This is the text of an email Susan sent to family members updating them on Fiona.

Fiona’s six-month doctor’s appointment was yesterday. She’s super healthy, of course. She is now 26 inches (66 centimeters) long (which means that her passport application is already out of date—it asks for height, and we said two feet), 17 pounds 10 ounces (8 kilograms), with a head circumference of 17.7 inches (45 centimeters). Her head circumference is somewhere around the 90th percentile, and her doctor said, “Ah, do big heads run in your family?” Why yes, they do. She had to get four shots, plus some polio juice. She dealt with it very well, although she did start crying on the second shot. About 12 hours later, she suddenly had a fever, and actually fell asleep in Dustin’s lap. She hasn’t been interested in sleeping in our laps in weeks. But the fever went away in a few hours.

She has changed up her cyclops game a bit. Before, she would sit on my stomach and touch her forehead to mine so I looked like a cyclops, and then laugh. But now, she leans down and chews on (gums) my nose. It’s a very strange sensation, especially since I’m pretty sure no one has ever chewed on my nose before. I think she may have gotten the idea from me, because I sometimes pretend to nibble on her nose and ears, but I’m definitely not as slobbery as she is.

Rolling over is not a challenge any more at all. Just a few weeks ago, she would struggle quite a bit, and sometimes she would end up on her stomach with her arm in the wrong place and start crying because she didn’t know how to move anymore. Now, she’s very adept. The next challenge is crawling, and she gets frustrated sometimes. She learned how to push up on her hands and get her tummy off the ground, but she’s not quite sure what to do after that. I think it’s pretty amazing that she’s figuring this out on her own, because she’s never really seen anyone crawl. Based on how quickly she mastered rolling over, I think she might figure out crawling pretty soon, too—but we’ll see.

For her six-month birthday, we got her some new pacifiers (in the next size up) and sippy cups. She views the sippy cups as toys, although she does know that there is food in them. She spits out her pacifier when she sees the sippy cup, just like she does when she sees her bottle. She’s still at least as interested in drinking out of our glasses, but I’m not sure she’s ever really gotten anything out of them—she mostly just licks the glass, trying to lap up water (even though her tongue is on the wrong side), and pours water down her front. The pacifiers, though, are a hit. I was holding her while Dustin opened up the package (she had already seen the package and played with it, but obviously she couldn’t get to the pacifiers herself). She had her old pacifier in her mouth, and when she saw that the new ones were coming out, she spit out the old one and opened her mouth to try a new one. I was so impressed that (a) she was able to generalize her limited knowledge of pacifiers (she’s only really been exposed to the two that she had) to new pacifiers in different colors and sizes, and (b) she found them interesting enough that she actually wanted to try them out. After sucking on the first new one for a minute, she spit it out to try the second new one. She is so smart.

And, last, Fiona has learned to love the bathtub. She kicks and splashes up a storm in there. The other day I sat her up and dumped some water on her head, and she sputtered a little and then laughed. Excellent! She’s definitely ready for the pool. Later on that day, I plopped her down on the bathroom floor to play while I took a shower, and she got all excited when she heard the water come on—she thought she was going to get in again! She also really wants to go explore the spout where the water comes out, but she’s not very stable when she sits up, so we haven’t put her over there yet.

And that’s about it this week. She’s such a good little girl.

Susan

This article appeared on page 14 of Issue 2 | April 2011.