Jack and B

Jack celebrates his second birthday with his friends Miller, Alexis, and Beatrice

Beatrice and Jack

From Summer St. Pierre's blog - and Summer has a real knack for getting great baby photos, too.

Beatrice, Month Nine

Congratulations, Beatrice - you're nine months old!

This month Beatrice has spent every spare moment pulling herself up to standing and then trying to walk. She is also crawling at an incredible pace, racing up and down the hallways chasing the dogs. She's very, very physically active, refusing to be held still for a moment - she's even taken to "swimming" in the bathtub.

To work through some of her excess energy we've been taking her to a lot of indoor playgrounds, children's museums, carousels, petting zoos, and science centers (it's hard to let B crawl freely at outdoor parks because the first thing she does when put down is to eat a large handful of the available ground cover: sand, woodchips, grass, or leaves).


Here she is having the time of her life on a carousel (click to enlarge and see the delirious look on B's face). I might add that she sat on a real horse that exhibited the full range of carousel motion, not one of those stationary benches for infants and cowards.

Dancing to Panjabi MC

This month Aunt Gillian came down to visit while Dev was out of town, then we took a road trip up to the Bay Area to visit her grandparents in Oakland. While we were there, we took Beatrice to the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito - by the far the nicest children's museum I have ever been to, and highly recommended if you are ever in the area.

When not catching fish at the museum, Beatrice spent her time chasing our cats Odin and Andromache back and forth across my parents' house.

Beatrice continues to love trying any and all new foods, and she's moving on to more "adult" foods (Dev and I typically refer to them as "human" foods) like hard-boiled eggs, cheese, rice, tofu, dhal, cooked vegetables, and soup. For a treat we took her to IKEA to play with all the toys and eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. It was a huge hit. She also tried her first pickle at Aunt Mina's house and loved it.

"I ruined brunch."

Eating her first pickle.

Beatrice has been teething for months now, but still does not have a single tooth. Every morning I peer into her mouth, waiting. Every morning there's nothing there.

And my proudest moment this month: Beatrice vs. the Roomba. Beatrice was crawling around when she accidentally started the Roomba, causing it to roll over her fingers and (painlessly) vacuum them. She reared back, let out a whimper, and for the first time I saw a look of real fear cross her face. She retreated. But then, moments later, she charged it, chasing it back and forth across the dining room. Fear = mastered!

As always, you can find many more photos on Facebook or Flickr.

Just one more...

I know I just posted "Beatrice, Month Eight" - but my good friend Amy Robb just posted a photo on her blog too cute to pass up. This is Beatrice with her friend Miller while Amy and Evan were very kindly babysitting for us the other night.

Beatrice, Month Eight

The eighth month was a big one. Beatrice is now standing up (with the aid of a piece of furniture). She stood up for the first time at Summer St. Pierre's house and has been perfecting her stance since - though since Beatrice can't walk yet, she will instead stand still for five or ten minutes while looking around with a "what next?" look on her face.

Beatrice has been spending a lot of her time lately with Summer and Summer's adorable almost-two-year-old Jack - they've been entertaining Beatrice twice a week while I work on writing. And Jack adores Beatrice - he calls her "my baby" and runs to bring her her favorite toys when she comes over. Beatrice loves Jack, too, and she doesn't mind being occasionally bowled over by his affections - in fact, the other day she managed to catch him off balance and knock him over. She always leaves Summer's house in a great mood (even if she often has too much fun to nap while she's there).

Beatrice is also perfecting her sitting, including sitting in the bath - and especially her crawling. She is crawling basically every moment she's awake. Unfortunately, she refuses to stop moving for anything, including nursing and diaper changes -even at night, she crawls back and forth in her crib until finally exhaustion takes her.

This month we started B on more finger foods, including Cheerios, cereal puffs, crackers, and yogurt drops, as well as non-traditional finger foods like cottage cheese and egg yolks. Egg yolks make more mess than you can ever imagine. Still - nothing occupies a baby like finger food. Mina and I enjoyed a leisurely brunch with all three babies recently while Beatrice was perfectly engrossed in eating five Saltine crackers in slow succession.

Beatrice encounters a cracker for the first time.

