Category: journal

Is what Lola now weighs, according to our not-especially-accurate bathroom scales (calculating the diff between Isa and Isa+Lola).

Sta arrivando oggi.

This morning, Lola would pull into a sitting position without her head dragging behind her. And when I lifted her to splosh her bum in the bowl of warm water she was more interested in a spot of assisted walking than in bending her legs to sit in the water.

Lola, I realised last night, has stopped making the odd, high-pitched, back-of-the-throat, inhalation-based noise that she used to make a lot while sleeping and, somewhat less, while awake. It was a very distinctive and amusing little call which I would wander around emulating. I wonder will it pass from memory — I don’t think I have a recording of it.

Her vocalisations have changed so much already since her birth. Her crying is different as are her various sighs and moans. And she has a whole new vocabulary; she’s not quite bablling yet, but she has a whole range of vowel sounds and is starting to get the hang of a few consonants (‘g’, ‘m’, ‘n’). When she gets excited she invariably will start chatting away.

Happy Tuesday,

this is a quick blog entry by email.

Perhaps.

Tsk–it is some considerable time since my last post. I blame the relentless onward march of time and my failure to inject a large enough quantity of significant events into it. Actually, putting on a less flippant face, I am not a fan of the modern malaise of attempting to rush through insanely full and varied itineries; great imperatives hanging over us all the time. Though some of those imperatives are hard to sidestep when entrenched in our mad economic/electronic pseudo-reality.

But I’m not here to witter on about that. I’m here to celebrate our daughter’s continuing adventures in life. Lola gets stronger, calmer, and cleverer by the day. She grows more independent, happily lying in her gym or sitting on her chair eying up her dangly toys, cooing and gooing to herself. She’ll sit on my knee now (with support, of course), a position she wasn’t keen on before; and we play at pulling her into a sitting position from lying down.

She’s started to touch things, and will reach towards toys when we’re playing with her; the other day she was reaching out to the elderberries I was showing her as we toured the garden. Tonight, for the first time, she gripped a toy (a two-handled smiley-face mirror-rattle) we were playing with–the jubilation of which moment was only lightly tainted by the fact that she then proceded to whack herself in the face with it. Later, she held on to her tiny doll, Wendy (who, by convention, always says, “Hello Lola, have you seen my tuba?”), when we were changing her for bed.

Nonna Cicina is coming next week (that’s Isa’s mum, to the uninitiated) and is staying for three weeks. In the middle of which we plan to take a long weekend and go and visit my parents. So my dad will get to meet Lola; and Lola will be entertained by all her grandparents at once.

Bleh. Fade…

Good night.

For the last week or so, Lola has been transfixed by the cat-rattle that hangs from her chair. At first she would just sit there staring at it and occasionally smiling at it; then we noticed a kind of focussed twitch in her shoulders every now and then and realised she was trying to reach out to it.

It was soon obvious that this had become a top-priority mission, and every time she was put in her chair she would focus fiercely on this task until she made herself cry with tiredness and frustration. It was like watching someone trying to get to the next level of a demanding video game. Over each session you’d see some improvement, and then the coordination would falter as she tired; but each time she came back you could see a great deal of assimilation and background processing had gone on, and she’d show a significant improvement.
Today she has it mastered, and has been knocking away at the cat and her other rattle like a pro. In the evening, we put her in her gym and she applied her new skill to the various hanging toys there. She’s there as I type, gooing away to herself as she bashes away at her octopus and her whale. (Thankfully, she doesn’t have a bishop.)

She’s doing all this, I note, with her left hand (or arm, she has some work to do on accuracy); it’ll be interesting to see whether that preference holds. It’s incredible to watch — I get this big joyous swell of emotion: pride, I guess. And I have a big grin on my face. Sickening 😉

Wow — she’s coming out with some incredible noises, too; stuff I’ve never heard before. She must have impressed herself.

What a star. There has definitely never been a cleverer daughter in the history of the human race. 🙂

Lola loves her baths. She always looks fabulous as she is lowered in: extra-attentive, really aware, relaxed and happy.

Perhaps we should bathe her three times a day. Certainly, that was tempting today; she was very whingy and only really placated by her Mum.

Maybe she was tired: she didn’t really sleep last night, waking every hour. Made today pretty tough for all of us. Still, we got a few things done: I managed to find a ceiling joist to hang Lola’s cot veil from (and I only had to make half a dozen holes to find it–blooming lath-and-plaster ceilings), and Isa finished off the ribbon decorations for said veil and started on a cuddly toy project.
And we went out for groceries (and nappy liners and eye-hooks and ribbon). And we stopped for a coffee at the World. And I received and installed my new ADSL router from Demon. And we even managed to eat.

Remarkable.

We took Lola to our new GP today for her six-week checkup. We’d decided to move from our current practice, having become a little fed up with the lack of continuity — we never saw the same doctor twice. Perhaps that was our fault for not ensuring we got the same doctor whenever we arranged an appointment; anyway, our new doctor was very highly recommended by several of our friends, and a new beginning for us all seemed appropriate.

Anyway, she gave Lola a pretty thorough going-over, asking good questions of us and pointing out useful and pertinent stuff (both good traits in a GP; neither necessarily a given).

Lola is bang-on average weight for her age ([insert weight here when I remember to remind myself]) and is in the 98th centile for length at 59cm.

So there you go. And so, coincidentally, do I. ‘Night.

PS: It’s a bummer that you can’t reorganise your photostream in flickr: I uploaded our Naples pics from last year, but they appear first and interfere with Lola. As it were.

Yesterday, I celebrated the start of my final year as an under-forty. As I’d spent most of the last twelve months thinking I was already 39, this was really quite a relief.

Lola knew just what to do. She woke in the middle of the night (perhaps alerted by Isa’s groaning), took one look at the afflicted gland and set to with gusto, completely emptying it, lumps and all. Much relief all round.

One downside of having got Lola to be so good at the breast is that she now seems loathe to take a bottle; looks like we’re going to have to retrain her to be happy with either. I tried three or four times on Saturday before she finally took the bottle (though when she did, I had to refill it twice before she was satisfied). It’s really distressing when she refuses it — she gets so upset, flailing out and seeming to push the bottle away and screaming what sounds very much like “noooooo”. We think perhaps she’s just not hungry on these occasions, but was looking for the boob for comfort…

The same thing happened today when I tried to feed her while Isa was working. The first two time she went into a tantrum, but an hour and a half later she took it happily. Hey ho.

Humm…  looks like Isa may have a plugged duct. Painful lump in Rita. Let’s hope it clears easily.
kellymom.com :: Plugged Ducts and Mastitis