On Jan 20, 2009...

On this very special day for our country, we are looking forward to the changes and challenges to come with hope and optimism.

At the same time, we also spent the day dreaming about our own future and reflecting on the past five months...because today, Gracie is five months old. Our expectations for her development were realistic, so I thought. But watching her learn, grow, and change every single day is the most amazing experience we could ever imagine. This wonderful little baby has turned our lives upside down and made it all so much more worth living for. I can't even explain how much in love we are with her, or how much we adore every sound and move she makes. And it is a very good thing, because she is certainly developing a personality that can try our patience, already.

In addition to my last post about all of her recent developments, including sitting without assistance...

One of the most annoying, but developmentally appropriate new skills Gracie has acquired is the ability to scream, screech, and squeal...and she has made it one of her favorite activities. She has surprisingly found a variety of uses for her high-pitched noises, some cute and others not so much, but all of them evoke reactions that I'm sure reinforce this undesirable behavior.

Gracie quickly figured out the art of swearing in babble, and is even a little sneaky. She tries to suck her thumb while she is eating, whether it be bottle or breast. Of course this doesn't work out so well for obvious reasons, and we also try to discourage it because if we go along with it, it interrupts feeding. So this is where she has very recently developed her version of swearing, often loudly protesting, and even pushing us away. She has become very sneaky about her attempts to suck her thumb while eating, and even figured out that if it looks like she is just covering her face, she can sneak her pinkie in her mouth and get a few good sucks in before we notice or before she breaks the latch. Another example of her sneakiness involves TV. We don't let her watch TV, so if we turn her away on the rare occasion that it is actually on when she is around, she'll turn away like it is no big deal. Then when our guard is down, she'll whip her little head right back around to sneak a peak at whatever is on the TV.

She has also quickly gotten daddy wrapped around her little finger, and she knows it. Last week, when I was feeding her in bed in the middle of the night, she kept turning over to make sure he was there and oh so sweetly rubbing his arm. And tonight, when she was protesting my attempts to keep her thumb out of her mouth, she would yell, babble-swear at me, and look around the room for him to save her.

Gracie is of course advancing in other areas as well:

She was still well above the 95th percentile at her 4 month appointment. Today we weighed her and she was a whopping 17 lbs. and 14 oz of cuteness.

All of a sudden within the last week, she became acutely aware of her surroundings. She now gets bored being in once place too long, and is fascinated by new things to look at and touch. When we take her into an unfamiliar room (guest room, basement, or bathroom), her eyes dart from one picture to another and at all items in the room individually.

She has added new sounds and consonants to her "vocabulary," but has only once uttered something that resembled a word. One morning, after getting up every two hours, we could hear her in her room, but we were hoping she would go back to sleep for a few minutes, when we heard "da-da." I'm sure this was quite by accident, and she must not have connected the sounds with our rapid response, because she has yet to do it again. But it was nonetheless, pretty cool.

We are continuing to use signs, some of which she has shown interest in and may have even tried out once or twice, but doesn't use them consistently. We're hoping to increase the use of signs over the next month in an attempt to reduce the number of protests and screeches, and give her some alternative ways to communicate. But we'll see how that works out.

Gracie also reaches out for everything within her grasp, including our food. In an attempt to wait the six months to feed her solid food, we started freezing some breastmilk and giving it to her like a slushy, with a spoon. She thoroughly enjoys this activity, and even holds the spoon once there is slush on it and puts it in her mouth. She even lets go of the spoon (most of the time) when she is asked (which is the first sign that she actually understands some of what we are saying, because she almost always lets go of things when we tell/ask her to. This has also given me at least one extra hand, since she usually takes up at least one and often both of mine). I, for one, am really looking forward to the time when she can eat solid food. I think she is more than ready, but we're trying to hold out since I have so many food allergies, in hopes that she won't develop so many adverse reactions. But two more weeks or so and we're going to get out the rice cereal!

So there you have it, her fourth month in a nutshell. As if you couldn't tell, we're really looking forward to watching her grow and teaching her all the new things that we can possibly think of. I'm also looking forward to her hair growing a little more so we can actually tell what color it is. But our initial guesses of red seems to be more and more evident as her peach fuzz thickens, which may explain that hot temper (and may also let mommy off the hook for passing that personality trait down - ha, ha). So we will be sending out another update at her six month milestone, along with some tears perhaps...as our little girl is already growing up too fast. It keeps mommy and daddy a little teary-eyed on at least a weekly basis.