first sand

is so delightful... Here is a video of Freya's first hands-on experience with the products of erosion:

Off the chart, again

At her 5-month check-up last week, Freya clocked in at 15.5 pounds, and 28.5 inches. The former is average, the latter is off the charts. And so it goes. Poor thing likes to sleep sideways in her crib, so more often than not we've been coming in to find her legs dangling through the rail. So much for keeping her bedroom furniture decently sized! Thanks to IKEA, she is now the happy occupant of a larger, but still simple, crib...

Here are some slides of Freya over the holidays (clicking on it takes you to a bigger version):


Freya continues to embrace (literally!) every new food we offer, and her current list of pureed favorites includes:

• barley with pears
  
• potatoes with apples
• carrots with a pinch of salt and a dab of coconut oil
• oatmeal with banana
• cauliflower with butter
• sweet potatoes

Oh, and today we found that there is a first tooth breaking through. That explains the drooling the last few days...

Yoga and beyond

I discovered a neat trick: do what I have always done, just do it with Freya! So she and I hit the mat every morning and do our exercises, I a modified sun salutation, she a unique sequence of amazing feats of flexibility. For a while we were trying to imitate her latest moves, but pretty much gave up after Freya served up this one:



As soon as her head is more stable, we'll go running together, courtesy of a friend's loaner running stroller. Exercise time thus becomes quality time :-)

My daughter is the boss of me

As is appropriate for a girl named after the Norse Uber-goddess, Freya is running the show. Here I thought I had figured out a way to nurse her for six months, busy work life and travel schedule and all. Had she not been the perfect executive baby just the other week, behaving with proper decorum in the first class cabin en route to Washington, DC, and sleeping through dinner in a fancy restaurant in Vancouver, BC a couple of weeks before?

Turns out she has a different idea. The other day, when we offered her a little pureed carrot, she went right for it: grabbed the spoon, guided my hand to her mouth (albeit with moderate success, see above), and figured out the mechanics of swallowing on her third bite. Ever since then my offering has been relegated to the middle-of-the-night feedings when she is too drowsy to complain, and once in three feedings during the day when I'm sufficiently engorged to resemble the easier-to-suck bottle. That's right, I am competing with a bottle for Freya's attention!

Freya at 4 months

So all parents probably go nuts over their offspring, but Freya really made some amazing leaps in the last few weeks. Now that she is four months old, she's become way more interactive and engaged -- but a picture says more than 1,000 words...

Symbiosis

In utero, the baby is more of a parasite, as defined in biology:

An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.

Now out and about for 4 months, our relationship has become more symbiotic. Our lives are intertwined in a curious dance, linked by our separate but closely related needs.

Take nutrition, for example. I have to eat not least to make milk these days, but rue the day I eat red cabbage, dairy, or any of the other foods that set off Freya's GI tract! The payback is immediate and vehement, her body arching in pain, accompanied by jags of crying, bursts of flatulence and foul diapers.

Closely related to that phenomenon is the whole matter of sleep. She needs to sleep but is just getting the hang of wanting comfort and attention more than rest, setting of a merry spiral of crying (she), comforting (we), thumbsucking (she), rocking her (we), flailing about (she), hair pulling (all), and bottle/boob deployment (we). Finally she tires out and goes back to sleep, while Steve and I debrief about how to do it better next time -- assuming we can remember at 3 a.m...

Off the chart

It's official, Freya is her parents' daughter. At the pediatrician's today she weighed in at 11 pds 3 oz, her head is 40 cm around -- both put her in the 50th percentile. She is 25 inches long -- literally off the chart for her age. That's my girl :-)