Maya turned ten months old yesterday. So fast! I feel like I don't write enough anymore, that there are all of these wonderful moments going by unremarked, and I'm certain the time will come when I regret it. This, then, is a sort of snapshot of Maya and where she is now. I'll try to do one for Sasha in a few days.
At ten months old, Maya is an absolute joy to be around. She's a really easy-going baby, with a smile that goes from one horizon to the other, just like the sun. She is very easy to amuse, and thinks sneezing is funny, and peek-a-boo, and standing up by the cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes she fakes laughing, a coughing-barking sound that makes me wonder if she is practicing her evil laugh in preparation for a future career in villainy.
She is very ticklish.
She has a lot of tricks: She pulls up to stand all the time - sitting is OK, but lying down is for losers - and sometimes she lets go for a second, or better, lets go with one hand and bangs a toy on the table with the other.
She adores the cat, and will pet him gently, more gently than you would think a baby is capable of. She is always excited to see him, day or night, and she raises her hand and waves at him, and she can just about say, "Hi, kitty!" (Though sometimes it takes her a few tries to get it right.)
Her favorite toy: Empty 20-ounce soda bottles.
When Sasha began camp, we took Maya out of the daycare that Sasha had been in for years, and put her in a daycare center. It's a little more money, and a rotating staff (so not the same person all day every day) but Maya has so much more space to play, and nobody feeding her inappropriate food, no TV on all day, nobody watching the news during breakfast. Sasha needed that stability, yes, even until she turned five, but Maya is a very different baby. It took only a week or two for her to succumb to Stockholm Syndrome and become contented with her fate. I don't think Sasha would have done well in that environment.
Maya may or may not have teeth, and frankly I'm tired of trying to work it out. We give her bagels to eat anyway, and big chunks of soft peach, and cut-up chicken and pasta. Teeth or no, she manages to eat these things. Her technique appears to be slobbering on the item until it has a thick slime coating, then scraping off the slime with her gums.
She still doesn't seem to be the atopic allergy sort of child. No mystery hives, no eczema. Still, the anxiety I have with Maya and food took a turn for the worst last night; I fed her a small piece of cheese yesterday, most of which she spat out, and she was up for an hour, mostly crying, because her tummy hurt her. She would cry and cry, and then burp and settle down for a few minutes.
I think I will not be trying any more cow dairy on her until after she is a year old.
This morning, Maya discovered the stairs, and after some excited banging of a Dasani bottle on the carpet, climbed up to the third one. Woe betide us!
And thus we conclude the Maya-related infodump for today.
My kitchen is: Ah, who cares.
Posted by andrea at July 29, 2007 10:58 AM