This morning, Olive demonstrated a new trick: alone on her mattress, she rolled herself from prone to supine unassisted, with both Christina and me watching.

This has been a while coming: she could roll herself over when on the big bed's soft mattress, with the weight of a parent providing a convenient slope, several weeks ago. This was demonstration of mastery, not anything truly new for her.

Still, it's emblematic of what she's been going through recently: her awareness of her own body, and its ability to manipulate the world around her, has been increasing dramatically recently. She grasps onto toy balls and rattles now, and shakes them around. Rattles in particular excite her, so she shakes them very vigorously. They never last long, though: she's not quite mastered the art of keeping her fingers tight while her arm shakes, so she shakes both, which means that the rattle normally ends up getting tossed after the first shake or two.

Her vocalizations are getting more intentional as well. The actual sounds that she makes still seem more or less random, but the pattern no longer is: instead of sounding off accidentally, or because of upset, she makes noises now because she wants to. We get to converse with her! She grins hugely when we do.

One consequence of all this is that she has a new basic need: she's no longer content simply to be rested, fed, and recently changed; she now has the ability to get bored. Actively playing with her can keep her entertained, but that's not the sort of thing I'm good at when I'm still in the process of waking up. She's quite happy to be placed under a dangling toy and practice her hand-eye coordination, so that's starting to be a thing for her. Probably what we should do is string something over her mattress for her to play with; we just need to find an appropriate length of string and some nice toys to dangle from it.

Physical strength remains a problem for her: while she can flip herself over, it's only with great effort, positioning her arms and legs for maximum leverage. I've been wondering recently how much of babies' strength gains come from what amounts to muscle-building training, and how much is from simple growth. Will she get stronger faster if we put a lot of effort into rattle training so she spends a bunch of time shaking her arms while they're weighted down? I have no idea.

Overall, she's prospering. I'd meant to make a big deal out of the day that she doubled her birth weight, but there was a period in which we didn't measure her weight for a while, and once we did, she was well past the 2.0 mark. I predict that she has probably three more doublings in her, and the rest of them are likely to be spaced out enough for us to actually catch them.