Little EC has made it to the half-year mark. She’s eating solid foods, kind of sitting up, twirling around on her abdomen and making crawling-like motions with her arms and legs. She just started to babble a little a couple days ago. In most respects, she seems to be about a month ahead of the standard “growing up” progression discussed in the books.

She’s been sick once, just a couple days ago (with some mild stomach bug that didn’t bother her much but gave her the runs). She’ll probably get sick more coming up because she’s grabbing everything and putting it in her mouth…except for food, which she grabs and throws to the floor. No doubt, if given the opportunity, she would grab said food from the floor and then put it in her mouth. It’s called “seasoning to taste”.

She is amazingly drawn to smartphones. We don’t let her play with them but she does see us using them and she probably infers that nothing is more interesting than whatever is going on there. If the “device” is in sight, she has her eyes on it. The other day, she left all her toys and spun around on her tummy to where it was sitting on the floor, and she gave herself a pre-crawling little push in an effort to get it. I’ve given her an old dead phone to play with before, and she’s equally entranced.

Yesterday she sat up indefinitely. It was because she was entranced by the iPhone as we tried to call the grandparents. She could hear it ring, could see herself on it, and wouldn’t move a muscle while it was going on. Only when I moved the phone away (no answer) did she loosen up and fall over.

She also sees us watching TV sometimes. We don’t let her watch it, but if we have five minutes left of a show when she wakes up from her nap we’ll put her in the walker and face her toward us while we finish up. She’s getting better at turning around, though, so that strategy will only last a bit longer. When she was younger we could just lie her down on the couch, but it’s been forever since that worked. Now, if we put her sitting up on the couch facing a blank TV, she’ll just stare at it…apparently wanting to emulate us. I suppose at some point she’ll realize that it’s not actually that fun. Maybe her parents will realize the same thing too 😉

She has been on a fantastic daily schedule. Wake up at 7. Eat. Play for an hour. Nap. Play for awhile. Eat at 11/12. Nap. Play for awhile. Eat around 3. Play, nap. Eat around 6. Bedtime at 7. Get woken up for eating around 10. Sleep until 7. Her naps are anything from 30 minutes to 2 hours, depending on how she feels that day, and whether or not I leave her to “bore herself” back to sleep. She’s been on this schedule for two months, about. It’s gotten very predictable.

She always wakes up with a big smile. She is a very happy baby in general, almost never crying unless something is wrong. She does get frustrated that she can’t crawl and get everything she wants. In the next month, that will change forever.

What great fun this is.

Reading about it in books or articles, you’d come to think that sleep training is a progression. After the first arduous night of listening to the little one scream, the next night is better because they don’t scream as long. And after that, the screaming gets less and less until she blissfully puts herself to sleep. The whole process takes 5-10 days. There may be a regression here and there, but really that’s about it.

Our little EC is anything but like that. Night 1: scream like crazy. Night 2: drop asleep immediately. Night 3: asleep immediately. Night 4: scream for 45 minutes. Nights 5-8: asleep immediately. Night 9: scream for 45 minutes. This looks like less of a progression and more of a binary, on-off behavior. It’s not really what I was primed for.

I just keep reminding myself that this too will pass. I just have to imagine a screaming three-year-old that never learned to sleep in her own bed, now demanding to get her way…nothing stiffens my resolve like the conviction that I’m on the path to making her not-spoiled.

An experiment with mice showed that they were kept most interested in getting new treats when the treats were administered at random intervals. Periodic, predictable intervals led to boredom. Just not knowing when something new would come is what kept things interesting.

Right now, little EC is keeping things interesting.

Little EC has demonstrated a pattern, almost since the beginning, that illustrates how she learns new skills. The first time I noticed it was when she first put her fist to her mouth in a seemingly-intentional way. Fist in mouth, suck for a bit. Then she didn’t do it again for weeks. Sometime later, she began the intentional practice that I’ve described before.

She did this with rolling over. Her first success was followed by weeks of not trying very hard. At some point, she picked up again and started rolling over whenever she felt like it. Most recently, she has started holding her own bottle while eating, in an intentional and insistent way. I was pretty sure this was coming, because…you guessed it…a month or so ago she held her own bottle during one feeding, quite by accident.

It is as if she is doing random things with her body, and every now and then she randomly does something that seems worthwhile to her. Then she has to ruminate over it for some time, after which she figures out just how she did that thing in the first place and can replicate it.

If I use this as a guide, then, I’m going to say she’s at least a month away from crawling, because she just the other day inched a little bit forward while reaching hard for a toy. She may start moving in the walker a little earlier, because it was last week that she got her first accidental steps in. So we’re looking at some perhaps serious progress near the end of Month 6.