Ada at six months.

Wow, how time flies!

Sporting a fabulous cardigan knitted by Nanny Kate

When we last did an update post, Ada had just turned three months. A lot has happened since then!

For one thing, Ada has grown. She now weighs 7.74 kg/17 lbs and is 67cm/26 in. That puts her at the 68th percentile for weight and 71st percentile for height. We haven't had her head officially measured, but I put it around 42.5 cm/16.7 in, which is still tracking around the 25th percentile. She still has a tiny head.

Since then, she's learned to roll over (both back-to-front and front-to-back) and sit up, which she can do for long stretches of time without falling over (and nowadays when she falls over, it typically seems to be because she wants to or something at a really crazy angle has caught her eye). She continues to really enjoy being on her front, and this is her default position. Sometimes she really NEEDS to be on her front, which makes for some interesting (read: stressful) diaper changes! Now that she can sit herself up from a lying down position, she's starting to choose to sit up quite a bit and she moves around all the time now. She can get places now, just usually not the places she's trying to get to.

She still moves backwards rather than forwards when pushing off on all fours, but it looks like she is starting to work out some of the logistics of crawling, even if she has a ways to go yet. The other day when on all fours, rocking back and forth as she does these days, she managed to move one hand forward, in order to move closer to a toy. Not reaching out to grab it, but actually tried to place her hand further forward so she could move closer. She didn't quite work out what to do after that, so just collapsed to her belly again, but she seemed to be trying to work out how to get all the moving parts together.

Ada now has two teeth! They haven't finished coming all the way up yet, but they're both fully through and fully visible now when she smiles big. She's chewing constantly.

You can kind of see the teeth

And with new teeth comes, of course, her first toothbrush. We haven't got into the habit of using it yet, but she at least enjoys it in general; she seems to be a natural!

And the other big milestone we've had recently is eating solids. We now typically have two meals a day, breakfast and lunch. We're working towards having a regular (early) dinner, though we're not there yet. Her favorites so far are sweet potatoes, pears and her "porridge," which is a banana and peach flavored baby cereal thing. She's tried avocado, squash, zucchini, melon, apple, carrots, banana, raspberry (in a mix with apple and pear), cranberry (in a mix with apple and banana) and as of yesterday, yogurt. So far the only thing that she has flat refused after the first taste was the zucchini, though I've been working on that and she'll now eat it if it's mixed with something else. (Besides, neither Mark nor I actually like zucchini unless it's grilled or served with something else, so she may be genetically predisposed to this reaction.)

Now that she's six months, we can get started on more of the fun stuff. I think bread is something we'll try in the next couple of days, and protein like fish or scrambled eggs. Plus we'll continue to introduce new fruits and vegetables, especially vegetables, since I've been taking the lazy way and giving her lots of fruit.

Pear

Porridge (sort of)

Applesauce

Sweet potato

Melon

She's becoming even more interactive and engaged with each passing day. She has been "talking" more, and her sounds are becoming more like syllables. We've started using the foam blocks to build towers for her to knock down, and she's starting to engage with simple "games."

She still loves bath time, which is fantastic now with her inflatable seal tub (thanks again, Mimi!). She enjoys chewing on her rubber ducks, chewing on her bathtime book and chewing on the side of the seal. Sometimes she tries to chew the washcloth, and if she's really excited, she'll splash a bit.

Sleep continues to be the one area where we're not exactly in "ideal" territory, though we have made progress in the last few months and I know it could be a lot, LOT worse. She's a decent sleeper, really, it's just that she's pretty erratic in some ways. She doesn't sleep through the night, and she can still wake up once, twice or even three times in a night. We never know which it's going to be. Lately she has had quite a few nights waking up only once, which is great, but it's still not so common that I'd call it the "norm." I'm kind of tired.

Her wake up times also vary; lately she can be up anywhere from 5:45am to 7:15am, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason. That means that the exact times that she goes down to nap also vary, since it's kind of dependent on what time she wakes up. If she wakes up super early, it often can throw her nap schedule out of whack because she can't make it to her "usual" time. She does now regularly have three naps a day; the variation here in addition to when she sleeps is how long she sleeps. For her morning or lunchtime nap, she could sleep 35 or 40 minutes, or she could sleep for an hour and a half or almost two hours - or anything in between.

I'm not worried or anything because I'm pretty sure she's getting the sleep that she needs. I think she typically gets around 13.5-15 hours of sleep a day, and she's generally alert and not cranky unless it's coming up to her next nap. We just try to be as consistent as possible on our end, and I'm just hoping things smooth out with time (though I know that it could still be a while before that happens!). At any rate, things are definitely better than they were back at three months. In the grand scheme of things, we are very fortunate. It's just a tiny thing that could make my life easier. It's hard to plan the day or know what I can get done, if I don't know when she's going to want to sleep until she wakes up in the morning and if I'm going to have 30 minutes or an hour and a half. Maybe there is a pattern there, but it's so complex I can't spot it! Anyway, for the most part, she sleeps, and that's good.

Since her three month birthday we started swimming classes, which she continues to enjoy. She's very good at going underwater now, and recovers pretty quickly. She's even starting to learn to close her eyes before going underwater when she hears the "signal." We're planning to continue the classes next term, which starts in September. 

And of course she still loves to jump - in all ways! (Though sometimes she just likes to hang.)

She just continues to grow and astound us - and we're only six months in!