Zanna the Superstar!

Josephine got to play with Zanna a couple times last week! They had a fabulous time! Zanna showed Josephine how to rattle the crib side. Josephine thinks Zanna is INCREDIBLE. It is all over her face whenever they play together. She either sits in awe, emulates (to the best of her ability), checks constantly to make sure Zanna is still there, or gets outright giddy. Josephine doesn't get to play with other babies very frequently, so naturally, I'm enthralled with the interaction when I get to see it. If you're feeling equally enthralled, you can watch this little clip:

a cutesy little fact

If you add up all the numbers in Josephine's social security number, all the numbers in mine, and all the numbers in Sean's, hers is the average of Sean's and mine!

Of course, Sean said the fact that I knew this made it more disturbing than cute.
He might be right.

Old and Wise

The Oldness

Josephine turned 9 months on Saturday. We had her check-up this morning, along with her Polio vaccine and the second half of her seasonal flu shot. All went well. Here are the stats from the nurse's form:

Head circumference: 45.1 cm (75-90th percentile)

Height: 27 inches (25-50th percentile)

Weight: 20 lbs. 2 oz. (not quite 75th percentile)

Josephine's a busy little bee these days, with her crawling and sitting and pulling up. She does some mild cruising-- inching, really-- along objects, but no transferring between objects. She loves initiating games of peek-a-boo, and it's sort of possible to roll a ball back and forth with her. The one toy you can't give her to play with during church is a baby doll because she talks to it too much and too loudly. She's a lot more fun to read to now, and when music turns on, often gets giddy and starts clapping. What a kid.

The Wisdom

Josephine's instincts are a constant source of amusement for me. I must say, she has a very healthy set of them. She seems to know exactly what to be concerned about should she need to survive in the wilderness. Of course, she's NOT in that predicament, so I have to agree with Sean's take on this: we can't help but wonder if this reflects an inherent distrust of our caretaking. Anyway-- water, fire, carnivorous animals, unstable heights: these all merit a scrunched face and excited, worried yelps. Complete strangers, however, do not. She practically dives into the arms of any cooing, maternal figure within a 5 foot radius (further heightening my suspicions about her lack of faith in me...)

Specific examples of the instincts at work:

~Water~

Turning on any faucet gives her a little jump, but letting her watch the washing machine fill with water = terrifying. She glances worriedly from my face to the rushing water and clings to my arm.

Similarly, I've learned not to remove her diaper until AFTER the bath tub water has been turned off. It just really scares it all out of her. And in general, baths aren't fun. She doesn't fuss, but she does look concerned the WHOLE time.

**While this pic is pretty representative, I have even more telling video footage. However, in hopes that she will hate me just a hair less as a teenager, I've decided not to post that on the internet.

~Canines~
Knowing she has serious anxiety about large dogs, I shouldn't have been surprised when the taxidermied animals at Stag set her off. I was just wandering around waiting on Sean, when we walked past a stuffed wolf and she looked up and saw it. Oh YIKES. Even when I walked away from it, she kept wheeling her head around in order to keep a close eye on it and repeatedly "told" me about it with short hollers. Similarly, on our last trip to Teague, we found the best way for Josephine and Badges to hang out was through a glass door. They were both far calmer that way. ~Heights~
I thought it'd be fun to carry her around on my shoulders the other day when we were home alone. Until I couldn't get her OFF due to the DEATH GRIP she had on my hair. I seriously thought I was going to have to cut her hands out of the hair, or else sacrifice two large chunks of my scalp. I'm not exaggerating. Although, this might not be so much fear of heights, as fear of Mommy's clumsiness (again with the lack of faith!!), since she shows no respect for the edges of beds, changing tables, chairs, etc. Apparently she doesn't mind the thought of plunging to her death as long as it is by HER choice.

~Fire~
This isn't the best example, but this clip will give you an idea of her alarmed reaction. In this case, it's in response to Sean's New Year's Eve indoor bonfire. Right at the beginning you can see the scrunch and the worried voice (but I don't have footage of the yelping, hollering noise she makes):

So yes, while nine month old shoulders are still relatively small, Josephine seems ready to carry the weight of the world. I guess there's just a lot to worry about at that age.
Which brings up the issue of hair. We all know grey hair accompanies wisdom. But it's hard to have grey hair if you don't actually have hair. So as an outward sign of her increased wisdom and world-wariness, Josephine has decided to grow hair.
Well, a few hairs, at least.
Proof: Another high chair shot:
And in response to Alison, whose boys are hilarious and soooo cute: the no-hands thing in the high chair stemmed from the fact that when we first started giving her solids, she wanted to follow EVERY bite with finger sucking. It was making a huge mess, so I started holding her hands in her lap with one hand and feeding her with the other, along with the verbal instruction "put your hands down, please." We just kept doing that, and she caught on fairly quickly. It still takes reinforcing every now and then, (like tapping her hand, or placing it back in her lap if she pulls it out), but she understands the verbal instruction and knows that she won't be fed unless her hands are down. In terms of pay off for amount of effort invested, this trick was definitely worth teaching.

