Charlotte's Web

Charlotte is 6 months old!!! Our biggest change this month is in mobility. Charlotte has gone from scooching to directed rolling and now to actual hand and knee crawling! Click read more to hear more and see pictures from Charlotte's sixth month of life.

We had our 6 month doctor's appointment on Monday (2/23) and Charlotte is definitely growing! She now weighs 19 lbs and is over 27 inches long (this is not so accurate do to wriggling). She is meeting all of the expected milestones and is even a bit ahead of schedule on some. Surprisingly, she loves going to the doctor. She enjoys playing with all the crinkly paper and of course seeing the other baby (in the mirror). She was all smiles for Dr. H, showing off her "jumping" skills and her new babbling. Thanks to daddy Charlotte wasn't even phased by her shots; she cried for less than a minute before she resumed playing. Daddy has a great way of not reacting to things and it really helps Charlotte move right along, unlike mommy who cries before the nurse even comes in.

Clapping is also a very big thing right now. Charlotte claps, and claps and claps for anything. It is so cute. She has not quite figured out that she needs to have her hands open so she claps her fists! I hope to post a video of this. Daddy is also working on the "hi-five."

Solid foods has been going really well. Charlotte is very interested in real food, especially mommy and daddy's food. So far she has tried: rice cereal, avocado, banana, sweet potato, peas, butternut squash, apples, pears, broccoli, zucchini and oatmeal. All of these were initially introduced as puree's but the last round of sweet potatoes she seemed interested so for fun i gave her a small chunk of steamed sweet potato (expecting her to spit it out) and to my surprise she started "chewing" it and promptly opened her mouth for more! She ate nearly a whole plate of little chunks.

And with the serving of 2 meals of solids a day comes some completely different poop from the sweet smelling breastmilk poop. When we were pregnant Rick did some reading on the EC (elimination communication) method and decided it was something he wanted to try. I scoffed and thought he was crazy and had decided that he could spend the hours holding the baby over the toilet if he wanted but that I wasn't. As it turns out my understanding of EC was not accurate. While we do spend some extra time in the bathroom waiting for "the event" it's not nearly as time consuming or schedule interrupting as I thought it would be. At around 3 months we started sitting Charlotte on the potty and we felt lucky when she went, usually we got there too late or at the complete wrong time, and some times we just got a pee. Nowadays we have been pretty lucky (I haven't changed a poopy diaper in about 1 month!) and are able to read Charlotte's cues that she is ready to poop (grunting and "serious" rasberry sounds) and we get her to the potty just in time! So, while I won't claim to have a potty trained 6 month old, I definitely believe she knows where to go!

Books, books, books. Charlotte loves her books. She has been known to cry if you stop reading before she is done and she even knows how to turn the page all by herself. The first few times I thought it was a fluke, but no, she really does turn the pages. In certain books she looks for specific pages that she likes (the bumpy frog and the red bird). In Goodnight Moon when we are on a black and white page she will flip back to the cover (which is in color) and touch the fireplace, then she will go the next color page and reach to touch the fireplace as well. Hopefully she just likes the color red and not the idea of fire...

Enjoy some pictures from month 6 of Charlotte's life!