Lucy's New Accomplishments!

Lucy is starting to make big strides in growing up.

First, she's improving her eating. A month and a half ago, she started eating Cheerios (while flying to Minnesota). Feeding them to her has been lots of fun. Not just for her parents, either: aunts, godparents and even Jacob have gotten some Cheerios in her mouth. About a month ago, she learned to pick up Cheerios, which she would drop or throw in any direction other than her face. This week, she has put two and two together and wound up with a mouthful of toasted oat goodness. She is quite proud of this accomplishment:

At least, I think that's pride. Or it might be making an effort to fill her diaper.

She's also upped the ante on the tooth market, debuting number three:

With the off-set tooth on top, we aren't sure if she's going for the vampire look or the hockey player look. We are sure that she's very cute.

Another development: her mobility is increasing at an alarming rate. She is crawling quite fast. She can pull herself up to standing on furniture, gates and railing. She's starting to cruise around furniture from this standing position. Right now she's rather wobbly, but she is practicing every day. No doubt she will be walking independently soon. Far too soon!

Jacob is starting to worry that Lucy is taking all the attention. But he is too cool to throw in the towel yet:

One of these things is not like the others

Jacob was pretty hilarious at dinner tonight. We had a wokful of shrimp fried rice for dinner. It had all the typical ingredients: eggs, soy sauce, peas, carrots, scallions, shrimp and rice. Jacob has maintained a "no veggie" attitude for quite some time now, so it seems rather obvious that he would object to the peas, carrots and scallions. Except that the scallions were too small to be recognized as vegetables, so they were eaten. He did remove carrots from his fork several times (though some slipped in behind a piece of egg or a pile of rice). He even evicted the peas, except for one pea. He took it in his fingers and said, "Jacob no like green peppers." The obvious thing to do after that would be to return yet another vegetable to his bowl. Jacob was not obvious, because the second after he finished speaking, he put the pea in his mouth and ate it. I was reduced to tears. Tears of laughter.

Writing the incident out now, it doesn't seem so hilarious. Maybe the best humor really is unexplainable.

Lucy's latest accomplishment

Lucy is almost six months old and is beginning to show a new talent: grabbing things with her hands.

At first she just flailed them around as if they were merely endings on those two jointed sticks that Mommy and Daddy call arms. Now she has enough coordination to work her fingers into vise grips. She has demonstrated this power repeatedly on women's jewelry (while the women are wearing it, lest you think Lucy is some sort of cat burglar), Mommy's hair and Daddy's beard. She is also good at grabbing onto skin and getting a good hold.

Yesterday, though, she brought a smile to my face. I was feeding her from a bottle (she is only just starting on rice cereal and oatmeal cereal) and she reached up with one hand and then with the other and grabbed the bottle. She held onto it and held it in place for about 15 seconds. Hopefully she will build on this success and give Daddy a chance to do more while she eats. Maybe I could even blog with her eating in my lap. That may be too much to hope for.

I'm looking forward to future talents.

Jacob relents?

Sorry for the delay in reports from the frontiers of the new science of zombie making. It seems that Jacob is starting to relent in his scientific experiments on his parents. Today he slept in till 6 a.m.! And he took a four-hour nap for the second day in a row. I kept doing small projects today, thinking that he would wake up at any minute. So I managed to do a great deal of cleaning in the basement, I moved the War and Peace game from the basement to the study (in anticipation of the coming of Rosemary's cats), I cleaned and vacuumed downstairs (playdate is tomorrow here at the house), and did more organizing in the study. If only I had blogged!

The other big breakthrough for Jacob (that's also a break for us) is using a fork. He's been on and off putting forks and spoons of food in his mouth after we get some food on them. For the past week he has been trying unsuccessfully to pick up food with a fork or spoon, but tonight he was able to eat his carbonara with a fork all by himself (mostly). He'd get some pasta on the fork and get it into his mouth. It was very exciting for us; we can eat our meal while he eats, rather than feeding him and trying to feed ourselves at the same time. I'm sure he won't be using utensils all the time just yet, but this is very promising. Every day is a new adventure!

I am setting myself a new goal of at least two blog entries a week. Plenty of stuff is going on, but I haven't taken time to blog like I used to. I will set up a new calendar with goals to check off. That worked well during Lent, I am sure it will work again.

Jacob continues his campaign....

Jacob is still at it. He is inventing new sleep patterns in order to keep us off our guard and under his thumb. I guess he has to be creative since his thumb is so small.

Today, he woke before 6 again. I stayed up with him for half an hour or so, then Angie took a shift. Eventually, all three of us were awake at the same time and had breakfast. His new trick for today is to pretend he doesn't like to eat. We know he is faking because he will still eat raisins, graham crackers and bananas. Other items he refuses initially (and sometimes continually). I'm not sure if he is holding out for the good stuff or just trying to manipulate us. Either way, he is driving us crazy...zombie crazy!

He took a shorter nap in the morning (just about 2 hours) and then was really excited in the afternoon to see Kaylee here. He loves hanging out with her. They went to the sand box at one of the local parks to play. They ran into some other kids and their mom. Kaylee was able to give her number to the mom, so maybe she will get some more babysitting opportunities. We were going to have Kaylee sit for us this weekend so we could see Star Trek, but that was before we realized it's Mother's Day weekend. Our schedule is already full, so hopefully maybe next week we will get an opportunity to see the movie.

After Kaylee left, we went to pick up the blue car from the shop. Jacob fell asleep on the way home. He slept long enough that we were able to cook dinner, but then he got up so we wouldn't have a quiet meal alone. He kept nodding off in the highchair. I felt bad for him. Finally we forced him to eat by feeding him a banana first. Then we fed him bread and chicken chili. We finally got him to bath and bed an hour later than usual. So much for going to church tonight. Hopefully he'll be more cooperative on the weekend.

If anyone knows any tricks to make him sleep into the morning hours, let us know. Please, we beg you!