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That I’ve posted pictures from Micah’s first Xmas?

No?

Well, here you go.

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Ok, Micah is now officially mobile.

Well, that’s not fair.  She was mobile before.  She could roll like a champion in order to attain any particular goal or toy that caught her interest.

Now, however, she’s officially crawling.

We’ve kind of been keeping an eye on her these past few weeks as she was looking as if she were on the very verge of crawling.  Not that we don’t normally watch her in any case.  It’s just that we were watching her in expectation of a particular developmental milestone.

These past few weeks we’d see her get up on the hands and knees and rock back and forth, back and forth.  Sometimes quite violently.  We knew that the minute she worked out that she could use that sort of motion in conjunction with some additional reaching of her arms to propel herself forward that it’d be all over for us.

So we watched.

Well early last week we noticed that Micah was making tiny, almost imperceptible movements forward.   More so on her belly in army-crawl fashion than on her hands and knees, but still…if you placed her down on the ground she’d kick and she’d kick and she’d kick and kind of move herself forward.

Her biggest limitation were her arms.  She just wouldn’t move her arms to aid in the movement.  They remained curled up into her chest, with her hands firmly in her own mouth.  If she kicked too hard, she ended up tripodding.

Then…just a few days ago, I had her on the ground again, playing with her toys.   I had just put down the house phone after calling Lagrange about something or another.  Her eyes were drawn like laser guided missiles to the phone, which lay just out of her reach.   The phone had been particularly fascinating to her for weeks.  The buttons made lots of beeping sounds.  I usually had the speaker phone on to talk to the office or to my relatives.  It lit up a little bit.  End result: complete and total fascination.

As I said, the phone was by me, about a foot or so out of her reach.  So she used her incredible talent with rolling to make her way closer to me to play with the phone.  All of this was too cute, so I had my video camera out to watch her.  For a while she just studied the phone.  I wasn’t that worried about the whole thing as she had it in the wrong orientation and had her fingers over the “End” button.  After a few seconds, however, she decided she wanted to turn the phone around into the correct orientation.  Then she started mashing on the buttons.  She didn’t seem to do much, but occasionally I’d hear a boop as she managed to find a key to hit.  After a few seconds more, she decided to give the phone a little taste, just to see how it measured up to her oatmeal.

It was at that point that I intervened and put the phone another foot or so out of her reach.  I kind of expected her to go after it again, but she was facing me in the wrong orientation to roll towards it.  Her head was looking at me directly.

Then, so quickly that I almost didn’t understand what I was seeing, she kicked and dragged herself army-crawl style towards the phone.  Within a few seconds she had it back in her hands.  I was both delighted and horrified.

So I decided to take the phone away and place it two feet in front of her…just to see if the last time was a fluke.  Sure enough, she stared at it for a few seconds and then launched herself forward.

She’s been repeating the trick ever since.

Fortunately she’s not at the point where she explores.  Usually she’s just going after one particular toy that has her interest.  But she’s definitely on her way to dangerous territory (for me and her mother).

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Micah is still not feeling 100%. She’s stuffed up, coughs occasionally, and is generally kind of crabby.

(To those nameless people out there who are right now about to head over to the phone and attempt to call me to express concern or give advice or just needlessly worry, please don’t. The situation is under control. Micah has the sniffles, not the bubonic plague.)

Last night while I was taking care of her, I found myself thinking that she seemed particularly stuffy. Enough so that I contemplated trying something with which we’ve had only marginal success: applying Little Noses and suctioning the nose.

For those of you without children, Little Noses is basically a diluted saline solution that one sprays up the nose.  With a cute name.   We’d tried applying it once before with little success.  Actually it didn’t seem to even annoy Micah that much, so I just assumed that the saline was special non-burning saline.  Kind of like “No More Tears” but for boogers.

This was my first solo application, so I wanted to double check the directions to make sure that I had things correct.  Place thingy in nostril and squeeze.

Hmm.  Not hard.

