Thursday, April 28, 2011

Maya's 7th month

During her 7th month (late January to mid February), Maya got to try a lot of new foods. She had a variety of new baby foods. We gave her oatmeal, juice, and puffies for the first time. Also, she finally switched completely to formula (after we finished our last bag of frozen breast milk).

After her weight had kind of plateaued during the last few weeks, she started growing again (though at a slower rate than her first 5 months), and ended up at 15.75 lbs at the end of month 7. Between 5 and 7 months, she fell from the 50th percentile in weight down to the 25th percentile. Her height stayed about the same at 27", putting her closer to average height (vs early on, when she was up around the 95th percentile). However measuring height is tricky for a baby, and we may have under-measured this month, or over-measured last month.

Maya started to get around a lot more this month. Whereas before, she had been pseudo-crawling (aka, the army crawl...dragging herself with her arms), this month she finally started real crawling on her hands and knees. It was pretty tough at first, taking her forever to make a tiny bit of forward progress. For a while she switched back and forth between army crawling and real crawling. However, it didn't take her long to start getting better (though she probably didn't really master it until during her 8th month).

Now that she could crawl better, she started to get more adventurous, exploring different rooms of the house (previously, she never left the living room on her own). With her crawling around a lot more, she started to get into more trouble. We'd always find her in the cat bed, the kitchen shelves, the bathroom, or somewhere else she didn't belong. She even managed to get her hands on an old, spongy cat ball and bite a chunk out of it. Thus it was time to really clean things up and take baby proofing the house a bit more seriously.

Along with her new crawling ability, Maya also got quite good at climbing up things into a semi-standing position. She'd use anything she could grab to try and pull herself up. She learned she could stand up at the front picture-window (which is less than a foot off the ground) and look outside. This soon became one of her favorite things to do. Of course, with all of the standing came the start of lots of falling. She hit her head often, but she's a pretty tough baby, and barely ever cried about it. And of course, with her now standing up, we had to drop her crib to the bottom setting to make sure she couldn't climb out.

One of Maya's new favorite activities became riding on her dinosaur (which is sort of like a bike...see below). I'd sit her on hit and she'd grab the handle bars and hold on while I pushed her around the house

Previously, whenever we went shopping, we just left Maya in her car seat and put it in the basket. This month, for the first time, we took her out of her car seat and let her ride in the shopping cart's kid seat. It's a little tricky at first, since she's so small, the cart is so big, and often the cart's seat belt isn't all that useful. It can be hard at first to keep her steady in there, but she soon got used to it, and before long she wouldn't want to go back in her car seat when we finished shopping.

Finally, Maya started to display a bit of stranger anxiety this month (which is normal at about this age). Before, she really wouldn't care who held her, but now she'd sometimes cry when seeing someone new (or even someone she hadn't seen in a few weeks). I took her shopping once and stepped just a few feet away to get some produce. Another guy came up and got between us, and she started crying.

Below are a few photos from this month. You can see even more photos here:
http://www.pbase.com/ldkronos/maya_7months


Riding her dinosaur like a chopper


Riding in the shopping cart


Getting into trouble


Drinking her juice


Climbing over everything in her way.


Falling and getting stuck



Maya crawls after her bottle (6 months old)





Maya sticking tongue out (6.5 month old)





Maya tipping her seat (6.5 month old)





Maya playing and making noise (6.5 month old)





Maya crawling for the first time (6.5 month old)





Maya playing with water jugs (7 month old)

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