Eight mois. May 22, 2007

Madeline turned 8 months old a few days ago! It seems like just yesterday that I was writing about her turning 6 months.

She has really been on the move lately. Last week we took her to the beach for Mother’s Day, to our favorite little Dakar hideout. She loves it, as usual, but her crazy haphazard crawling now makes it a different experience from last time. She loves crawling in the water (see the picture)… but has this disturbing tendency to immediately crawl towards deeper water any chance she gets. When it gets deeper, she doesn’t seem to mind – she just splashes more and more. Why are little kids so suicidal? Surprisingly, we don’t have a problem with her wanting to eat sand. No appetite for that, thankfully. She loves to feel different textures, and seems to relish the feel of the sand (dry and wet) between her fingers and toes. Very cute to watch the wonder on her face.

This past weekend, we took her to a bar-b-que on Ngor island, just off the northern coast of Dakar. It’s about a 5 minute pirogue trip from the mainland (Maddie’s first pirogue!), a small island with no roads or cars… quite calm and relaxing. It was a friend’s birthday and we celebrated with a sand castle cake.

Lately there has been a distinct change that has come over this little baby. Besides getting around ever more efficiently (standing up on any object that will support her 20-pound weight), she has really started to “speak” as coherently as she can. Sometimes, at random of course, she will say something that sounds like a real word, and it is startling. But her babbling has gotten much more “intelligent”, as if she is really trying to say something. And she has become much more insistent on getting her way with things. For example, if she wants to crawl up on you and you don’t want her to, she gets very fussy, whereas before, she would pretty much accept whatever was happening to her. Yikes!

We have lots of evening events coming up over the next few weeks so it will be interesting to see how this baby holds up. On Friday night we went to the “international dinner” at school (in the gym, a huge affair with lots of people) and she loved it. If she’s around lots of people she’s about as happy as can be.

Development. May 7, 2007

It has been an explosive several days in Maddie’s development! One of those weeks when you just can’t believe how far your kid has come in such a short amount of time.

She has been on the verge of crawling now for some time; and quite good at getting from point A to point B one way or another (though lacking the fluid motions of having her arms and legs actually working together to propel herself forward). Last week we came home from work one day and BAM! She was crawling all over the apartment. Laye was quite proud of her and we were too. Amazing that she would just ‘get it’ literally in one day.

Of course now that she has figured this out, she has begun to get into everything. We now realize how child ‘unfriendly’ our abode is, and that we have to make some major changes in pretty short order. She can really haul ass when she wants to; pretty scary at times.

She is also now so confident crawling all over the place, and lifting herself up to a standing position whenever she wants to, that she spends time in all of the nooks and crannies of our living space.  We had thought that perhaps she would skip the crawling phase altogether and go right to walking, but that does not appear to be the case now. Still, I think she might be an early walker.

She claps her hands all the time now, just for fun on her own, and also when we clap our hands. Maddie is very coordinated already! She doesn’t quite have the waving bye thing down yet, but is working on it.  When something is interesting to her, she tilts her head to one side while contemplating it.

Her hair continues to grow like a weed, but for some reason we are resisting cutting it. We had this thought in our minds that we’d not cut her hair until her first birthday, but this is clearly not going to be the case. We put it up in a hair clip or a headband frequently but she usually manages to shake it off.

She is still enamored with Hobbes and they continue to become fast friends. He is still very gentle with her and I wish he would treat me the same way! That feline bastard has taken pounds of flesh off my legs over the past year.

A drawback to baby development is that diapers are no longer so cute and funny. Though Maddie still breastfeeds a lot, she is also eating so much solid food that the nature of her poops is slowly changing…. starting to smell like the ‘real thing’! Yuck! This makes for some interesting diaper-changing events.

We are getting ready to go back to the states for the summer holidays and counting down the school year. Can’t wait to get back to the Pacific northwest with Maddie; her first time there!