them which pulled them all off again. After I had pointed this out three times, one of them finally realised the futility of it. Another nurse was going to take her temperature while she was asleep, and started off by lowering the side of the cot with a loud clang, and then seemed surprised that she woke.
• I got the impression that some of the tests they did were done not because they really expected any results, but because it would (a) preclude anybody from coming back and suing them, or (b) ensure they hit some kind of target.

Outcomes that are neither useful nor interesting:

• Most of the staff were actually helpful and sensible.
• Spending the day in a hospital for observation is about as exciting as spending the day in an airport, but with fewer shops. Most of the time is spent waiting, sitting in uncomfortable chairs. And just like airports, it’s exhausting even though you don’t actually do anything much.
• The hospital food was utterly abominable.

I added some new photos to the album.

Most of my photos of Ingrid now end up similar this one: everything is sharp except her head and arms, both of which rarely stay still long enough for a good photo. In one series of about 30 pictures I deleted all but half a dozen.

Ingrid is now indeed back to her happy self, except with more walking and talking. Well, more moving around and making noises, in any case. Even though what she does looks nothing like what I would describe as crawling, she really is reaching the stage where I cannot leave her unattended for long because she can easily end up in a place that I hadn’t planned, chewing on things that really shouldn’t be chewed on. More work for me, less frustration for her. (Although an endless stream of “No, you really cannot chew on that” and “No, don’t play with that” might get frustrating after a while as well.)

This happened faster than I thought. Most of the changes in her habits have happened faster than I was prepared for, really. Eating solids. Going to sleep without crying. Standing up. Moving around. It’s rarely a smooth process – one week she doesn’t, and the next week she suddenly does.

Oh, and I almost forgot: I believe she realised today for the first time that she can pull herself up all on her own by holding onto things. Not quite to standing yet, just onto her knees, but she laughed with joy. (Until now I’ve pulled a bit and she’s pulled a bit and together we got her up.) Of course she picked the strangest time and place for this discovery: in the bathtub, during her evening bath, pulling on the FAR edge of the tub… slippery and unsafe, and very un-ergonomical for me, but apparently a lot of fun for her.

It is so lovely to see her joy of discovery.

This weekend we offered Ingrid some baby food with chicken. She accepted it with great pleasure, and ate with more enthusiasm than she has shown towards my lovely vegetable purées recently. I have given birth to a meat eater!

(I have been a vegetarian for almost 15 years now, and Eric well over 10 years. I may eat a piece of fish occasionally, especially when we’re abroad and vegetarian food is hard to find, but that happens maybe once a month on average.)

The chicken smelled kind of gross, actually… I don’t think we’ll be buying that again any time soon. She can eat all the meat she wants at the nursery, but I’m not going to let any of that stinky stuff into my house if I can help it. This first time was only because the nursery staff will not experiment with food: they won’t feed her any kind of food that she hasn’t tried before. Now that she has tried chicken, she can eat some of their standard lunches. Once we’ve tried fish and pasta at home, she’ll be able to eat most (if not all) of their baby menu.

I wonder why she liked it so much, though. Possible explanations:

• They put some mysterious addictive substance in the baby food, that isn’t on the label. Like sugar.
• She just likes meat.
• She liked the more complex flavour. That jar contained more ingredients than three of her home-made meals do together.
• She liked the spices.

I think it may be time to get a bit more adventurous with her food. Mix it up, add some spices.

A week ago I read this posting at Familjeliv.se:

jävla debatt om skrikmetoder, vad fan ska man göra med de som ligger och leker och gapskrattar när de är supertrötta och borde sova då? nyss gick jag in i sovrummet och hittade min snart 9 månader gamla son halvvägs i en kullerbytta. ja, han stod nästan på huvudet. ögonen gick i kors och han skrattade belåtet.

In English:

all this debate about cry it out methods, what the hell does one do with those who lie and play and laugh when they are super tired and should sleep? i just went in to the bedroom and found my almost 9 month old son halfway through a somersault. well he was almost standing on his head. he was all cross-eyed and laughing happily.

At the time I thought it sounded like a funny story, but I couldn’t really imagine myself in that situation.

How things change. For two evenings now I found myself in the exact same position: half an hour past Ingrid’s normal bedtime, when she would normally be cranky and barely able to keep her eyes open, I watched her laugh and roll around in her bed. I didn’t even need to keep her company or supply her with toys, like I normally need to do during the day. All I had to do was to lift her back towards the centre of her cot when she had gotten tangled up in a corner and couldn’t get out. She was as happy as she’s ever been and yet somehow she seemed totally loopy: overclocked, overstimulated, and unable to slow down.