...Now, my efforts to teach her to stay on a 4x4 blanket during "blanket time" have been a lot more exhausting. She is beginning to catch on, but the jury's waaaaay out on the effort's true success...

meager but merry!

We managed to get the living room primed (albeit very sloppily) in time to toss up some Christmas decorations a few evenings before heading out of town for our next holiday tour (which I will post later). I felt determined to decorate for Josephine's first Christmas (but knew full well that my determination didn't guaranteed an OUNCE of success). So in the end I was relieved and thankful it all worked out, despite strand after strand of Christmas lights going out on me and all the gouging one endures decorating the wiry branches of a nearly needleless, two-decade-old tree. You can see here the sum-total of my Christmas decorating: a wee wreath, bells on the door, a red cloth for Wilbur, and a rather sparsely lit tree.

It's okay, though. We lit some candles, a little incense, and it felt festive. :-)





Of course, the finest decoration of all had to be the 8 month old in red velvet:

Wilbur wanted me to point out my hedgehog ornaments. So I took a picture and labeled it: 1) Sean gave me Christmas 2008, from a shop in south Austin. 2) My aunt and uncle found this little glass one for me this year!! I love it! Especially that it is so different from my first one. I see a collection in the making! 3) These are not hedgehogs. But when I looked at the photo I realized the ceramic kissing angels my grandma painted were in the bottom corner, and so I wanted to point them out. Go, Grandma!
The last photo from our house is courtesy of my friend, Melissa, who came over and took some family photos for us! We are NOT an easy bunch to work with. Thank you, Melissa!

(And if you're trying to figure out why my tree garland is reminding you of the automotive aisle in Walmart, it's because YES those are wooden beads from minivan seat covers. I saved EVERYTHING as a kid. And clearly I still have most of it. I think it sort of looks like popcorn strings from a distance... Let's just pretend, shall we?)

from november

Here are a few photos (and semi-successes) from November that I never posted...

Mosquitoes were still rampant, so I rigged up a king-size mosquito net (thrift store find, brand new for $6, yay!) so Josephine could spend some time outside. It has worked okay. It's really too time consuming to set up, and in between times, a tacky strand of twine swings through the back yard from a high branch. Need to figure out a better method.

Below is a picture of her being very tired of her floor time and my photos, and doing her "all done" sign. Basically, any focused hand movement (usually involving a closing of the fingers) was her "all done" sign. I believe the cognition went something like this:

When they ask me if I'm all done eating, they move their hands back and forth. And when we decide I am indeed finished, they move their hands back and forth while they talk about how "all done" I am. Therefore, being all done has something to do with moving my hands. So when I've had enough, I'm going to move my hands. YES! That's it!!

So in that sense, she caught on to it pretty fast. And since we have her keep her hands in her lap when we feed her, when she pulls them out and intentionally opens and closes her fist, (usually accompanied by an irritated loud noise, which every now and then sounds an imaginative hair like "all done"), that tends to be her "all done" sign. She also started using it for other situations, even though we hadn't been-- like when she wants to be put down (she's "all done" with being held), or when she is tired of sitting in her room and wants to be played with, when she's been in her car seat beyond her desired amount of time, etc. I found this all very humorous-- it was funny for her to express herself so deliberately. Made her seem less like a baby and more like a little person with opinions.

So of course, thinking that this baby sign language stuff was brilliant, I started showing her "more" and "banana" and "mom" and "dad" and "please" and "thank you" and waving hi-- none of which we'd been doing previously. BOY was that a mistake! It was like you could see the complete synapse-sizzling meltdown in her brain every time she tried to communicate something. She got all the signs confused (to the extent that she even had the dexterity to imitate them) and it frustrated both her and us. It also killed the consistency of her "all done" sign because she was mixing up movements and getting mad that we couldn't read her mind.

So, other than waving hi, we went back to just doing "all done." It's currently January, and while she has waving hello down, we haven't progressed past her initial abilities with signing, (still just her version of "all done") so it's not really any more helpful than her other cues, (glamorous things like arching her back and throwing her head over in total drama, shrieking, etc.) So I think it might fall more in the body language category than sign language, for now.

And of course, who can't resist a few naked baby shots? (Don't worry, I remained on close mosquito watch the entire time.)