4 1/2 months

Things are getting more and more fun around here. Roan has been in good spirits lately, and she's added a few more tricks to her bag. We started solid food last week. It was a messy endeavor the first time around. I'm pretty sure she spit out every bite we spooned in. All over her tummy, her face, it was on the back of her head, all over her bumbo, the table, covering her fists... Lots of fun. But since last week she's gotten to be much better at it. Now she manages to swallow three whole teaspoons of cereal once a day. I'm planning on adding some more foods soon. Maybe pureed carrots or apple.

Her cute little tooth nub is getting bigger. It's still a ways from looking like a full fledged tooth, but still so cute. This means of course that we can no longer let her use our hands as a teething ring because it feels like she's shredding your hand.

This week we met some other mommies for a potluck picinic lunch. We spread blankets out under the trees and all the babies crawled around (those that could, anyway) and checked each other out. It was neat to see how interested in each other they were, even at this young age. Roan faced off with a cute little boy named Iggy with big blue eyes like hers. He started talking to her, making weird throaty noises. Roan was transfixed. I told his mom we call that "pterodactyling" and she said "We do too!"

The picinic was nice because I got to meet some more moms from the neighborhood, including 3 that live on my street! There are so many couples we'd like to invite over for dinner or meet out for margaritas. The trick is finding the time to do it, planning enough in advance and not being too pooped to socialize. It was certainly a lot easier to make new friends last fall before a certain someone came into our lives.

One of the moms I met had been planning a home birth, but like me, after 30 odd hours of unmedicated labor ended up with an emergency C-section. It was nice to commisserate with someone. It's funny, right after Roan's birth I had no negative feelings about having had a C-section. But over time it's bummed me out a little. Mostly there's the trepidation I have about going into the next one, if there is a next one.

Last friday we took Roan to the pool for the first time. I actually thought she'd be thrilled because she loves bath time so much. But as with most things on the first time, she wasn't so sure about it. She cried a little at first, but gradually warmed up to it. And she looked so darn cute in her red & green bikini with ruffles on the butt!

Roan has been growing ever more interested in the world around her. I can no longer put her in her bumbo on the kitchen counter and not expect her to tump over the olive oil or reach for the knives. She can hold her bottle now, not through an entire feeding yet, but for 5 or 10 minutes at a stretch. The other day I had her on my lap while I was eating my lunch. She grew more animated as I was eating slices of apple, until finally she started crying when she reached out her hand and I wouldn't give her one. I figured what the heck, and handed her a slice of tart granny smith, expecting her to spit it out, but instead she gummed it enthusiastically. It was pretty cute.

We've also been doing some stuff around the house. Guys came this week and blew insulation into the attic (finally! now that the summer's almost over). Arwen spent all day yesterday putting cedar siding up on the outside of the house. In a week or so roofers are coming to put on a new roof and install new vents to further cool the attic. And then painters will come to paint the outside, including new gutters. We've also been starting to look at landscaping books.

We've also had a ton going on at work. As soon as I finished a big software rollout with an important deadline, Arwen got slammed with a different big sofware rollout. It's been a week of long work hours - I worked till 11 pm the other night helping him proofread some user manuals to go along with the software - and we are finally today putting it out there. It's a relief to have that behind us.

Even with all we've had going on, I did much better this week than the week before in terms of having "Mommy Meltdowns." Part of what helped is a long talk Arwen and I had last weekend about not letting Roan's challenging moments get to me. As he pointed out, she's a baby. It's her job to cry and it's our job to not freak out and just calmly figure out how to help her. And sometimes we may not be able to figure out how to help her. You know, there's this point you reach right before you lose it where you can either give in and blow off some steam or you can kind of go limp and let go. I've been opting for the latter this week, and to my surprise it's really helped.

Oh one last thing. I'm moving all our photos over to Flickr, a popular photo web site. I've had problems with storage limits on virtually every site I've used, so hopefully this one will do the trick for us. I'll post a link to our photo albums on Flickr soon.

Wait, one last question: Does this constitute child abuse?>> We're not actually feeding our sweet little baby processed cheese food, but just try keeping the cardboard box it came in away from her!