Progress

I have not been keeping you up-to-date with all the things Kendra has learned over the last month, so I’ll try to remedy that now. First of all, I’m pleased to announce that she can finally crawl like a normal baby, on her hands and knees, rather than dragging her legs behind her! It’s a huge improvement, even if it doesn’t seem to be much faster. (She would usually drag herself around on the hardwood floor wearing her sleepers, so she could slide along pretty quickly that way…) It’s nice that she doesn’t look like a paraplegic any more, and I have to admit that her crawling absolutely delights me. She does it in a very slow, matter of fact way that I find irresistibly sassy—- something about the slow waddle of that diapered tush just cracks me up.

The other thing she’s been doing is pulling herself up on things. I’d been trying to “teach” her to do this by slowly pulling her up and occasionally hooking her arms over the couch and leaving her standing there. This invariably made her cry with annoyance at me, so I finally gave up. She figured it out about two weeks later on her own, so I guess my help wasn’t really necessary. Those of you who remember her rather dramatic birth will recall that this is a girl who started out doing things her own way and on her own time-table, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Kendra is also sporting some brand new, razor sharp teeth these days. She’s got two of them, to be specific, both on the bottom. She enjoys biting me, which makes me yell at her, which I think is probably the reason for her final “new thing” which is that she seems to be weaning herself. She used to eat four or five times a day, and now is down to about two feedings a day. I don’t know if this is because she doesn’t like me yelling at her when she uses me for a teething ring, or if she’s just big enough to not need me so much any more, but I can’t seem to be able to do anything about it (it turns out that phrase “you can lead a horse to water…” is quite true in this case), so I’ve decided to embrace it. I did this by leaving her with her grandparents all day last Saturday so Craig and I could attend the temple and do some shopping. And I thoroughly enjoyed myself and Kendra seemed just fine without me! So I guess my little baby is getting bigger. But—- you guessed it!—- she’ll always be my baby.