41-42 Weeks

Natalie’s crawling adventures continue! She’s crawling all over the house and crawling to us when we walk into another room (and often when we just encourage her to do so). She’s such a happy kid. You can tell she’s very proud of herself once she scoots her way on over to her desired destination and plops herself up onto her bum! And now she’s starting to really explore the house too- simple things like the vertical blinds or the sliding doors to the closets really fascinate her. Unfortunately, so do the cat bowls and everything else we don’t want her getting into. I went out and bought some cabinet latches to secure away our cleaning supplies and things. Although I watch her like a hawk, I know she can get into something she shouldn’t in a second’s time.

Natalie also follows the cats around now. We’re still working on petting them gently, since she prefers to grab and pull, but luckily I’m not worried about the cats around her. They’re still faster (for now) and can easily make themselves unavailable by jumping to the top of their cat tree. Penny keeps her distance anyway, since she seems bothered by Natalie’s screeching, but Mr. Blake doesn’t seem to care! He’s so mellow and doesn’t even get upset when she does pull at him. It’s fun to see them interacting together.

Natalie has also started doing the cutest thing just recently- she’s started to dance! She has this little toy guitar thing that Auntie gave her that plays little tunes when you press its buttons. When it plays, she often starts to wiggle around and smile!

We’ve started taking Natalie with us to the hot tub in the evening. Eric and I really like going to the hot tub. It’s never terribly hot and we don’t submerge Natalie much. Plus she seems to enjoy it- I love how happy she is in the picture below with Daddy! When we went the other night, there was this random neighborhood cat hanging out at the pool. S/he was very friendly, following us around and rubbing up against our legs. The cat had a collar on with a phone number, so obviously someone owned her/him, but if the cat didn’t have a collar on, I would have considered taking it home!! Such a sweet cat. Eric would kill me though.

I haven’t updated her new foods in a while, mostly because we’ve been trying to deal with her ongoing constipation issue and thus not introducing many new things. But recently I’ve made and offered her kiwi, a berry medley of blackberries, blueberries, strawberries and raspberries, mashed potatoes and northern white beans. All have been well received, like everything she eats! I even gave her broccoli again and she took right to it, after seemingly hating it the first go around. And then when we’re done with dinner, one of us grabs a baby wipe to clean her face and she’s started to snatch the wipe from our hands and tries to wipe our faces instead! She also tries to give us her paci at bedtime when she’s not tired.

I also recently bought her a new sippy cup that she’s learning how to use on her own. Here she is sampling it.