Olive! Good to see you in my office. Why don't you take a seat there. Let's get the stress over with right away: this is your six-month performance review, and I'm happy to tell you that you've made a very positive contribution to this family, and we look forward to having you here for years to come. You can consider your probationary period passed with flying colors.

Let's start by reviewing some milestones you've already passed on the way here:

• You breastfed like a champion, right from the start. In fact, this almost became a problem; for a while there you were precariously close to the edge of the bell curve for weight-by-age. We're happy to see that this is starting to normalize again.

• You didn't just waste all that extra mass; you worked hard on turning it into muscle. This gave you great neck control from a quite early age, and these days it's given you a startlingly strong grip.

• You finished the "fourth trimester" and became really engaged with the world right on schedule, and have constantly sought to expand your understanding and capabilities ever since.

• We mentioned sitting earlier; that's something you started fairly early, and have been improving at ever since. The simple fact is that we can trust you to sit up on your own in an adult chair for a minute or two right now, which is incredibly useful.

• For the last month or so you've been waking up before the rest of the family, and then quietly playing in bed without bothering anybody. It's a simple thing, but it's an incredible morale boost for us to wake up peacefully, and then see you grinning at us once we finally open our eyes.

• You've also been recently demonstrating a strong desire to try new foods and solids. We really appreciate that you seek these things out, instead of making us force them on you.

Another item, harder to quantify, but which I'd be remiss to fail to mention, is your incredibly cheerful and inquisitive disposition. You're always happy to meet new people, go new places, try new things; situations like long flights, which might have been terrible, hardly bothered you at all. We're both incredibly grateful that your personality is so consistently positive.

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect; there are a few items we'd like you to improve on:

• You recently stopped pooping for several days. While normally your bathroom habits are a personal matter, the evident distress which this caused you and its apparent invulnerability to any form of laxative bothered us all quite a bit. Please continue to regularize your bowels to the maximum degree possible.

• You rolled over twice, at around the four month mark, and then stopped forever. Your mobility needs to keep increasing; regressions like this will do you no good. Please reacquire this skill.

Looking forward, here are some milestones we'd like to see you accomplish in the next six months:

• Get some teeth out from your gums. While the process is uncomfortable, the increased ability to bite and scrape solid foods will prove well worth it.

• Learn to crawl. We've recently seen you lift your entire torso and support yourself on hands and knees; we've seen you lying prone, leaning on one elbow, playing with a toy with the other arm. You've demonstrated the ability to pivot on your belly, and scoot forward when your feet are braced. You have all the strength you'll need to crawl; you just need to figure out the mechanics.

• Learn to control your orientation: roll over (again), sit up, lie down. Before the end of your first year we'd like to see you able to stand up on your own and balance while bracing on some appropriate object.

• Improve your fine motor control, particularly with regard to foods. Currently, when given a spoon or long food, you hold it up vertically in front of your face and reach out with your lips to try to capture it into your mouth. While endearing, this isn't a particularly effective strategy. We'd like to see you start feeding yourself with at least simple foods, and handle a sippy cup properly.

• Continue to develop your vocal abilities. You've worked out quite a few consonants and all of the vowels, as well as the ability to project a powerful screech, but we'd like to see some more purposeful babbling.

• Start communicating with baby signs. This is possibly the most ambitious of our goals, but you've already evolved certain signals to us, such as arching your back when you want to be picked up. We're going to be increasing our efforts to demonstrate signs to you; we'd like you to pay attention to these and begin imitating them in relevant situations.

These goals may seem tough now, but we have reason to believe that they'll be well within your capabilities as you double your age. You can do it!

Seriously, Olive's been a wonderful child; I'd heard good things about being a parent, but the actual experience is better than I'd expected. I think that what I'm most looking forward to personally in the next half year are the baby signs; being able to communicate more directly with her will be an incredible convenience.

It seems likely that Olive will be crawling pretty soon now, so Christina and I are suddenly interested in babyproofing options. It feels very much like since Olive's birth, we've been slowly inching our way along the clicking ascent of the first hill of a rollercoaster, and we can just now see over the top: we haven't picked up any speed quite yet, but it's already obvious that it's going to be a rush.