Our baby is starting to grow-up.
Occasionally, she will make huge developmental leaps in what seems like a few short hours, as if she's gone to bed with a certain amount of knowledge and then awakened with more. That's what has happened in the past week.
For one thing, I could swear she's been laughing. Or at least, she's beginning to start to learn how to laugh. It's hard to tell the difference between a smile combined with a delighted gurgle and a true laugh, but perhaps it's the beginning stages of laughter. At any rate, it's causing me to do endless variations of funny faces and silly noises in an attempt to get her to replicate the delight and develop her laughing muscles, and at the very least she finds it amusing when I get real close in her face and go, "Blooooop!"
What's more exciting is that rather than simply sitting back and observing the world around her, she's finally starting to develop a desire to touch and feel it. At first, she expressed this desire by tonguing every object that her face happened to come into contact with. The cloth mat she lies on while she does tummy time, her own fist, my shirt, the Moby, all wind up being poked repeatedly by her tongue.
But now, only in the past couple of days, she's turned another corner. Now when she focuses hard on an object, her hands begin to move in that object's direction. It's incredible to watch. This morning, for the first time, I dangled a rattle in front of her and watched as she began to wave her arm toward the rattle and eventually whacked it with her fist, promptly blowing her mind. She even curled a finger around one of the rattle's plastic rings. She doesn't yet understand the mechanics of reaching and then grabbing, but she's making the first steps.
The other big event this week was her two-month innoculations. Scott and I were steeling ourselves for days in preparation for this, because we've heard so many horror stories about how pleasant babies turn into angry, upset, pained monsters after they get their shots. And the act itself is traumatic for the parent -- I mean, they make you hold your baby's arms down, for heaven's sake, and they tell you to talk to your baby to "distract her." Do you understand how bad it feels to coo at your baby and get her to give you a trusting smile, knowing that in .02 seconds someone's going to jab a needle into her thigh?
The crying was short-lived, fortunately. By the time the nurse left and I'd bundled Sadie into a blanket, she was done with the tears. She fell asleep in the car on the way home and Scott and I looked at each other and shrugged, all, "Huh. That wasn't too hard."
And then. And then, she woke up.
Oh, lord. The anger.
The fury was epic. She was in pain, and she would try to stop crying, but then it would hurt again and she would burst into a fresh round of sobs. In between, she would look at me with an expression on her face that read, "Mom, why won't you make it STOP?" I wanted to die. Instead, I gave her 0.4 ml of Children's Tylenol, wrapped her in a warm blanket and held her tightly. She eventually went back to sleep and slept most of the afternoon. And when she woke up, she was the happy girl she'd been earlier that morning.
We have a great baby.
Ah, we were much luckier with our baby's shots - she stayed asleep and woke up groggy but happy. I'd steeled myself for a nightmare of a day but it was fine! We'd given her the 0.4 dose of Tylenol about a half hour before the appointment and I'd heard that this can make all the difference. We also gave her another 0.4 before leaving the office once the Dr. confirmed that she weighed enough for that extra amount. You just want to make sure that the baby isn't running the least bit of a fever first because the Tylenol will mask that when perhaps they shouldn't be getting shots if they're feverish.
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