Then suddenly 10 minutes later her energy ran out and she whimpered. And 2 minutes later she fell asleep. Wacky.

Today for the first time ever Ingrid “told” me that she was tired by some other means than whining or crying (which is a rather generic signal and makes it hard to tell tiredness from other problems). Well, she started by crying, but when I picked her up she immediately started sucking on her thumb, which she otherwise never does when she is awake. I put her down in the bed and she was asleep 5 minutes later.

She did it at a time when she wouldn’t normally be tired so if she hadn’t given me such a clear signal, it would probably have taken me a long while to figure out what was wrong. In fact I probably wouldn’t have figured it out at all, because it was so far from her normal naptime, and she would have been all cranky for the next hour.

I guess you could say she used sign language. Yay for communication!

Seven months.

Sitting unsupported, which was the big news for Ingrid a month ago, is now everyday fare. I no longer bother to put a pillow behind her, even. I was going to write that it’s been weeks since she last fell over, but then she went and proved me wrong earlier today… Bath times are a lot easier and less nerve-wracking now that I no longer need to hold onto her all the time, and can reach for the sponge without worrying.

She uses her new upright position to explore the world around her. A good way to keep her amused now is to put a big box with stuff in front of her. She takes each of the things from the box, briefly turns it over and puts it in her mouth, then puts it down next to her and reaches for the next. When the box is almost empty – empty enough to not be fun any more – she shouts. I shovel everything back in the box and she starts over.

Likewise when we are out on one of our afternoon walks, she reaches out for things she can see from the pushchair. We drive close to leafy bushes, and brick walls, and lamp posts, and she pokes at them with her fingers. Luckily both brick walls and lamp posts are impossible to put in the mouth so I don’t need to worry about how dirty they are. I just hope the bushes I take her to are not immediately poisonous. (Not that I allow her to eat them but she does occasionally pull them to her mouth.)

All this lifting and grasping has been good practice for her hands and fingers. She can grip things she would have dropped a month ago, and no longer runs the danger of accidentally hitting herself in the head or poking her eyes with them. This has greatly increased the range of toys she can play with. All kinds of non-fragile and non-dangerous household items can now be put into toy duty: whisks, bowls, measuring spoons, empty jars, CD cases and so on.

Ingrid would also very much like to move around on her own. When she is lying down, she often spots something interesting just out of reach, and pushes with her whole body to reach it. She has never yet moved forward by even the slightest bit – at best she manages to push herself backwards. But moving backwards is quite enough to get her tangled up in furniture, and when you add rolling over, she can accidentally reach all sorts of things. They are generally unsuited to chewing but of course they tend to end up in her mouth anyway. I am actually not looking forward to her learning to crawl.

During the last two weeks Ingrid has become more clingy – unless I’m imagining things. It may be because she has been sick for quite a lot of this time, or maybe she’s starting to realise that she is forced to be apart from us during the week. I’ve been holding and carrying her around more than I used to. Once again I am really grateful for our slings and baby carriers!

About a week ago she also began to go to sleep on her own, with no rocking or patting or shushing. This was a development that took me completely by surprise: there were no signs that anything like this was about to happen. After two nights of a lot of crying, it suddenly became obvious that any rocking or patting was now just disturbing and upsetting her. I can now help her calm down if (or rather, when) she wakes up and is upset in the middle of the night, but I cannot help her go back to sleep. And when she isn’t upset, I can just lay her down and she goes to sleep with no help at all.

I have a suspicion that the clinginess and the independent sleeping are related. They may sound like complete opposites, but I think she may be coming to realise that she is separate from me, and can be separate from me. Separation anxiety, in other words. When she is upset, whether it’s day or night, it is generally enough to just pick her up and hold her close.

After Ingrid learned to sit, she had a period when she refused to lie down. I guess sitting was such a novel, exciting thing that she just wanted to do it all the time. Now that the novelty is wearing off, she is willing to spend some time in other positions as well. Not on her back, though: she always either turns on her side, arching her back like a little cheese doodle, or onto her tummy.

And while she is on her tummy, she now wants to go places and do things. She wants to reach that toy, or that corner of the carpet just ahead of her, so she strains with her whole body… and pushes herself backwards. Frustration ensues. Or she pushes more with one arm and rotates in place like the hands of a clock. (When I took the photo she started out on her back on the fleece, with her head roughly in the middle, where the wool has been flattened.)

It seems like hard work, but it keeps her occupied and as long as she isn’t moving away from something she really wants to reach, she seems to enjoy the experience. Generally she keeps at it until she is really tired, or until she gets stuck because she’s backed up against something so she cannot move any more.

I cannot call this activity crawling because it is not intentional and the movements are tiny, but nevertheless she moves!