Into the Crib, Part 2

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Zoe central. Zoe has sprouted a couple of new teeth. She doesn’t like us prying her mouth open to watch them come in, but we can often get her to laugh while we are dangling her upside down, providing us a good peek inside. It looks like we may be up to six teeth, and given how much she likes to put her mouth on everything, I suspect we will soon see bite marks on the coffee table. I’m looking forward to her back teeth coming in so we can move away from foods that require little more than tough gums to masticate.

She has also started a very distinct babbling. “Bah, bah, bah. Blah, blah, bah. A bah. A bah” Sometimes she will say it directly to us, almost in response to something we have said, and other times she will be occupied with some task and just sit there talking to herself. We of course assume she saying Ma or Da, or possibly she is trying to solve K + sinK - K*sinK - π/2 = 0. Either way she is definitely saying something. In fact, Alison was sitting with her a day or so ago and I walked up; Alison swears she said daddy. I didn’t hear it, and even after telling Zoe that she wouldn’t get dinner until she said it again I couldn’t get her to repeat it. We keep hearing words mixed in with the gibberish, but I don’t know if we are hearing real words or we’re just performing some parental conjuring.

It was just in my last post that I talked about Zoe pulling herself up, and then quickly learning how to get back to the ground. Now she is not only up and down with ease, but she is this close (visualize my thumb and index finger about an inch apart) to walking. If we are lying in bed she will use one of us to pull herself up to a standing position and let go. If she manages more than a couple of seconds we will applaud and with a big grin she will repeat the trick. She likes to do this on the bed so that when she falls she has a soft landing. But the big step came yesterday when I was lying on her mat and she pulled herself up on me and stood for almost five seconds. The only direction she has left to go is forward.

I think the biggest development since my last post is that we have almost transitioned her to her crib. Yes, you read that correctly, she is not sleeping in our bed (except for naps and if she has a bad dream). On May 7, 2007 in my seventh blog post (this is number forty) I wrote Into the Crib, Part 1. This week started part 2. She spent four full nights and two partial nights in her own bed. Unfortunately we are not sleeping any better. The problem is that she does not cry for very long when we put her down. This can only mean that something is wrong, and we’ll sit with an ear pressed to the monitor trying to interpret every noise filtering through. Unfortunately our monitor, which sits on the bookcase next to the window, also picks up sounds from outside, so when that little nocturnal animal runs through the bushes we interpret the sound as Zoe getting tangled up in her blanket and trying to kick free. It’s all we can do to keep ourselves from rushing in. The first couple of nights, when we’d check on her, we would find her half-asleep sitting up, her little head bobbing forward. Finding her like that was almost worse than her screaming for an hour (I said almost). I realize that the video monitors were four times as expensive as the already-expensive digital version we bought, but I think Alison and I would be better rested this week if we could just see her for a couple of seconds every minute.

See photos of Zoe at http://picasaweb.google.com/dbglass