Six Months Old and Cute as Can Be!

Today is Willa's six month birthday!  She is getting to be such a big girl, I can't believe it.  At her doctor's appointment two months ago, he mentioned about starting her on solid foods.  She just seemed so small, I felt like she would never be ready for solids!  Now, looking at her I think it's probably time to try them.  She is just acting and looking so much older!

I'm not in any hurry to try solid foods, there are a lot of cons in my opinion: takes more time, costs more money, causes stinkier diapers.  If she was having trouble sleeping through the night or taking good naps, then I might be convinced, but for now the only big plus would be that I could leave her at a babysitter's with a jar of baby food rather than a bottle (which she may or may not take, depending on her mood).  She still only eats about five times a day, so I think the milk is filling her up just fine.

Willa finally rolled over this month.  She has done it a couple of times, but must have figured out that the end result was not fun because she has stopped doing it.  She does a halfway roll, which allows her to grab at whatever she wanted, but she rarely goes the distance anymore.  She is almost sitting up by herself, but not quite.  I'm trying to give her some practice, but am not sure how to practice this without her falling over.  I will put her in the sitting up position and lightly balance her.  She loves to be pulled by her arms from laying to standing and she stands really well with some balancing help.

This past Tuesday Willa also learned how to put her pacifier back in her mouth all by herself!  Such a big girl!  She doesn't get much time to practice this since we usually only give her the paci once she is swaddled and ready for bed, but occasionally we'll give it to her when she is up and has her hands free to play with it.  This gets me one step closer to stopping the swaddle since I don't have to worry about her tricksy hands getting the pacifier out and not being able to put it back in.  I still am leaning on the swaddle, though, because I think she does sleep more soundly with it.  I can get her to sleep without it, but never for as long.

I also forgot to mention that Willa has also started getting her hair conditioned this month!  It was getting so knotted, Ryan and I have been flummoxed in how to deal with it so we decided to start conditioner.

Her eyes are definitely going to be brown, but they still haven't settled in yet.  Some days you can catch a glimpse of them looking brown, but more often there is still a ring of the newborn blue around the edges and you can't really tell the color.

She likes scratching on different textures with her hands.  She hasn't quite figured it out in books, but she likes to put her arm on the couch, or bed, or anywhere and start scratching and listening to the noise.  She also has started to like looking at her hand while she eats.  She slowly turns it over, moves her fingers, and generally seems to be learning that that is her hand and that she has control of it.

She still sleeps 10-11 1/2 hours each night, which is great!  We take her with us on Tuesday nights when I have Young Women's and Ryan has Cub Scouts.  She is definitely getting older because she doesn't really cry anymore.  She'll just lay on the floor with her toys and play quietly while we are there.  Or, sometimes we will put her in the Baby Bjorn where she can chew on our fingers (she prefers Ryan's particularly).

She laughs and smiles more frequently now and loves to look at Ryan or whomever is talking.  As soon as she makes eye contact she gets a big smile on her face and then looks away abashedly, it's very cute.  This afternoon she fell asleep in her carseat on the way home.  I took her out of the carseat to carry her inside (she'd only been asleep about 2 minutes and I didn't want to haul the whole thing up there).  While I was carrying her she put her head down on my shoulder and went back to sleep.  It was so sweet and tender!  She seemed like a big girl sleeping on my shoulder like that as I carried her.

To celebrate today, I am going to make some brownies.  Then tonight, we are going to watch the Thursday night comedy line-up.  Back at USC we had Ryan's law school friends Peter and Scott over for dinner and the Thursday night NBC line-up.  It was always something fun to look forward to, but now that we all have moved away it's just Ryan and me and the night is always kind of anti-climactic.  Between the four of us, we would mostly get all of the wittier jokes, now at least half of them probably go over our heads.

I think that's all the Willa news I can think of.  Along with her host of nicknames previously mentioned, we also call her Raggiest T. Ragamuffin (Raggiest for short).  We probably won't get in for her six month check-up for another week or two.  She is so big, I wonder what her stats are.  There is a little baby at church who is six weeks older but Willa is bigger!