So Many Changes

It’s 7:00 AM on a Sunday morning. It was my turn to get out of bed early this weekend morning to bring Zoe upstairs to play (which means she is hanging off my chair trying to reach the keyboard as I type). Although usually it’s near impossible to do anything while Zoe is awake, yesterday I caught her playing quietly by herself on her play mat and discovered that she is playing with her toys on a whole new level. Not only is she placing the rings of the stacking toy on the post, but she is also slipping her arm in and out through the hole of the larger ring. She has also been spotted nesting the nesting blocks, and finding small objects to place inside the larger ones. She has a toy that requires that you hit a hard plastic ball with a hard plastic hammer to get the balls to travel through a short maze. The balls balance on their own little base, and she will remove and than put the ball back onto it’s small spot, a task that requires a bit of coordination. As for the hammer, she still doesn’t have the strength and coordination to knock the balls through, so she instead pounds everything else with it, most often the hardwood floor. She has also enthusiastically learned how to wave goodbye. About five minutes before Alison leaves for work in the morning she will start the arm waving, and it will continue until Alison actually leaves. In fact, all it takes is one of us walking away from her, even to go sit on a chair, for her to start in on the bye-byes. She prefers to wave goodbye to people she knows, but will also wave goodbye to anybody else, as long as they are not looking.

It’s been about a month since I wrote Into the Crib, Part 2. The early days were tough on us (and probably on Zoe as well). She would cry and it would nearly break your heart (and require that we turn the TV volume up way too loud). That first week we would go get her if she cried for more than a couple of minutes. Well, we are a month down the road and for a while she was actually sleeping through the night. However, she has recently started waking up somewhere around blurry-numbers-on-the-clock o’clock. She will join us in bed, Alison will feed her, then she will find it impossible to get comfortable and wiggle and kick until I pull myself from the warm blankets to carry her back into her own room, where she will proceed to cry because we have abandoned her. She will eventually go back to sleep (after we have lain awake wondering if she will really go back to sleep), but until she actually sleeps from the time we put her to bed until a reasonable hour in the morning we can not claim complete into the crib success. The saga continues.

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