Anna's Seventh Month

We are now into Anna's seventh month, and everyone's still alive!

After an awesome Christmas with two of my sisters and their families here, everyone got sick with a nasty head/chest cold.

The visit was totally worth it, but it wasn't pretty for that week-and-a-half recovery period.  Immediately after The Plague cleared up, Dave and I loaded Anna in the car with a big box of toys and drove sixteen hours down to Oklahoma City.

She was an angel most of the way down, and we had fun playing peek-a-boo and looking at each toy one by one as Dave drove.  After OKC, we stopped in Dallas (too briefly!) to visit my family.  I took zero pictures, not even on my phone :'(

But all in all, it was a very good first road trip for our little family, even though it was a whirlwind.

Ok, on to the exciting stuff:
Anna has cut her first tooth!  It's her bottom right one, and it's pretty darn sharp.  I felt it for the first time on the second day of our trip down south.  You can kind of see it in this picture:

I think it's the reason she likes gnawing on carrot sticks so much, because she can make that satisfying scraping sound on that tooth.

Anna is still a big banana fan, and she likes being able to feed it to herself.  Really, she likes feeding herself any baby food either with the pouch or with a spoon...she'll grab the spoon down low and hold it for herself to suck the contents out of the bowl.  She's pretty good at it.

She's probably going to be one of those that eventually refuses to eat anything that she's not allowed to feed to herself.

Anna is absolutely the independent type!

She's been babbling with different consonants all month including "b" and "m", and motor-boating with her tongue.  And she thinks it's super funny when you do it back to her.

Anna just loves being "flown" overhead.  It always makes her smile, even mid-cry.  She likes being tossed in the air, too, but she just likes it, she doesn't love it.

Dave's been holding her next to Monkey's crate (yes, we're crating our cat, long sad story) and she hangs on and stands up!

Of course she's not pulling up on her own yet...she's not even sitting up on her own yet, though she really, really wants to.

Things she wants to play with this month: my coffee cup, my watch, our phones, my smoothie cup (seeing a trend?), our trackball mouses, OH, and any and all plastic bags, you know, the ones that say "NOT A TOY"?

We think she knows her name.  It's hard to tell.

Sleep is, as always, up and down.  Some nights she sleeps 6+ hour chunks, some nights (like last night) she's up every two and a half hours.

And when she wakes, nine times out of ten she will insist on milk, regardless of how long it's been since her last meal (ie, one hour).  If I try to just soothe her to sleep, she's up again in 20 minutes.  I'm not gonna lie, it's maddening.  Daytime naps help, but Momma's body is screaming for some uninterrupted nighttime sleep.

Sadly, Anna is now able to pop herself out of the Bumbo, so I'm afraid its days of use in this house are numbered.

It's still okay for sitting on the floor to play with toys when she gets too wiggly for me to hold onto, but I do try to keep floor time as floor time.

She's revisited the pushing-up-on-the-knees thing...

...and even sometimes pushes all the way up onto her toes!

Dave has seen her actually move forward doing this, but generally she only succeeds (through great effort) in pushing herself backwards, sometimes all the way across the room.  This results in a frustrated Pterodactyl Baby screeching her way (backwards) around the room until she backs herself under the couch or other spot from which she cannot escape and miles away from the toy she was trying to reach in the first place.  She gets super mad when this happens, and I never laugh at her while she glares at me like "NOT HELPING, MOM!"

Anna Banana, you are our darling, and we love seeing you discover your world!  We can't wait to see where your interests and personality blossom and shine next month and the months after that!  What a great kid you are!!