Our Zoe is Growing Up

You’ll want to watch the accompanying video (at the bottom of this post) before you read another word. It’s the amazing footage I promised of Zoe sitting up. Alison and I have been working very hard with her, and as you can tell from the video she has almost completely mastered the skill. For those who listen to the audio portion of the video, again I have to apologize for my special ‘Zoe’ voice. As I said before, I don’t think this is the way I usually talk but perhaps it is.

This last week Alison, Zoe and I were in Boston. I attempted to write and publish this blog from there but oddly enough found no time. However, in the two weeks since I shot the above video Zoe has made unbelievable progress on the sitting-up front. Yesterday I put her in a sitting position (she can’t get there herself) and sat myself down, in a sitting position, across the room. Although she did fall backwards a few times (onto a pillow) and did a face-plant once (she took the opportunity to lick the matt) she basically sat by herself and played unattended. Yay!

On the 7th of September Zoe turned six months old. Every couple of months Alison goes through her cloths and weeds out those that no longer fit. It’s hard to imagine that she has grown enough to outgrow anything, but since birth she has gained about ten pounds and added over six inches to her height (or length, since she is mostly horizontal). The last batch that we (we being Alison) went through included some of our favorites, and more than anything highlighted how quickly she is growing up. As excited as we get when she learns new tricks (fetch, speak, sit) it’s also sad to know that she is actually going to grow up and most likely put a good-sized dent in my car. I also suspect that by the time she is in college she will no longer laugh with abandon when I blow raspberries on her tummy.

Unless you were just skimming this blog looking for celebrity gossip, you will have read that we were in Boston last week. I’m happy to report that Zoe screamed far less than other kids on the plane. In fact, even after her most difficult stage, after she fell asleep, the woman in front of us commented that our baby was not only the most adorable baby she had ever seen, but the best behaved and also the smartest. Okay, maybe she didn’t say all that stuff but she did comment positively and absolutely did not say, “Thank God she’s asleep,” which is what people were saying about the demon-child a dozen rows behind us. Not that we were happy that she screamed but I think it’s always better to have another child behave worse than your own. It really takes a lot of pressure off us parents.

On the way to Boston we were lucky that the person sitting in the isle seat was thin, didn’t smell and basically kept to himself. When he sat down I asked if he was planning to sleep—meaning don’t plan on sleeping—and that we were planning a row-wide sing-a-long of Wheels on the Bus a bit later on. He promptly fell asleep. Zoe, on the other hand, decided that sleeping did not suit her mood. On the way home we finagled an empty middle seat and she slept about four of the six ours we were on the plane. An infant sleeping on a long flight is almost better than sex.

See photos of Zoe at http://picasaweb.google.com/dbglass.