Six Month Update

Dear Lana,

Happy ½ a year birthday! You’ve achieved a lot in six short months, like learning to breathe, eat, poop, smile, laugh, play, roll over, sit up, and remove your diaper. I, on the other hand, still haven’t gotten around to unpacking my toiletries from the hospital. I guess keeping you alive and (mostly) happy should count for something, though.

In the last month you’ve developed some strong preferences about what you like, dislike, and hate with a fiery passion. On the list of likes: the theme song from Scrubs, applesauce/pears/peas, your Carter’s bunny blanket, dogs, walks, and pretty much anything you can stick in your mouth. You absolutely love for me to strap you into your Baby Bjorn and walk you around the neighborhood or through a store, and I love how your giggling up and down the aisles of the grocery store makes a formerly mundane chore into an occasion. And although the local Kroger is really funny, it doesn’t hold a candle to the family dog. You have laughed louder and longer than ever before while watching Rico play Frisbee or fetch this month. I knew there was a reason for keeping that crazy canine around.

Your list of dislikes is happily shorter, consisting mainly of pacifiers and anything that we won’t allow you to stick in your mouth. It’s a bit odd that a baby who will stick anything in her mouth should care so little for a pacifier, but I think you view it as a malfunctioning nipple. You become angry when it doesn’t produce a delicious beverage, and anger is the last thing we need from an object that advertises pacification. I should also take a moment to veer off subject and report that after six months, your father still snickers every time I ask him to bring me a nipple for your bottle. Juvenile? Probably. Endearing? Definitely.

Finally, we reach the things you hate with a fiery passion, the way I hate The Macarena or finding pickles embedded in a sandwich that I ordered plain. These things all involve your nose – the wiping of the nose, suctioning of the nose, picking of the nose. For months I cleaned your nose with little or no resistance – The Booger Removal Patrol, as I liked to call it back when it was all fun and games. That name now seems a bit too glib, as Mr. Cruise would say, since we are engaging in real hand to hand combat over the fate of a steady stream of snot and boogies. I’m sorry to cause you so much distress, but happy to report that your hand/eye/nose coordination is improving rapidly as a result.

Keep fighting the good fight, my lovely Lana Bear.

Love,
Mom