December 5, 2013

Iris is Six Months-Old Today!

That Iris has reached her half-year milestone means that everybody lied when they told me that feeling would return to my abdomen within six months. I mean, I know that nobody really needs feeling in their abdomen, but it’s the principle of the thing, you know?Anyway, I’ve got a lot of feeling in most other parts of my body, perhaps too much, so perhaps it all just evens out. And Iris is absolutely adored, this obscenely bald person who was born with a tooth. I like her less in the evenings when she refuses to be put to bed, but the odd time she actually makes it there, I start reminiscing about her goodness in about 45 minutes. And then last night she slept from 10:30 to 2:15, which was a monumental occasion. Also, she has finally dropped for 5:30 pm nap, which makes getting dinner on a whole lot easier.

Who is Iris at six months? Truth be told, we don’t wholly know, because she’s still unfolding. In the last few days, she’s started prattling on incessantly in baby mumbo-jumbo and we love it. She’s been eating solids for a week, and pureed peas and zucchini is her favourite so far. She likes to smear egg yolk in her eyes and then cry (as you do). She delights in her older sister, and while Harriet’s ego is a bit too big, it’s true when she says that she is Iris’s favourite person in the world. Her favourite book is Mr. Brown Can Moo, but she also listens to all kinds of stories and is really quite patient about the whole thing, even though sometimes she spends story time screaming. Her favourite way to engage with books is by eating them. Her favourite toys are the rice paddle, a pie plate, and Harriet’s stuffed giraffe. She thinks it’s funny when you blow on her tummy, she is happiest when being dangled upside down by her feet. She is never, ever wearing socks because I can never ever find a pair, and if you have a problem with that, then you can go and look for them yourself. She has become an upright person, eating dinner with us in her high chair and nearly sitting up by herself. It makes her so human-seeming! She is always being schlepped about in her Baby Trekker and she’s happy there, so everyone thinks that she is a well-contented baby, which isn’t technically true. She can scream unrelentingly like nobody we have ever met.

Six months is so much harder than the newborn days, when we bounced along in a blissful bubble of summertime, but then at six months we can (pretty much) handle it whereas we were all quite fragile then. These days, we are very, very tired, plus people who are 4.5 years old also come with their own very specific and complex needs. It’s a tricky business, and sometimes it all goes very wrong, but then there are these other moments when it’s oh so very right, and we know that a family of four was who we were always meant to be.