I love this blog post about breastfeeding.

– First snow day! No sledding and hot chocolate though. We stayed inside and played.

– Standing with no hands! She can now pull herself to standing, walk along the edge of what she used to pull up, and let go with one hand and stay standing. She is letting go with both hands too, but so far doesn’t last more than a couple seconds before she loses her balance

– She can now eat the food inside her fist. Before, if part of what she was eating was inside her curled up fingers, she couldn’t get to it. Now she can, and uses this advantage to grab whole handfuls of Cheerios.

– This isn’t really a “first” per se, but we seem to be in some kind of sleep regression or something. A couple times a night she’ll wake up screaming, much like she did when she was only a few weeks old and struggling with what I now think was gas. Is she constipated? Her poop has been changing, and it seems much stiffer than the peanut butter/hummus consistency I’ve been led to expect. Is it night terrors? Apparently this is the age around which they develop the ability to have nightmares. I dunno. It happens whether she’s in her crib, in my arms, or nursing. Sometimes I can console her. Last night she screamed so long and hard that she woke herself completely up and it took hours to get her back to sleep. So I’m not sure what’s going on. Wheee, preverbal babies!

It’s been a long week, tough for everyone, it seems.

– first case of conjunctivitis. She hates the eye ointment that I have to smear into her eyes 3 times a day. Well actually, what she hates is being immobilized so I can. Once we let her go she stops complaining.

– first tooth!! Hooray! I’ve been waiting a long time for that cute (sharp!) little nubbin! Lower right incisor.

– first time mom was late to pick her up :(. I was about 45 minutes late. The two of us were way more upset than the guide who stayed late to watch her. (I locked my keys in my car. Sigh)

– and another big one! First time pulling herself to standing and then letting go with first one, then both hands! Of course she falls almost immediately, but she does let go! She will also walk if a person is holding her hands and calling, “step! Step!” Like it’s the step-step game. She loves it.

– first real laugh! It was small, no more than a “heh! Heh! Hehe!” But it was there nonetheless. I about melted. At the time I was playing “kiss monster” which is a game where I basically just kiss her over and over, all over, exclaiming, “kiss monster!!” Many of the little games I play with her are kind of weird sounding when I try to describe them. Kiss monster indeed :p

Only one new thing I can think of, but it’s a big one this week! J has started pulling herself up to standing! It takes a lot of work and she’s pretty wobbly, but the smile on her face when she makes it up is pretty amazing.

Edit: oops, I had this set to save as a draft rather than publish. So it’s a little late this week.

Since she turns 33 weeks tomorrow, this week’s update is the one from Friday, I guess. Not much has changed in the last 3 days. She went back to daycare today and apparently spent most of the day trying to get up the single step in the infant room with no luck. I bet she can do it by the end of the week.

Oh there is one thing. This weekend I heard her cry for the first time because she was undeniably frustrated. Not hungry, tired, scared, hurting, or in need of a cuddle. Just straight up pissed off and frustrated. She was trying to crawl somewhere we wouldn’t let her (I forget where now, or why) and getting more and more insistent and annoyed until eventually she started screaming. I gave her a hug and then we went outside for a minute to distract her (but only fir a minute because it was cold.

Anyway, short update this Monday.

I would have posted this yesterday but I left my ipad at work, and it’s really hard to write a blog post on a paperwhite. So! I missed a couple weeks. We went back to Philly for the holidays and I immediately lost track of time. It was glorious to have no idea what day it was for multiple days in a row! Lots of new firsts came up. In no particular order:

– First (and second) plane flight! She handled the entire travel experience like a champ. Nothing seemed to frighten her and none of the rigamarole bothered her at all. Her ears only hurt a little bit during one of the ascents, but a quick nurse fixed that right up. We forgot all the goody bags we’d put together to hand out to our fellow travelers, but it turns out we didn’t need them at all. J was smiling at everyone the whole way to Philly. On the way home she was not as smiley, but just as cute as she played step step in the aisle and clapped and did tahdahs (more on that in a minute).

– First Christmas! There are so many firsts about this! In her stocking she got an orange, a bright bow, a squishy airplane toy, and a bell. She enjoyed 4 of them thoroughly, and I enjoyed the orange. She also got some great books and some great toys. Her favorite thing, however, was definitely the wrapping paper. She helped unwrap a number of her presents, but once she got a good strip of paper in her hands she lost all interest in everything else and proceeded to try to eat the paper. We tried hard to let her play with it without letting her actually eat it. We mostly succeeded, although I did find a little piece of red shiny wrapping paper in her diaper the next morning.

– Clapping! She’s figured out how to clap. Not only does she do it on her own, she’ll also clap if she sees you clapping. This led to some very adorable scenes where J would clap, and then a room of 10-12 people would all clap back at her. She would get a big smile on her face and do it again. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was clapping to imitate us, or if she was training us to clap