Sibyl is seven months old. Where has this time gone. I love having her as a baby so much and I'll definitely miss her squishy baby-ness as she continues to grow up. I will not miss the sleepless nights, however. She has been sick for the past week (right in time for me to take some days off of work for a dissertation vacation) and we've all been sleeping terribly.
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| 7 months old! |
Sibyl has started crawling (forward). She has been crawling backward for a few weeks but is now figuring out how to move forward. She has had trouble figuring out how to use her knees because she loves standing so much that she just wanted to walk around in a downward dog pose and would end up toppling over.
Evan remarked to some friends that crawling style is like a fingerprint: every baby has her own unique style and no style is identical. I like that idea.
Sibyl has also started saying "da." She's close to saying "Dada" but not quite - this is about the same age that Iris started babbling too. One of her favorite things to do is to whack me really hard when I pick her up. She whacks everything and I think I've decided that she's trying to get a sense of what the object is made of and what sound it makes.
Have I mentioned Sibyl's favorite toys? She loves to hold these magnetic connectors as seen below. She goes everywhere with them and never lets them go. She'll toss all her other toys around but inevitably it seems like when I pick her up and take her to another room she has a connector in tow.
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| Sibyl's favorite toy |
As for the past few weeks, we've had some visitors. My great Uncle Bob, who is 93, came to visit this part of the country for a while. Iris Skypes with Uncle Bob occasionally when my mom is visiting so she was VERY excited to meet him in person. My mom visited for the first part of August because the girls had no school and I needed someone to watch them.
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| Iris and Uncle Bob |
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| Grandma and Iris |
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| Grandma and Sibyl |
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| Evan, Uncle Bob, and Sibyl |
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| Daddy & Sibyl |
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| Grandma, Uncle Bob & Sibyl in a sleep sack |
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| Mama and girls |
I've been fairly exhausted and everything seems more dire when not sleeping enough. I finally have gotten some good nights of sleep this week and the world seems like an entirely new place. Iris has been sleeping well; I have almost nothing remarkable to report about her. She is scheduled to get a brain MRI in a few weeks. I keep my eyes out for new research articles being published about her condition. Like this one. Except - remember that Iris has R179C not R179H. There has also been some activity on our Facebook group about whether we should allow our kids to go on roller coasters and trampolines. The general wisdom is, "no."
Our next door neighbors have two boys about Iris's age and they have a big trampoline so I've had to tell the mom that when Iris plays with the boys we can't do the trampoline.
She also has recently shown me that she can write all the letters in her name. Almost in the right order. The really surprising thing is that she has no trouble doing the "S" correctly or the "R."
Iris
is such an amazing soul. I've been reading a children's book about
Frida Kahlo to her and she loves it. The reason she loves it is because
Frida gets sick and has to be in the hospital. I'm not sure what this
means, but I take it as another example of Iris learning empathy and
finding people who have had experiences like her own.