Instead of unusually warm, the weather’s now been unusually cold for May for a few days. Have made sure to wrap Jessica up a bit extra (especially since our floors can get a bit cold) and not really ventured out much – a shame as this was a Bank Holiday weekend and Ian and I had hoped to go out in the car on the Monday on a proper family outing. We did, however, pop out for a few hours on Sunday with the raincover very securely tucked around the pram. Jessica slept through most of our walk and probably didn’t notice that we stopped by at her farmor and farfar’s for tea and biccies on our way home.
Jessica saw her reflection for the first time yesterday morning. Her reaction was fun to watch: big smiles, laughs and lots of chatter. She kept looking into her own as well as my eyes in the mirror and seemed very happy about the whole experience. I’m assuming she didn’t know it was her but thought it was some other baby. Speaking of which, she ‘met’ her first baby today (a 17-week old girl named Daisy, no one we knew) and they had a little ‘conversation’ from over their Mums’ shoulders – absolutely adorable! If Jessica’s awake at the next post-natal group session, I wonder what she’ll make of all the babies there…!
She’s really into this smiling and chatting thing now – sometimes when I feed her, once she’s got over the first ‘desperately’ hungry stage, I sometimes see creases appear in the corners of her eyes, then her dimple, then the corner of her mouth and at that point I know she’s lying there smiling at me and have forgotten all about eating… She’s such a wonderfully happy little baby, she really is great fun to be around (if a bit exhausting at times…)!
She’s grabbing things more and more, and sometimes manages to put them in her mouth. I got her a baby book the other day, one of those first ones for 0-6 month old babies with a lot of contrast and no story line. The one I got is made of fabric with crinkly pages and the pages show patterns and simply drawn faces in black, white and yellow. When I held it up in front of her, she seemed fascinated. Each spread lasted a good few minutes as she stared at the patterns, reached out and stroked the pages, grabbed the corners of the book and wrestled it around and then put the corner of the page in her mouth.
Jessica’s farmor came around to babysit again today for a couple of hours while I went to my last (at least this time around) post-natal Pilates session. Afterwards they met up with me outside the local surgery and we went to the health visitor clinic again. I thought I’d get Jessica weighed every other week – more often is probably unnecessary and less often wouldn’t be often enough as I’d be too curious on her progress… She’s now (at 14 weeks old yesterday) 7.03 kilos (15lb and 7oz), which is right on track.
Gabriella