Friday Four

Call this "The Proud Father Edition". -- Ed

1. The baby and I have a new ritual when we get home from walks, trips, and errands: I let her grab the door knocker and tell her to knock three times. This started when I saw her grabbing for the knocker after a Baby Bjorn trip and decided to see what she would do -- and then noticed her go straight for the knocker after the next such trip. So I made a game of it, and now take her out of the stroller and hold her up, if we're not using the Baby Bjorn. She is not, as far as I can tell, purposely doing three knocks so far, so I pull her away after she makes a good noise three times, while I count aloud.

2. The baby babbles quite a bit now, and often makes the sound "da-da". She also turns towards me and smiles when Momma asks her, "Where's Daddy?" As much as I'd love "Da-da" to be her first word, I am refraining from counting it until she clearly means "Daddy" when she makes the noise. As it was with crawling, so it is with talking, there are lots of pieces she has to put together before she's really doing it.

3. Baby Van Horn got a clean bill of health this week after her nine month checkup. At nineteen pounds, she's just shy of being three times her birth weight. I've been here the whole time, but it's still amazing to me both that she has grown so much and that she was ever so small. It's hard to imagine her at newborn size now, and I find that I now have to think of things, such as, "Well, her whole body used to fit comfortably across my lap. Now, not so much," and "She's much stronger and sturdier now: Some of the ways I can hold her now could have hurt her back then." Pictures help too, of course. Lately, I have been fond of saying to her, "You're three times your original size, but you're still a tiny little person!"

4. I have been assured that some anxiety is normal for a nine-month-old. She clung to me at a friend's house last week, although she has been to numerous other "new" houses before. (She eventually adjusted, and started playing on the couch, then the floor.) My first taste was more amusing: She clung to me when the bathtub faucet made a racket as I filled her bathtub. I didn't catch the hint, and proceeded to undress her and finish preparing her bath. When I filled a small container I use to rinse her from the same terrifying faucet, she clung to me and peed on my shirt. Momma sometimes calls me "Mr. Immaculate" since I usually manage to go through the day spotless, but we both were wearing a new change of clothes after that particular bath!

-- CAV