Miss Leila has been somewhat in the wars recently. The cough and cold that caused some spectacular vomits has morphed into an infected throat and ears so the Little Princess got her first ever course of antibiotics this morning. Although she’s been generally pretty happy and good tempered she seems to have finally understood that she is sick and therefore allowed to be grumpy and difficult to get along with. She’s one very grouchy baby today.
I suspect being unwell isn’t helping her eating behaviour either. The only thing she really wants is a rusk and, boy, does she want it! Show the kid a rusk and her face lights up. She bounces in her seat and both hands come up to grab it and stuff it in her mouth as quickly as possible. Spoons are not nearly as interesting so food from a spoon has to be delivered around rusks. Sometimes the rusk can be dipped in food, but one must return the rusk to her highness pronto to avoid outraged screeching.
The inflatable donut has really started to come into its own now that Leila can sit without needing a lot of support. She sits in it for ages with a collection of toys and plays. She rarely gets into a position from which she can’t extricate herself and when she starts to get tired she can recline and watch the world go by.
She doesn’t do quite so well with rolling, though. She’s very good at rolling from her back to her front and does so pretty much as soon as she’s laid on her back. Getting from her front back onto her back is a whole other matter however and Leila seems to prefer to lie with her face on floor and yell until someone rescues her. Then she rolls herself over again…
Sleeping has to be our greatest achievement of recent weeks. Leila has dropped her late night feed and now sleeps from 7pm until about 6am. I had hoped that, with the start of daylight saving over the weekend, she might sleep until 7am, but she’s already adjusted and is back to the 6am wakeup. We may not be getting a sleep in but being able to go to bed before 11pm is doing us a heap of good.
The thing that I really must mention before I finish this post is how much Leila loves Finn (I may have to use this as evidence in years to come). Leila is a happy, friendly baby and most people are greeted with a big smile, but she is always, always, really excited to see Finn. He gets the biggest smiles, the loudest yells and, when he sings and dances to “Michael Finnigan”, he’s the only person who can make her laugh her head off. Wherever Finn is, Leila is happiest by his side.
Feeding Leila mushed up food has been a bit hit and miss. Although she seems to like most things I’ve offered her (yoghurt being a notable exception - it made her chuck massively) actually getting the spoon in her mouth has been a huge battle. Her tongue just kept getting in the way and she appeared to want to lick the spoon rather than actually take the food off it - if that makes sense. But we had a little bit of a breakthrough in the last couple of days.
Like any baby she shoves anything she gets hold of into her mouth and she’s become very fond of chewing on rusks. The other night I let her grab the spoon and pull it into her mouth herself. She did that for most of the meal and it seems like the penny dropped. You open your mouth, the spoon goes in and it deposits food in there!. All you need to do is swallow the stuff! Who knew it was that easy!
Just now I gave her some Heinz meat and veg mush (I will cook stuff for her myself when she’s eating reliably enough for it to be worth the effort) and it went down a treat. She grabbed the spoon and put it in her mouth once and after that was happy to just open up and let me shovel the food in for her. When she’d had enough she put her hand up and pushed the spoon away.
I dare say there’ll be more challenges to getting her eating real food, but for now I’m really happy with this little triumph. I was very sick of fighting with her tongue.
I just watched Leila do what I think is her first intentional roll - at least it’s the first one I’ve seen.
She was lying on her side quite happily gazing out the window and talking to her self and the hoisted herself onto her front to get closer to a toy she noticed.
Now I’m waiting to see if she’ll roll back or just yell when she gets tired of lying on her tummy.
Leila seems to really enjoy the joys of bouncing in her Jolly Jumper.
