And what can she do? Well, as is clear from the photo, she can sit, and balance very well. Amy and Lena literally screamed when I let go of her for the two seconds it took to take the photo, and, as you can see, Erica was herself a little nonplussed!
She looks a little severe in this photo, but her normal state is smiling. She's always smiling. She wakes up smiling and I can hear her smile-breathing - mouth breathing with a smile plastered on her mouth, a kind of 'hee-hee' breath that's very cheeky, and usually indicates she is, or is about to, engage in some very fun activity that may or may not be what her mother thinks of as a good idea!
She is NEARLY crawling. She leans forward from a sitting position, and slaps her hands on the floor, lifting her bottom off the ground. It looks like she is going to do it just like her big sisters, and crawl from that position on one foot and one knee, skipping belly crawling altogether. She hates it when she ends up on her belly, and cries to be saved. We called her Eri-kame, 'kame' means turtle in Japanese, and on her tummy she's like a turtle on its back, helpless to move. Sometimes she rolls over to her back, and she's happier like that. She also micalculates often and ends up smashing her nose into the floor. It's all red now, and she has a bruise on her cheek. She also likes to practice standing whenever someone will hold her up, and just yesterday pulled herself to stand, rather wobbly, at the table with the piano on it. Need I say she loves the piano? What baby doesn't love banging piano keys? She always looks so proud of herself when she succeeds in doing one of these grown-up tricks.
And like any crawling baby, she's clingy too. As she realizes she can move independently away from me, she wants to make sure I'm always there to go back to. She likes best of all for me to sit on the floor so she can practice her pulling-up techniques on me. I can use one computer from the floor, and do the laundry that way, which is good, because I am able to leave her alone less now than a month ago! She has always been very content to amuse herself with her toys, but not so much at the moment. It doesn't help that the girls keep waking her up, so she's tired and cranky too. But even so, I know things are going to be a lot harder when she begins to move. I still have it good that once I plonk her down, she can't go anywhere! Only problem is, she knows that now, and it frustrates her!
She's not eating much yet. I've given her a few things, rice and bananas and bits of mandarin. She's not so interested once we sit her down and feed her with a spoon, but she still breastfeeds pretty often so I guess she's just not hungry. She hardly needs it anway, she's now 8.8kg!
It's Spring Break, which means I have to think of something to feed the girls every half hour or so! "Mum, I'm hungry". Only 8 and 6, my god, how many times in my life am I going to hear that? Mum-Judy, do you want to hazard a guess at how many times you've heard that?!! Today was strawberries and pineapple and cookies for morning tea, and I will cook rice and tuna fritters for lunch. There's cheese and crackers for afternoon tea, more fruit, some cake that no-one is particularly interested in, but I'll try to feed it to them.
Spring Break also means kindergarten is over for Lena, and she will enter school in two weeks. And I will go back to work. Right now with Erica just starting to get clingy and shy of strangers (she cries for Baachan now, whereas she didn't a month ago)! I am lined up to do my favorite class, the technical university. Three hours twice a week. We figure if Kanji feeds her, gives her some milk out of a sippy cup (she won't take a bottle), gives her a bath then goes for a drive with her, that'll about take up the three hours.
That means some savings! Things are not looking good on the savings front. I lost some money (I'm just about to turn this room inside out to try to find it) and it's harder to save than we anticipated. We have not booked tickets yet, and people are talking about booking summer tickets already, and the planes being already booked out. I suspect part of that is the travel agents' bulk reservations, which will come free a month before the flight. So we might still make it! Amy and Lena are dying to come - Lena is excited beyond belief about getting her ears pierced, and Amy just wants a world with no homework where she is free to do her own thing. I'm trying to tell her NZ is not that much of a paradise, but absence makes the heart grow fonder! We all got rather wistful watching a TV show the other day with a Tasmanian family, with the big yard, and bbq area, lawns and trampoline! For this, and this alone, will I torment my precious baby with the shock of dear mummy leaving her. She'll get used to it I suppose, they all do.
No comments:
Post a Comment