Turns Out Her Poop Doesn't Stick

Just yesterday I said that someday Anna will crawl away with poop stuck to her bum. Anna's not quite crawling yet, but today I learned that it doesn't really stick to her bum. Unfortunately for me, this morning she decided to poop when she wasn't wearing a diaper. I gave her a bath this morning and as usual I let her have some nekkid time on a towel before sticking her in the bath. And lucky me, she decided to poop. So there she is pooping. I'm frozen because the wipes are in the other room and the poop is coming out of her bum and she's rolling around and so is the poop (and it's not sticking to her bum). I knew enough to grab her legs and try and hold her out of it, but I didn't know what to do about the poop. But Anna knew what to do. She grabbed her poop, at which point, I finally grabbed some toilet paper and disposed of the poop in the toilet. I guess it was good I was going to give her a bath anyway. I gave her hands and mine a good scrubbing. I'd rather have her poop on the towel than in the bathtub, but as long as I'm picking I'd pick the diaper as the best place of all to poop.

Too Much Tummy Time

Back when I was working with Anna daily to get her to spend time on her tummy, the PT told me that at some point Anna would love being on her tummy. I don't think I truly understood what she meant.

She does enjoy being on her tummy now, but more than that, she insists on being on her tummy, even when I'm trying to dress her or change her diaper. Being the oldest child of seven, I remember fighting with my siblings as I tried to dress then for my mom. I'm sure I didn't do this, but in the back of my mind I have this image of holding my baby sister down with my knee. I'm thinking the knee image is my mind's way of representing the struggle that it was to dress my sister.

It's different with my own baby though because I actually feel guilty for trying to hold her down. Because I'm still changing her diaper on the changing table, diaper time turns into an all out fight as she tries to roll away and I try to keep her bottom-side down so that I can change the diaper and she doesn't fall off. Changing her on the floor is even harder, but I suppose that the consequences are less extreme if she gets away. I know that any day now she's going to crawl away with poop hanging off her bottom, but so far she's not crawling yet.

Lately she's also really resisting the car seat, which I know is normal, and I can even empathize. What I don't get is the way she fights the high chair. She loves to eat crackers, bananas, apples, noodles, cheese, anything I give her. She loves picking the food up and stuffing it in her mouth until her mouth is so full she can hardly chew. Then she opens her mouth and lets half of it fall out. Yummy. And I only give food to her while she's sitting in her high chair or occasionally when she's screaming in her car seat. But whenever I try to put her in her high chair, her legs and back go stiff, and she refuses to sit down. Maybe the upside is that she's no longer biting her spoon.

No, No, No

Lately Anna has been into shaking her head as if she's saying no. I know this is quite normal for little babies, and I'm also pretty sure that she still doesn't quite get the concept of no, but we still have fun with the idea. When she's really going Dan likes to ask her questions like, "Does Mom know what she's doing with the camera?" to which Anna shakes her head. Dan's also tried to get her to shake her head insinc with Amy Winehouses's "They tried to make me go to rehab . . ." but so far Anna has yet to be cooperative.

Anna is also yelling a bit more these days, especially when she hears loud noises. The other day she yelled out when I tore off some aluminum foil and then again when I was scraping cookie remnants off my cookie sheet. Her favorite sound these days sounds a lot like "Hey!" So of course we laugh when we make a new noise and she yells "hey."

The one sound she can't tolerate though is when someone opens a garbage sack by waving it around to fill it with air. That noise sends her into hysterics even when we try to do it quietly.

Biting the Spoon

When Anna's no longer starving, she likes to bite the spoon I'm feeding her with. We like to think it's an intriguing if not oblique peak into her personality, but it's probably just more evidence that she's normal. Lately she's also added grabbing the spoon to biting it. I wish she'd figure out how to dip the spoon in her food and get that to her mouth instead of rubbing her hand in her food and then in her hair or eyes. I know it's normal, but cleaning her up after each meal is getting to be such a chore, especially since she likes to hide little balls of food under her chins.

Happy Halloween!

Were you dropped on your head as a kid?

I was hoping that Anna would be able to answer this question with a yes that was not only emphatic but also accurate. But it seems that taking a fall is a rite of passage for both the first child and the mother that we weren't able to pass up. And yet, I thought I could make it. I haven't been anal about keeping her on the ground or anything, but I was lucky enough to see her roll on the floor rather than off the bed or the couch. So then I knew not to put her on the couch, although I still put her on the bed with the best of intentions to watch her closely.

But when Anna fell it wasn't because she was rolling. I had her on the changing table. (My mom never used one of these and now I'm thinking that maybe that's a good idea.) I had just finished changing her diaper and I was looking in her drawers underneath the changing pad for her clothes. A few weeks before Anna had started pushing against me while I changed her so that her head would dangle off the pad and rest on the table itself. For some reason she likes seeing the world upside down. So I'm sure you can see where this is going. While I was looking in her drawer, thinking about the weather for the day and which outfit I wanted to dress her in, she must have arched her back in order to dangle her head. But I think she got a better push than she realized. I looked up just in time to see her body in midair as her legs lost their footing on the pad and went over the far end of the table. I tried to grab her leg but without much luck.

The good news is that she screamed as soon as she hit the floor so I'm pretty sure that she didn't injure her neck. But she didn't scream too long. In fact she calmed down rather quickly. I really didn't think that I had been too traumatized by it all. I felt bad of course, but I've had enough mothers tell me about their own experiences with falls to know that these things happen. But I must have been a bit more traumatized than I realized because for the next few days whenever I thought about changing her on the table I felt that same feeling of panic that washed over me when I looked up and saw that my baby was no longer where she was supposed to be. I'm over that now, but I do tend to hold onto her leg if I'm not looking directly at her while she's on the changing table.

Recent Adventures

This is the face Anna makes when she's trying to push out a dirty diaper. We call it the pushy face. While everyone was in town for her sealing and blessing, she entertained a crowd with this face. Sometimes when she pushes particularly hard the color red will creep up from her neck to the roots of her hair. She has also been known to accompany this face with hunched shoulders and an arched back.

I think Anna does her best rolling in the crib. In the evening, after I put her to bed in the middle of the crib, I always find her smashed up against one end of the crib. Sometimes her hair will stick straight up from rubbing it against the bumper. I've learned though that there's no point in putting her back in the middle of the crib, because she'll work her way back up to the end of the crib again. So now I just try to make sure her mouth and nose have space to draw air in.