Is it simply by virtue of having a child that your sense of time speeds up? I can’t believe that we have gone from recapping month 6 to recapping month 7 (very nearly month 8, really) already! Yet, here we are, 2-1/2 weeks past E’s 7 month birthday. It’s crazy, how fast she’s growing up!

My little girl seems to want to grow up in a hurry, even without the whole time speeding up thing. She moved from baby food to solid foods in the blink of an eye!  She now eats bits of chicken, wheat bread, Cheerios, apples, bananas, pears and tortillas, too!  And, because she’s a big girl now, she prefers to feed herself, rather than to be fed.  The good news is that expensive baby food is on the outs, and cheaper fresh food is IN!  The bad news is that she’s not a precisely tidy eater, so she produces a very messy dining area and an even messier baby, once she’s done eating!

E is also an accomplished sitter, crawler, kneeler, and stander.  She can pull herself up to a standing position and sit back down again without assistance.  She loves to play with her toys on her quilt, and finds great joy in learning a new trick (like banging things together to produce loud noises).

Because she’s so mobile, we are planning out how to babyproof the house.  Oh, yes, that does mean that we haven’t babyproofed yet.

We’re the world’s worst parents, I know.  But, but, but – we don’t let her out of our sight, and she’s not allowed to crawl anywhere unless strictly supervised.  I feel a bit bad about that, since she is SO curious and SO smart, and I think that she could do really well on her own, if only the house wasn’t a minefield for a baby her age.  There are so many things she could pull on top of herself, so many outlets she could electrocute herself with, so many blind cords she could hang herself on.  We have a lot of work ahead of us.

Help me out here!  What kinds of things did you babyproof that really didn’t need babyproofing?  What should you have babyproofed that you didn’t?

E is 6 months old (actually, she’s closer to 7 months, but since I’m so busy right now, it’s taken me a loooonnnng time to write this post, and we’re going to pretend she’s only 6 months old).

In the past month, E has learned how to crawl, sit unassisted, pull to a standing position, eat puffs, put her pacifier in her own mouth, and make consonant sounds.  Oh, yeah, and she learned how to drive, too.

Just kidding.  We only taught her how to park the car.

E has officially started to crawl.  Now, bear with me, here.  She’s not all coordinated yet, but she’s definitely crawling.  Her grandma tried to tell her that what she was doing WASN’T crawling, and here’s what she thought of that:

HA!  So THERE, grandma!

My sweet little E has been sent home from daycare a couple times in the past couple weeks for exhibiting symptoms of illness.  While I appreciate that the daycare workers are protecting the other babies in her “class”, both times, E has been fine.

The first time she was sent home was for a rash that had cropped up on her arms and legs.  I suspected that the rash was due to a reaction from unusual detergent (we had stayed with friends in Indiana the weekend prior).  We were required to take her to a doctor to determine if the rash was contagious, though.  Even the doctor thought the requirement was silly, given the mild appearance of the rash (no raised bumps), the absence of a fever, and the fact that she did not appear to be bothered by the rash at all.

Five short months ago, my daughter joined the world.  Since then, I’ve learned that unless I’m extremely organized, I’m going to get beat by this whole mothering thing.  Something that no one tells you before you have kids: you get really stoopid (yep, that’s stoopid with 2 O’s) when you have a baby!

I chalk it up to being exhausted.  Exhausted people have not historically been known for their keen powers of thinking.  Where once I was a smart, thinking woman of a certain intelligence, I am now a quivering blob of amoebic goo.

Therefore, I have developed certain areas of no-thought-required organization to help me and E’s daddy care for her (yes, he’s been struck stoopid, too).  Take her diaper bags, for example.

Thanks, Aunt Pat for this quilt!

My E is now 5 months old.  Last month I commented that I couldn’t believe she was already 4 months old, and *poof* we’re here at month 5!

She is a force to be reckoned with now.

E is a good baby. Active, happy, cheerful, sweet. Really, really good. And I’m exhausted. All the time.

What must mothers of less cheerful babies feel like? Or moms of multiples? I mean, REALLY!?!!?

E let me take a nice, long nap over the weekend, so I was relatively awake for part of the weekend. But, come Monday, my brain was mush again.

So, how do you do it?  How do you function on a level above zombie?  Because I’m having no luck.  Seriously exhausted, brain numbed, getting dumber by the moment.  Soon I’ll be drooling into my Jello.  Help!

…being flexible about things you want to do.

I wasn’t able to get pics of the nursery for the organizing post yet. I want to photograph the closet with E’s clothes in it, but I haven’t put her clean clothes away yet! We were able to spend some great family time together this weekend, and I felt that was more important than hanging E’s clean clothes for a “photo shoot”.

So, I’ll use the hour after work to hang her clothes today, and will hopefully still have enough daylight left to get some good pics of her room for the organizing post.

Hey, at least her clothes are CLEAN, right?

I can’t believe another month has gone by already!  E is 4 months old today!

As you can see, she just keeps getting cuter.  Yes, I said it. As though it were fact and not opinion.  I love her, and she’s adorable.  The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Anyhooooo, she’s rolling over – front-to-back, back-to-front, end over end (well, maybe not that last one).  She even flips back-to-front when she’s bundled in her SwaddleMe blanket!  I thought that with her arms pinned to her sides, she wouldn’t be able to flip over, but she goes from her back to her front now.  She started that less than a week ago, and FREAKED. ME. OUT.  She’s like some kind of baby Houdini.

She’s also much more interactive with her toys now.  She’s moved from holding them passively to grabbing them actively.  On the walker-thingie we’re borrowing from my sister, there are a bunch of activity toys, and the first few times I put E in there (about 2 weeks ago), she’d push herself around in a circle, but didn’t seem to care much about the “extras”.  Yesterday, I noticed that she’s looking in the mirror, spinning the ball full of confetti, and smacking the bell.  So fun!!

E’s first 4th of July.  It was a rainy day.  Cool and rainy.  Not a typical July 4th.  But, we celebrated anyway, taking her to visit with my folks before we went to a party at our friend’s house.