I got to watch little EC playing a new fun game today. Sitting in her little play area, she and found yourself a sock, and an overturned plastic box that we use for keeping toys organized. (Clearly, the toys were not so well organized today.) I watched her as she figured out that she could put the sock on top of the box, and take it off. And then she would put the sock back on top of the box, and then take it off. She kept doing this for quite some time, with more or fewer flourishes involved. Sometimes she would place the sock gently on the box; other time she would toss the sock on to the box. But clearly, she was having a good time practicing a new skill, and a new fun game.

In other news, she started crawling the day after her 9th month. I suspect that within a week we will lose containment. 

Little EC has surprised me this week.

I’ve mentioned in the past her pattern for developing new skills: one day, she randomly does something neat, like rolling over, or sitting up for an extended period. Then several weeks pass while she tries to figure out how she did that in the first place, and a month or a month and a half later, she starts to reliably do that thing like she means it.

At the beginning of this week, she sat up by herself for the first time. Starting from her back, she would roll over to her side, toss her legs out in front of her, and push up with the arm that is still on the ground. And presto, she’s up. Seeing that on Saturday, I figured that we’d start seeing it reliably sometime in mid-July.

I’ve been seeing it reliably for days now. She’s figured it out, and when she wants to sit up, she sits up. Sometimes she doesn’t quite make it, sometimes she falls right back over. Sometimes I’m changing her diaper and I do everything I can to keep her down (but that’s when she most reliably succeeds, of course). But she skipped the weeks-long hiatus that’s supposed to happen.

Maybe this is a fluke. Or maybe, she has made great progress in learning how to learn, and has developed greater facility in analyzing her own actions. If that’s the case, then I suspect we could be seeing faster progress in mastering new skills.

Already, she is pushing herself up onto her knees, or moving onto her knees from a sitting position. How much longer could it be before one hand moves in front of the other, and she really gets moving?

This morning little EC let us sleep in, all the way until 8:00. I was very grateful, until I went in to say good morning.

I should say, first, that whether it is all the extra drooling because of teething, or the new variety of foods that she’s been trying, she has not been very ‘regular’…a bit runny, actually. But happy and without a temperature, so I’ve just been scaling back on the food variety a bit till we find out what her system doesn’t like so much.

Returning to this morning, I don’t know how long she’d been awake, but it must have been awhile. Long enough to soil…her diaper…her pants…her shirt up to her neck…her blankets…at least the crib itself and the walls escaped. There might not have been any on her socks, but I forget. And she looked up at me as I came in, and gave me a great big smile. I imagine many other babies would be very displeased with staying in that state for any length of time, and most would have just called out for help as soon as it happened. Not little EC, no…most patient baby ever.

We were “vacationing” (EM was working, but little EC and I were vacationing…) last week, so we were without the normal infrastructure such as a high chair. Little EC has begun to enjoy grabbing things and eating them. Bread is a particular favorite because it mashes up easily in the mouth and is easy to grab onto.

So without a high chair, I would sit her down on a towel on the floor, a plate of bread and cheese between us. Rip off a piece, set it in front of her…she leans forward, grabs, stuffs and chews. Repeat. One for you, one for me. And just like that, we had our first picnics.

The bread that we got was a multi-grain, whole-seed sort of thing. I didn’t think about it when buying the bread…but those diapers were really interesting. Black sesame seeds simply don’t digest if not crushed up in chewing, I guess.

It took about two days for her to get used to sleeping in a new place. She’d cry like crazy when being put down in a strange crib in a strange place. We let her cry it out, just like we did at home. Before the week was out, she was just as comfortable sleeping in the hotel as at home. But we got to relive those wonderful sleep training days, which was loads of fun.

Also, I got to change her diaper pretty much everywhere. Floor of the subway station? Check. Floor of the mall? Check. She only complains when it’s poop (and maybe more when it’s a particularly “seedy” poop, I don’t know…) so of course those were picturesque changes. Fortunately she has no concept of modesty. I, on the other hand, let a subway come and go just to get all the passengers off the platform before doing the dirty work.