Beatrice and cottage cheese.

This month B also discovered a newfound love of swings. As you can see, she's perfectly fearless (though I'm not - I made Dev stop pushing her so high, I was sure she was going to fall out).

And now that she's older, she's beginning to appreciate things like the Zimmer Children's Museum, where she explored the water table and the "toddler bounce room," or the Cabrillo Aquarium where she sat in a fish tube.

Fish tube.

Beatrice plays with the water table.

Beatrice poses with some kosher play food at the Zimmer Museum.

Find more month eight photos on Flickr or Facebook.

Beatrice, Month Seven

Beatrice's seventh month saw her still working on most of the same things she started last month, including crawling and sitting up. She spent most of the month in a great mood, however (barring episodes of teething), full of laughter and excitement. She is very sociable, loves parties and crowds, and gladly welcomes the attention of strangers.

Here she is crawling to get Dev's Leatherman:

She's taken to letting out a loud roar of enthusiasm or victory - she does this constantly, all day long, whether bathing, feeding the dogs Cheerios, or greeting a new friend.

She has now sampled a wide variety of foods, vegetables, fruits, grains, and meats, and loves them all - some of her favorites include yogurt, puffed cereals, beef, peas, and all fruits.

Every month she gets more and more interested in her toys, which is so gratifying since I bought them for her long before she was able to appreciate them (and in some cases, long before she was born). One of her favorites is the Swedish barnyard play set.

She also adores the Rody that Patricia, Lucas's mother, gave her.

This month Beatrice met James's sister Katy.

Beatrice loves playing very rough (or as rough as we'll allow) - she likes nothing more than to be knocked over by the dogs, to tumble upside down, fall over, get back up, be grabbed and tickled, or pushed very fast in the stroller. Here she is roughhousing with Shack:

She loves music and toys that make noise, including her xylophone and her giraffe shaker (both Christmas gifts from Mina).

She also loves books and listening to stories - Travis gave us several new favorites this year for Christmas, including stories about Babar, Eloise, and Madeline.

Beatrice is very independent and insists on doing everything herself, which is charming but also messy and time-consuming. She won't eat anymore unless you let her try to hold the spoon and feed herself, and she also wants to turn the pages of books on her own.

She is learning lots of skills out of order, the harder thing before the easier thing, so she can crawl and use a spoon quite well, but she can't properly sit or use a cup at all. It's pretty clear she has her own agenda.

By far what I'm proudest about, though, is that Beatrice is so brave. She is truly fearless. On New Year's day at the Waddingtons' annual party, we showed her a wooden mango. When you turn the mango upside down, a realistic-looking cobra pops out. You might have expected Beatrice to cry or at least recoil when the snake popped up in her face - instead she let out a roar, lunged for it with both hands, and tried to throttle it. That's totally Beatrice.

We didn't take that many photos this month other than Christmas ones, but you can catch a few on Facebook or Flickr.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Beatrice with her cousins Louis and Rosemary in Griffith Park

This year's Christmas card photo

Merry (belated) Christmas! and a Happy New Year!

Early in December I took Beatrice to see (a wonderfully authentic-looking) Santa at the Americana shopping mall in Glendale. We waited in line for 45 minutes surrounded by loud music, blinking lights, and shrieking children but Beatrice had a great time throughout, she was smiling the entire time, even when I made her sit alone on the lap of an outlandishly costumed stranger.

Christmas attire in Southern California

Then we drove to Dallas with the dogs, stopping on the way to visit Michael, Laura, and Boston in Santa Fe.

We spent the holidays with Dev's whole family: Mamo, Naresh, Suzan, Mina, James, Julie, Maureen, Rosemary, and Louis, along with me, Dev, and Beatrice, plus the two dogs and Maureen's rabbit Fifi.

And we even got snow for Christmas!

Louis had his Christmas balloon tied to his wrappings

Beatrice plays with her drum and xylophone from Aunt Mina

Beatrice opens her first Christmas gift from her mom and dad, the "bob and wobble lion"

The lion is a hit.

Playing the worst board game of all time.

Beatrice with her Christmas balloon.

James makes an excellent pie.

See the rest of our Christmas photos on Flickr and Facebook.