Letter to Miss Leyba: Month Six

Dear Miss Leyba,

Oh my goodness, you are half a year old already! I can’t believe it. In 18 years you’ll be heading off to college. The time is flying by.

Month six has been all about movement. In the last few weeks you’ve morphed from a squishy, soft baby to a very muscular young lady with places to go and things to see. In fact, you converted so much baby fat to muscle in the first half of the month that we started bringing back clothes we had already packed away because they had been too small.

Then you hit your 6 month growth spurt and I’m happy to report that your beautiful, gigantic cheeks are back! (and those 3-6 month t-shirts are packed up again.) Your outfits are still super baggy, but you’re filling them out a bit more every day. Way to go, my voracious eater!

Here’s what you’ve been up to this month:

You can now sit beautifully by yourself. You are also very close to being able to sit up by yourself from lying on your back and you sit up fairly easily when you push up from your side. You like to go from sitting up to the crawling position too.

You are constantly trying to crawl, rocking back and forth on your hands and knees. You scoot yourself backwards around the house on your tummy; so far, you have only ventured around the living room on your own. We know it’s only a matter of time until you’ll be cruising the joint.  We really need to baby proof the house as we didn’t realize just how much baby proofing would be needed until we saw how you reach for everything we touch and will put anything in your mouth.

You love standing up by yourself and only need minimal support from us now so you don’t fall over. You are incredibly proud of yourself for this achievement and give us giant, toothless grins while you’re standing. It’s adorable. You have every right to be proud! What a momentous achievement! Now stop growing up so fast; I can’t take it.

This month you’ve been expanding your vocabulary and love to chat with us. You still are very quiet in public and mainly just talk to daddy and I, but sometimes you surprise us and chat it up with total strangers. For the most part, you are speaking gobbletgoop, but you frequently mimic what we say. You’ve repeated “meow” (once!) and mimic the intonation of things like “hi” after me… we’re still holding out for mama and dada! I listen carefully to everything you say and are ready for you to astonish me with those big words.

We still read together, but now you have less patience for long books, so we mostly stick to “baby books” with just a few words on each page so you can practice turning the pages and, of course, eating the book. Everything goes in your mouth!

You are tremendously fascinated by food and reach for what we’re eating. We haven’t given you any solid foods yet; we’re holding out as long as we can on that. Now that you are six months old we plan to introduce all sorts of yummy vegetables and fruits to you.

You reach for, toss, and drop your toys. Over and over again. I like seeing you make choices and develop preferences. (Of course, I can say this NOW.)

And you enjoy riding in your jogging stroller.

Of course, you enjoy it even more when our runs are over and we hold you, but we really can’t blame you for that.

We’ve been hanging out together for 15 months now. It’s been such fun. Happy Half Birthday, sweetie!

Love, Mama

Baby in the mirror from Carrie on Vimeo.