And in one supreme moment of parental pride…we went out to dinner one night, and she was already tired and grumpy by the time we got to the restaurant. But we managed, through a combination of bread, mashed potatoes, and drinking straws to keep her entertained through a three-course meal over almost two hours.

And just like that, little EC has a tooth. She hasn’t been crying, fussing, or anything. No disruption to the sleeping schedule. But she does stuff everything, and particularly her sleeping blanket, into her mouth as far as possible and bite hard. She falls asleep and wakes up with that blanket in her mouth. Her stuffed animals now look mangled and are possibly biohazards.

The tooth is a lower front tooth. She won’t let me look at it, so I just have to stick my finger in and feel it.

If she’s this good about all the rest of her teeth, we should have an easy time of it. I suppose I should now figure out how to brush the tooth. The pediatric dentists of course recommend that we start brushing her gums from 1 month or so. I ignored that, so now it’s time to start.

On the food front, she enjoys and is successful at picking up little bits of food and sticking them in her mouth. Today she tried cake. That went over well. Normally it’s just toast. Or spaghetti. Or cheese. Eggs are still off limits. She likes drinking water now.

And she’s also begun, though not mastered, intentionally rolling from one place to another to get something she wants.

Last week, when little EC had just started sitting up for extended periods, she was for the most part pretty stable. She leaned forward, sometimes hands on feet or on the toy she was playing with, and didn’t wobble too much. When she did, she’d usually go down.

One week later, she’s gotten much more dynamic. Now she totters on purpose, leaning backward and raising her feet up, balancing on her tailbone, sometimes playing with the strings on her pants. She looks much less stable than she did last week, but that’s because she’s trying harder and harder things. Her side-to-side stability isn’t much improved yet…if she starts to go down that way, she’ll go down.

When she does fall backward, she tries to get back up. She doesn’t know how to get back up though, so she just struggles, flexing her abs and reaching her neck forward, as though she had enough weight in her legs to provide the counterweight to get her top up. She doesn’t, so I have to take her by the hands and give her an assisting pull.

In other news…

She hates oats. She dislikes bananas. But put the two together into a thick banana-oat porridge, and you have a hit! Instead, now she has a new nemesis on the food scene: scrambled eggs. I don’t know if it’s the flavor or the texture, but that does not go down well.

She likes a new game that I made up. I tap my chest and say, “Daddy”. Then I tap her chest and say, “Baby”. And then I do that over and over a few thousand times. It never gets old, the smile never stops, and I’m hoping that’ll teach her two important names, if she doesn’t know them already. I think she doesn’t…she won’t yet look for me if EM tells her to look for Daddy.

Oh, and still no teeth.

I’ve been wondering for awhile why little EC wouldn’t sit up for any length of time. She seemed capable of balancing herself, and if properly distracted (like when staring at the phone on a video call) she could hold herself a bit; but generally, she seemed uninterested in staying up for any length of time, and would plop back down onto her stomach after a little while.

Two days ago, it hit me: I’ve been giving her toys to play with that she can just as easily play with lying down…so why go to the extra effort of sitting up? So I trundled her off to the local communal play room, and sat her down in front of one of those ball-on-wire contraptions that she would only be able to reach sitting up. She did pretty well, practicing with a few 1-2 minute sitting sessions before she would flop back down. I thought that was pretty successful.

Yesterday, I did the same thing. But yesterday, several other small kids came in to play, and ran about yelling, and sat and played with her, and otherwise distracted her. We got a good 20-minute stretch of sitting out of her as a result. It only ended because she started getting fussy and wanted to eat.

Same thing today. I think she’s gotten the hang of it, in just two days.

Little EC has discovered a new trick: if she tilts her head, everything rotates. So now whether she’s sitting in her high chair, being held in my arms, or doing push-ups during tummy time, she routinely tilts her head to get a new perspective on whatever she’s looking at.

