Oops? I didn't mean to let this run without updates for so long. Let's take a quick look at Olive and point out some of the updates and patches which have been applied:

• She has a full row of front teeth, top and bottom, and she's showing some signs of continuing to grow more. We pretty much don't ever just stick our finger into her mouth anymore; that's too hazardous a game. By the same token, she eagerly eats small chunks of whatever Christina and I are having at every meal, and she hasn't balked yet. She makes really crazy faces, sometimes; stir-fried veggies in spicy peanut sauce, for example, were not at all what she expected. She still ate them with enjoyment once she recalibrated her expectations for taste.

• She is more verbal than ever: her babble continues to adjust its tone according to her emotions, but at the same time, the individual phonemes are now beginning to get really standardized. What this means is that she'll utter complete sentences now, such as "Ba guuu... na ma ma ma ma ma ma MA!"

• While she still doesn't crawl, she can absolutely get into the belly-up posture. When she wakes crying at night, more often than not we discover her on hands and knees. I'm pretty sure she does this to absolutely minimize the effort and time necessary on my part to scoop her out of her crib.

• Not crawling doesn't imply immobility; she's actually demonstrated a few different locomotive methods at this point:

  • Prone, she can pivot back and forth around a point which is not her center of mass, such that she gradually makes her way in a direction.
  • Alternately, she sometimes shoves herself straight backward with brute arm strength while in that position.
  • Sitting up in a high chair, she'll lean forward and slam her body into the backrest to scoot the whole thing gradually backwards.
  • Anywhere within her surprisingly long sitting leaning reach, she'll just grab onto any convenient handhold and manhandle her body around using nothing but arm strength.

  What these methods have in common are that they're cute to watch, wildly inefficient, and don't involve actually using her legs as propulsive devices. This seems a bit odd to us, but what do we know about getting around?

• She's knows how to transition from a sitting to a crawling or lying position, and given convenient handholds, can transition back from either to sitting. She's rolled over too often to plausibly claim that she can't, but still does so less often than she seems to want to.

Another change has occurred in her context: she's now going to daycare three days per week, and is just finishing the "settling-in period" when Christina is expected to attend with her and gradually increase the period of separation. We really hope that very soon now, Christina will finally have some reliable time to focus on her studies.

Babies! You look at them every day and say "yup, that's the same baby as yesterday," but when you expand your review horizon even a bit, they change surprisingly quickly.