Our beautiful Princess
Princess is nearly nine months old now. I love this age. She’s still roly-poly and cuddly, but so much more interactive than a newborn. Her personality is beginning to come out, and what a personality it is!
Easy-going: She keeps herself busy when the rest of us are busy. She is generally happy to go along with whatever the family is doing, as long as no-one is hurting her, and she’s not tired or hungry. When something bothers her, the grumbles don’t last long. She knows she’s going to be attended to when I can. Everyone comments on how happy she seems to be and how much she smiles.
Gregarious: She loves being with other people. Her dad and brothers have just gone out, to give me some peace, and she stood at the stair gate and cried to see them go. She waves her arms around madly when her brothers appear. During the week, if she’s awake when my man gets back from work, she races over to see him. She smiles at strangers when they show an interest in her, and in my yoga classes she crawls all over the place to investigate everything in the room and visit all the mums. One day she even sucked someone else’s toe when they were trying to get into position.
Her relationship with Reptile Boy is getting much better. He’s realised he can make her laugh by doing silly things, or tickling her, and she just loves it. I think she has started to say his name - just the end syllable. It sounds a bit like she’s just grunting, but it’s distinct from her other noises. She may be trying to sign his initial letter too.
Active: I can’t believe how active this girl is. All the physical milestones have come round so quickly: rolling over, sitting up, crawling, pulling herself up to standing, ‘cruising’ holding on to the furniture. It seems that they have come one after the other in quick succession. At most stages, she has been at least six weeks younger than her brothers when they started doing these things . She started crawling at six months and currently she will walk when holding on to our hands. About a month ago she started standing for several seconds unsupported, before lowering herself onto her bottom. In the past week she took her first tentative steps on her own.
When Reptile Boy was six months old I made him a treasure basket full of household and natural objects to investigate. He would happily spend half an hour or more sitting with the basket in ‘heuristic’ play. I have many videos of him with his treasure basket and I remember wishing I had made one for the older boys when they were babies.
This time round, I made Princess a treasure basket in happy anticipation of the amount of pleasure she would get out of it. I had not expected how different she would be, compared to her brother. Quiet contemplation was not for her. The treasure basket hardly got any attention because she was too busy starting to crawl. Right now, she does visit it from time to time, but only on her travels around the living room investigating everything else. Her brothers have to be careful not to leave their books anywhere she might find them as the pages get torn, and they are under strict instructions to keep Lego out of the living room.
Any other milestones to report? Her first tooth came through roughly six weeks ago, and the next followed a couple of weeks later. I think there’s another one coming along soon, because she’s started dribbling and chewing her thumb again. She has beautiful fluffy hair which is slowly getting thicker and I think it might be curly for a while, like Reptile Boy’s was. She’s started saying some things that might be words, particularly “mummy” which is great, as all the boys (or perhaps just the first two) said “dada” before “mumma”. She has started to understand and follow simple instructions we give to her (like “Go to Daddy”).
We all love our little princess.