Incidentally, by doing this while pushing up, she gives herself exactly the motions she needs to flip from tummy to back. Which she is now doing with increasing frequency and ease.

In an unrelated note, now that I have her to take care of I no longer feel like going out through traffic to find a barber. So I bought a pair of clippers and scissors and I cut my hair today. It’s not everything I could have wanted, but it’s serviceable and I imagine I’ll get better at it over time. It got the Empirical Mom seal of approval, and little EC didn’t care a bit. I call that success.

I gave little EC some oat cereal this morning. Just some oats, ground up to powder in the blender, with some water or milk (tried both) to make a porridge.

She hated it so much, she tasted it for a second with her tongue, screwed up her face, and vomited.

We’ll be waiting awhile before we try oats again.

According to the books I’ve glanced at, solid foods can begin at 6 months. We began at 4, with little tastes here and there. By 5 months, little EC was getting a pre-milk solid meal once in awhile, and since she turned 6 we’ve been doing solid pre-milk meals twice a day during the weekdays—that is, whenever Empirical Mom isn’t at home.

Here’s what she’s eaten so far, all blended from whatever it is we’ve had on hand:

Bananas: she’s ok with them, I don’t like blended bananas, so not too much
Pears: she loves them
Apples: she loves them. Preferably gala.
Plums: she hates them
Avocados: she hates them. As an addition to pears or apples, no problem.
Carrots: she loves chewing on solid carrot pieces. She hates blended carrots. As an addition to apples or pears, tolerable in very small quantities.
Zucchini: she loves chewing on solid pieces. As an addition to apples, she likes.
Sweet potatoes: she loves them. I love them too. I make extra so I can share with her.
Rice cereal: she loves it made with milk, not so much made with water.

It has seemed much less convenient to me so far to figure out how to buy baby foods off the store shelves than to just throw things into the blender, so that’s what I’ve been doing so far. That 15-year-old Magic Bullet is really handy. I steam the carrots and sweet potatoes; otherwise, all these have gone down raw. I only peel the sweet potatoes; everything else goes in whole. If we could get clean sweet potatoes around here, I’d probably leave the peels on those too; but what’s on offer is so gnarly (am I officially old for using that term?) that it’s best to just strip it down to the clean innards.

I give her bits of whatever I’m making for myself to play with when she’s sitting in the high chair at the kitchen counter. That’s how we had our first choking episode a couple days ago, with a nice ripe kiwi piece. She had a strong enough bite with her gums (no teeth yet) to get off a nice big chunk and inhale it. Cue Dad reflexes: I had her out of the high chair and tipped over in seconds. She must have gotten it out and swallowed it, because I didn’t see it come out but she did start breathing again. That’s the end of kiwis and oranges for a bit. I’d been letting her play with grapes and popcorn (supervised, of course) because she showed no interest in mouthing those things yet. But that’s now stopped too.

As an aside, the texture changes that all the solid food has caused to her #2 ensures that we won’t have to worry about exploding diapers anymore. At least, not of the run-up-the-back kind that we used to have.

As another aside, somewhere near the end of the 5th month I stopped giving her solids for a week. She promptly stopped pooping for a week. The metabolism of mother’s milk must be nearly 100% efficient.

As yet another aside, she will have to start drinking water at some point. So far, she’s shown zero interest in that. She does like to drink out of my water glasses, because she likes the motion. But she has no intention of letting any of that flavorless clear fluid down her throat. Each experiment just leads to an outfit change. Or a walk outside to dry out.

What comes next? Whatever we have on hand, I suppose. The guidance I’ve taken to heart is just to avoid nut butters, honey, shellfish, and cow’s milk until 1 year. I’ll avoid wheat until probably 9 months. I’ll make up some teething biscuits from oats as soon as she starts having teething issues. Other than that, we’ll see!