The Lucy Files: November 20

Lucy had enough big adventures this week, like our trip to the “Marion farmette”:/news/2006/vay-cay-with-bay-bay/ and her “first cold”:/news/2006/first-sniffle/, that there isn’t much more to say. But that never stopped me before. We can always find a few Lucy-isms to mark down for posterity:

* Lucy made some definite strides in sitting up last week. She can just about do it. I still am hesitant to leave her on her own, as her wild personality will sometimes evoke in her the desire to flip backwards and potentially bonk her head on the floor. But in a moderately padded environment, she has achieved sitting independence. She especially enjoyed her “laundry basket escapade”:/news/2006/good-clean-fun/ last Thursday night — and Mama didn’t mind having two hands free to fold laundry, either!
* Lucy is giggling more every day: when getting a diaper changed, when Papa looks at her during breakfast, when getting her nose suctioned, when looking in the mirror with Mama. God must have sent her here to teach us to be joyful!
* Lucy has started to recognize patterns and pictures in a new way, too. We often find her scritch-scratching on various surfaces with her fingertips. She is much more interested in books, and appears to be trying to grab the pictures on the page. Tuesday evening, when I brought out Baby Faces to read, she grinned hugely, then giggled and scritch-scratched all the way through the book. It is truly her favorite book.
* I’m almost embarrassed to say this, but Lucy definitely prefers Puffs Plus to regular tissues or cloths for wiping her sensitive nose. And if you come at her slowly and gently, she’ll sometimes let you give her a wipe without even flinching. But most of the time, she hates it. “Mo-o-o-m! Quit it!”
* Lucy’s fingernails grow quick as lightning. It might just be that her fingernails grow at a normal, human rate, but they appear to be long because her fingers are so tiny. In any case, I clip her nails about every third day, and she still ends up with scratches on her face. (Sigh.)
* Lucy has had her first real bout of diaper rash this week. We think it started when she pooped in the middle of the night, unbeknownst to us, and was sitting in it for a few hours (poor child). But she doesn’t seem particularly bothered by the rash. We have been lathering her butt up with diaper cream (Mama calls it “butt frosting”) and taking a break from cloth diapers until it is cleared up (since you aren’t supposed to use diaper cream with Fuzzi Bunz). Lucy’s butt is nearly back to the perfectly-smooth baby-butt we know so well.
* The other night (Thursday, November 16), Lucy woke up 45 minutes after her evening put-down and did not want to go back to sleep. When we got her up to play, she surprised us by getting up on all fours — on her knees — for the first time. Her first step toward crawling? She seemed to have a lot of fun getting onto her knees, laughing and grinning and looking around proudly. I’ve heard that sleep can sometimes be interrupted by developmental milestones, so perhaps that was the reason for her wake-up, as if she was lying there thinking about it and had to try her new trick. (We are still in denial about baby-proofing the house, but that will change soon enough.)