My little baby-boo (or “little nugget,” as her older sister calls her) turned 6 months old yesterday!

She had her 3rd day of rice cereal when we got home from work yesterday. She eats off the spoon like a champ, as if she’d been doing it all her life. We doubled the portion yesterday (2 teaspoons of rice cereal mixed into 4 teaspoons of breast milk) and she seemed to want more after we were done. You know how they say time flies with babies? The reason is that, turns out, the mommy-amnesia thing is TRUE. I would say I have a better memory than almost everyone I know, and I even have a hard time remembering how we spent our days when I was on maternity leave. What was I doing during her awake segments? What about back in the days when the waking times were arbitrary? I recently looked through photos of Allie as a newborn and two-month-old, and the baby depicted doesn’t even look familiar to me. Who is that Asian-looking infant? (I’m losing genetic input now as she looks more and more white.) Although I have little independent recollection of the trauma of the early days, I do remember impressions, like that I felt overwhelmed and scared and insecure a lot because I didn’t know what was coming, what it all meant, and I struggled a lot to learn about infants as fast as I could (which opened me up to more paranoia and confusion). These days are now much, much easier.
Allie now rarely cries, but laughs and smiles easily. It’s clear what she enjoys, such as rolling over. She rolls in both directions, sometimes consecutively as a mode of transportation for her. This is how she ended up here for this photo:

I had her all set up nicely on her tummy on her blanket, and when I got up to go in front of her for the photo, she’d rolled away. So I had to sit with her for a few photos and have Mr. W take the shots.

A cameraphone isn’t ideal for taking baby photos, because it doesn’t have the shutter speed to deal with quick baby motions. We got a lot of unusable blurry photos, like these:

Me: Look, Allie, a disappearing hand! Neat trick, huh?
Allie: I can do it, too, mommy!

Allie has slept on her fuzzy bear, a gift from the sheriff’s department, in her crib for as long as she’d been sleeping in her crib. The bear’s gone during her naps because she naps on her tummy, but each night, after she nursed herself to sleep, I place her gently onto her bear in her crib on her back. She’s startled awake by the movement, flings her arms out, and the moment she feels the bear, her eyes start closing and she gets cozy with her left thumb in her mouth and her right hand grasping the bear’s head. When she wakes in the middle of the night, she “bear wrestles” and tugs on the bear’s arms, face, or foot, curls up with a bear arm, and falls asleep again.

I know the bear brings her a lot of comfort and security during her night sleep, but Mr. W has been freaking out that Allie is so capable of movement now that she may place herself in a position where she will suffocate herself with the bear over her face. I tend to feel the opposite. Seeing how mobile she is makes me feel that she is so strong that she won’t get trapped by the bear and suffocate. Due to how strongly Mr. W felt (he uses words like she WILL die, we WILL have to attend a baby funeral, we WILL have a SIDS situation on our hands), I gave weaning her of the bear a try last night. Yeah, happy birthday, baby. You’re gonna be forced to be a big girl.
So last nite, I nurse her to sleep as usual. She’s carried, asleep, over to her crib, and lowered in. She doesn’t bother to open her eyes, but flings out her right arm to feel for the bear’s head. It’s not there. She rolls to her side, feeling for the bear’s foot. That’s not there, either. She’s on a hard mattress, sans “bear rug.” She reaches over from the sideways position, sucking her left thumb, grasping the top of the crib bumper with her right hand as she does with the bear’s arm or foot, tries to pull it to her as she would with the bear’s foot. It doesn’t go anywhere. She tries to sleep with her hand on the top of the bumper, but her hand’s too high and each time she drifts off to sleep and her hand falls, she wakes up and tries to hold on again. After a few minutes, she pops open her eyes, looks around, swings her arms around her feeling just the fitted sheet. She rolls over, pops up, looks around wide-eyed. It finally registers that there is no bear. She tentatively feels the bumper, and then starts crying. We’re watching this on the iPad downstairs, and I’m breaking out in a cold sweat. Soon I am nauseated and getting tearful myself. My poor baby wants her security toy! She’s wailing, when usually one of the most predictable parts of the evening is the time after putting her down, knowing she’d just go to sleep on her own and stay there all night. Mr. W storms upstairs, saying something about not being able to stand me freaking out, and despite my protests, goes into her room, puts the bear in her crib, and puts Allie on it, then walks out. Bewildered, Allie cries a few more minutes, and I cry along with her downstairs, feeling helpless and overwhelmed and guilty like I did in the beginning of motherhood. Soon she is quiet. I dare leave the kitchen to go peek at the monitor in the living room. She is on her tummy on her bear, fast asleep, with her cheek nuzzled on the bear’s shoulder. She slept well on her bear all night until we woke her at 6:25a this morning.
Allie: 1
Mr. W: 0