I took a practice squeeze, just as we had done last time.  Nothing much came out, so I quickly deduced that we may have been a little too gentle and hesitant.  A bit more force and I got the results I wanted.  Now onto the actual application.

Micah was pretty compliant as I stuck the business end of the container up her right nostril.

3…2…1….squeeze!

The change was immediate and much more vigorous than the last application.  Micah looked pretty confused for a second…then she started coughing….and then….

And then…well…Micah was piiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssed.

Fortunately it only lasted a few minutes.  After that she was just sullen for the rest of the evening.

Fun Fun.

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They are available:

Micah’s First Snowfall

Micah among the Packers Fans

Micah’s First Thanksgiving

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Just in case you were curious, my daughter has ingested the following:

• Rice Cereal
• Oatmeal Cereal
• Avocado (actually the first solid food she ate)
• Bananas (did not go over well)
• Sweet Potatoes
• Butternut Squash
• Apple sauce

And just today she tried green beans for the first time.  She wasn’t thrilled, so we’ll try it another few times before we come back to it.

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It’s a little cold out.   I’m not going to lie to you.   There’s probably somewhere between a half-inch and an inch of snow on the ground.  I haven’t had nearly enough coffee to deal with this yet.

Yes, we took Micah outside and took pictures.  No, I’m not going to post them today.  We’re actually up in Madison right now, so I don’t have a way to offload them from my camera.   You’ll just have to be patient.

Speaking of my daughter, it’s amazing how quickly you take things for granted.   The family drove up to Madison last night, as did AM’s sister and her husband.

Now, AM, her mother, and I have all had our turn at feeding Micah solid foods these past several weeks.  It’s almost become old hat for us.  AM’s father, her sister, and her sister’s husband, on the other hand, were absolutely fascinated by the process.  Every outraged face that my daughter made was greeted with uproarious laughter and delight.  So much so that Micah was consistently distracted from the process of eating, which was even funnier to them.  I was almost tempted to ask them to stand in the other room so we could cram some more sweet potato in my daughter’s mouth.  Micah tends to be very interested in what’s going on around her more so than what’s going on in front of her.

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I had started this evening’s writings by intending to title this post “Even her boogers are cute.”

But they aren’t.  They really aren’t.  They’re just kind of gross.  And now that she has her first case of the sniffles, they’re quite plentiful.

Well, it had to happen at some point.

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Ok…my child has grown overnight.

Literally.

I know, I know.  Everyone who has had a child has gone through those moments when you can almost literally watch your child grow.

But really, in six months, I’ve never really seen the evidence of it.  Oh sure, over the course of several days, I’ve seen my child go from fitting into a particular outfit to barely fitting in the same outfit to using the outfit as a dust rag.  But I expected that.

This is different.

A few weeks ago, my wife finally relented and allowed me to buy the Fisher-Price Rainforest Jumperoo.  Up until that point we had been using one of those hang in the doorways jumpers.  This is much better.

 In any case, we set it up, put her in, and discovered that she was at the right height at height level 1 (of 3).  That is to say, her toes…and just her toes…consistently touched the ground.  Having the feet flat on the ground is no good.  She’s not ready for that yet.

In any case, everything was going just fine.  My daughter loves to bounce.  Bounce bounce bounce.

Heck, I had her in it for a good twenty minutes yesterday, watching her play with all the toys and knick-knacks, bouncing away and having a good old time.

Just a few minutes ago, however, I place her into the jumperoo and lo and behold….her feet were solidly on the ground.  Yesterday…toes.  Today…feet.

I admit, I was a bit stunned.  I quickly took her out and set about changing the height settings to level two.  After placing her in, once again her toes were the only thing on the ground.

Still…I swear she grew an inch last night.  That may not be medically or developmentally possible at this point, but again I point out:  yesterday toes.  Today feet.

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From Micah’s First Halloween:

Also…perhaps my favorite:

“What do you mean I don’t get candy?”

Oh, by the way, that first link is the gallery with the rest of the pictures

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