Belated update 1: Alice

In posting the sentimental letter last week, I skipped over the more prosaic update on half-year-old Alice.

The youngest family member now has two bottom teeth, and judging by her large swollen upper gum, is working on a pair upstairs as well. She is using those teeth to good effect, grabbing and gumming almost any food within reach--she got a square of spanikopita off my plate at a wedding celebration this weekend--and reminding us at least twice a day that she would like some of that stuff in the jars. I'm beginning to realize that the point of having two children (or more) is to show you that everything you thought you knew about parenting was, in fact, simply the hard-won wisdom you'd acquired about one human being--your first child. With Edith we never understood why some parents objected to storebought baby food in on the grounds that it was expensive. Who goes into parenting unwilling to spend an extra $1.50-$2 on their child's 2 or 3 jars of baby food per week? Now we see that not all children take three or four days to go through a jar of baby food but in fact, might go through a couple of jars in a single day!

In a related vein, top on my list of Things to Do Differently this time was my plan to start setting some limits on nursing after the twelve month mark, so "feeding on demand" wouldn't turn into clawing at mama's shirt every time the toddler feels tired, frustrated, shy, or bored. And here we are wondering whether Alice will sustain sufficient interest in breastfeeding to get the milk she needs until she's a year old.


Despite her interest in solid foods, Alice nevertheless continues to get longer and leaner. Six month measurements:

27 inches (90th percentile)
16 pounds (41st percentile)

(It was interesting that the same pediatrician who sounded a mild alarm about the 16 percentile points between Edith's height and weight was quick to assure us that the fifty-point gap in the other direction in Alice's case is "perfectly fine." And they wonder why young girls develop anxiety about being fat...)


A shaker, Alice isn't quite a mover yet. She can roll her way across the floor like a champ, but she hasn't yet figured out forward motion, to her distress. She gets her knees up under her, only to have her legs splay out as she goes splat onto her tummy again. Add Wiggle to her string of middle names these days. Squealer, too.


I think she was born with a sense of object permanence, despite what the experts say. When someone removes an object she's interested in, she'll continue to stare at the spot where it vanished for some time. Or if someone she's watching walks behind a wall, say. she'll turn anticipatorily to the place where they should reappear again. She's just starting to seem to favor mama slightly, objecting sometimes when I leave her with someone else. Thankfully, her daycare teachers are still on her list of preferred handlers: she is all eyes, hands, and eagerness when we put her into her seat in the infant class in the mornings, looking around at the older kids as if to say, "Okay, guys, what's on the agenda today?"