Day: March 13, 2006

One of our jobs as parents is to provide interesting and educational stimulation for Leilani while she is awake. Music and singing only work when she is sleepy, but Mommy has found that rhyming stories really get her attention. She also looks at pictures in books, so we can read to her and she will sit through an entire book. This is very lucky for us, because with all the rain recently, we cannot go outside much, which is her preferred stimulation.

On a recent rainy day, one of many, Mommy picked out the Dr. Seuss classic book, “The Cat in the Hat“, which coincidentally, is about staying inside on a rainy day:

Leilani’s mom adds – much later: And that’s what I do on a rainy night – play with photoloops

We had heard that new parents should never plan to eat a meal at a set time, or plan to eat together. While that was sometimes the case, Leilani lets us eat together most of the time. At first, we put her in a swing next to our table, and we would eat while she slept. For a while, she could be awake and watch us eat while she watched her mobile or the ceiling fan.

But recently, seeing the parents put things into their mouthes is too interesting for her to watch and she wants more attention. Half of the time, it makes her hungry, and Mommy can feed her at the table while we eat. The rest of the time, she just wants to sit on our laps and watch us eat. It’s hard to eat over a baby, so we’ve had to put napkins on top of her when we eat messy foods:

To be fair, Mommy spilled food in this photo because she was laughing so much while I was taking the picture.

This seems to be a month of firsts. Leilani is definitely more interested in the world around her, and motivated to interact with it. After talking practice, she’s experimenting with crawling:

This was taken on Thursday, March 9th, it was the first time she got up on her elbows by herself. In this picture, her feet are also in the air, but when she put them down, she tried moving her knees up in a crawling motion. So she is not crawling yet, but we can see she knows how to do it and really wants to try.