On Saturday we were invited over to friends, Chris and Angela (the latter, incidentally, being the person who signed Jessica’s passport application form) for dinner. As we’d only received the invitation a couple of days before, we didn’t have time to arrange a babysitter. So we decided to take her with us. As we were due there at 7.30 and it’s a half hour drive, we had to feed her, get her ready for bed and hope that she settled in the car seat rather than the cot. She didn’t really settle on the way: even the motion of the car failed to rock her to sleep, so when we arrived we had a slightly cranky and confused baby. Fortunately, Chris and Angela allowed us to put Jessica in their bedroom where it was that bit quieter. It didn’t take Gabriella too long to sing her off to sleep, in which state she stayed all evening. Jessica stirred slightly as we put her back in the car and looked decidedly bewildered, but she nodded off again as soon as she realised that she was safe with us. Again, when we got home Jessica stirred when we took her out of the car, but she went straight back to sleep when Gabriella laid her down in the cot at around half past 11. Jessica then slept though until just before 6.
This has given us confidence to have more evenings out and taking Jessica with us.
Jessica’s not really shown any signs of wanting to crawl. According to my parents, neither my sister or I crawled and pretty soon after we were sitting upright unsupported, we developed a ‘shuffle-bottom’ motion, so maybe Jessica will go with that method.
Something I’ve noticed in the last few days is her insistance for standing up. If one pulls Jessica’s arms to bring her up into a sitting position, she will keep her body straight and allow herself to be pulled onto her feet. Once there, she doesn’t need much in the way of support. I can hold her hands lightly and she’ll stay there swaying gently. In fact, yesterday when I was changing Jessica for the night, I let go of her hands and she stayed up leaning very gently against my chest. As Jessica’s so keen to be upright, we’re trying to teach her the art of taking a few steps. Maybe she’ll skip the whole crawling/shuffle-bottom modes of propulsion and go straight to walking…
As an aside to this, we measured Jessica last week and she is now 68.5cm (27 inches) tall.
I think Jessica’s starting to enter the bam-bam (think The Flintstones) stage. Nearly everything she gets hold of gets shaken with extreme vigour! She has hurt herself slightly a couple of times. One particularly memorable (if that’s the right expression…) occasion was where she’d grabbed her green rattle. Jessica was really giving it a good shake, when she bopped herself squarely on the nose. After the surprised expression had worn off, she continued to shake the rattle vigorously. Unfortunately (and it was like it was in slow motion) there was a loud, slightly hollow-sounding, thud as the rattle connected with her forehead. There then followed a trembling bottom lip, capped off by a serious bout of Wah-Wahing. Needless to say I picked her up and comforted her for a bit. She was soon her happy, giggly self and appeared to have completely forgotten that it had happened.
I daresay that there’ll be other moments like this, but that’s all part of the fun of parenthood.
Ian.