You--34 Weeks, Six Days

You're really on the move, girl!

Just tonight you discovered that there's a world outside of the schooling room that's now in reach to you.
Typically you're kept on the floor in here, "here" being the one room that we spend the bulk of our time in together.
But tonight I saw you crawl over to the front hallway and sort of hang back for a minute, looking curiously at it, and then decide to see where it went.
I followed you down the hall and straight into the kitchen and was dismayed to see the look of sheer wonder and joy on your face.

My job of keeping you safe just got that much harder.

Because now we need the basement gate installed and soon we will need to block off all staircase accesses--top and bottom and that is a pain in the ARSE!  It's incredibly difficult for your sister and brother to work the mechanisms that they need to work in order to get up and down the stairs on their own which means a LOT more running for me.

That's okay though.
You're worth it ;)
In the time that I last wrote, you went from really kind of starting to food to having entire platefuls (you are a piglet!  I'm not even remotely kidding!), have started pulling yourself up on furniture (yes!  Do it!  Start walking, it's far cleaner!), and just tonight had a "big girl" bath with Creux--no baby tub needed.

Food:

Jeez, girl, we've created a monster here.  I thought we'd just sort of "introduce" you to solids and you grabbed a bib, a knife, and a fork and settled in to eat your way to a year old.  Had I known what you were capable of, I would never had bought the stupid netted food feeder (you're insulted by that), the spoons that hold one eensy bite of food (you have graduated to Crate & Barrel's h'orderve silver spoon and fork--perfect size!), and bowls so tiny I'd thought they'd be perfect for new eater proportions but I GROSSLY underestimated your appetite.

You have it all, too.  No mushy baby cereals, no processed-to-the-point-of-flavorless jars of baby food, you have the real deal!  Tons of organic fruits and veggies lush and bursting with flavor and nutrients and you eat everything up!  That pasta with cayenne is your favorite which just cracks me up.  And the more pureed foods like applesauce tend to get a "no, thank you" tongue from you.  You like texture and it's really quite adorable because you don't have a darn tooth in your mouth (SERIOUSLY.  Am getting a bit concerned that you're going to be toothless and two.  Where are they?  I can see little bulges in your gums but nothing erupts. ???) so you look like a little old lady eating.

Moving:

You're a fast little thing and there's no more commando crawling going on, you're up and on all fours!  New this week is the pulling up on things and you've had some hard knocks with that.  You drag the toy bins out of the organizers and you try to stabilize yourself on those but they move and aren't sturdy at all so you've cracked your wee noggin a time or two.  There's several stools and a small table in the room too that you're very interested in all of a sudden; you crawl over and pull up to your knees on them.
You're not pulling to standing yet but you're super sturdy on your feet when held so I don't anticipate that it will take much longer for you to figure out what you need to do to get up and start chasing all of the "short people" in the house around.

Big Girlness:

--today I made a move to give you a bite of smoothie and you shook your head "no" at me.  I tried again and you shook again.  I pushed further and you swatted my spoon!  You're figuring this stuff out!

--you totally answer to your name; there is absolutely no mistaking that you know very well who "Luxie" is!

--the spoon swatting is already old.  I like the head shaking better.

--you've moved to 12 month sized clothing because you are a PORK CHOP

--your hair is growing longer and your bald spot is not bald anymore

--tonight at dinner Chas showed us what he taught you today.  Sitting at one end of the table he made a lip-smacking kissing sound.  You beamed at him from the other end.  He did it again.  You beamed harder.  He did it once more and you pursed your sweet lips and "kissed" him back.  We all clapped and scared the kiss right out of you.  You were done then.

--you say, "mama, dada, and baba" but I don't really think they mean anything yet.  I have not noticed any deliberate words so far.

--you're sleeping better.  Down at nineish, up at four, back down until 7:30-9:00 the next morning.  Whew!  Because I really hate that three hour waking thing.  I have been a demon for weeks now.

In other news...
I want my room back. 
I know, right?
Here, fully documented in these pages, is a mother's heartsick lamentation over how I would just DIE if you left my room.
But now we've made the change, you no longer sleep in my bed AT ALL, and I'm tired of tip-toeing around all night long.
I want to go upstairs and watch tv or read or talk to Daddy and instead we have to be super, super quiet or you will wake and want to nurse again.

This is not good because all progress on your room came to a halt awhile ago so that we could quickly revamp the boys'.  But there's been nothing quick about it and you don't even have complete walls up so...I am not getting my room back any time soon.
We simply don't have the hours to devote to it but I'm going to have to dig them up somewhere because you really need to be sleeping in a dark, quiet place now--uninterrupted.
You're not a newbie anymore.
You need your space where you can get some sleep without our accidentally waking you with an episode of "The Real Housewives of Orange County."

And that's what's about to happen right now, except the Housewives aren't on because the Sister Wives are.
Wives, wives, wives...married women are apparently incredibly intriguing!  (They are! Really!)

I'll close this with my favorite thing about you right now:

When you're in your crib and you've just waken, sometimes you'll hear me open the bedroom door.  And I'll sneak super quietly over to you, so quiet because I want to see what you're doing while you wait on me.  (You never wake crying, you coo and play.)  But you have hearing unlike any child I've ever known and at the slightest noise, I see your head straining for a visual on me.  You'll be on your tummy and your little head will be leaning forward and cocked to the side, your eyes wide and wondering, searching, searching....and then you see me and you break into this huge grin and your head will drop down to your mattress and you smile hard and then peek right back up at me.  And when I finally come close, you pull yourself towards me  and as I reach down for you, you reach up with one small hand.

Oh, how I love this moment so much!  And I'm so glad that I have this space here to write about it so that years later I can look back and hopefully this will jog my brain for the exact snapshot that I seek: the one second where you and I make eye contact and how overcome with glee you are that I've arrived because you know that I'll scoop you up and kiss you silly and then take you down where the circus is waiting for you to be the ringmistress.

You are so loved.

Always,
Mama