Julia’s
Journal
A record of Julia’s adventures and
milestones
2000 2001
Tuesday, January 2
Cute
things Julia does these days: rubs her
eyes 
when she’s sleepy, revs like a motor when
she’s trying to go to sleep,
raspberries constantly when she’s happy.
She’s
also becoming less interested in something you hand her than in something lying
around or something you’re using
(that is, she only wants what’s
not offered to her.)
Monday, January 8
Julia had her 6-month visit at the pediatrician’s office today. She weighs 16 pounds, 6 ounces, which is just about the 50th percentile for her age, but she’s only in the 25th percentile for her height (25 1/4 inches) – shocking considering her towering parents! She had a fever last week, and we had taken her in for her first sick visit, but she appeared just to have a cold. Dr. David Landis, her fabulous pediatrician, continues to say that she’s doing very well.
Friday, January 12
Julia clearly wants to crawl, but
she’s
just not sure what to do. If you put her on the floor, she starts doing full pushups
– she’s always been very strong – but she hasn’t
figured out how to move to go forwards. The force of her arms tends to push her
backwards somewhat, so she just gets madder and madder as she gets farther away
from whatever she’s
trying to reach.
Thursday, January 18
Well I know we reported in
November that Julia had begun to babble, saying “ah
ma ma ma”
one night, but since then we hadn’t
heard another consonant until today. Tonight she began saying “ga ga ga
ga ga”
and regaled us repeatedly with her animated chatter.
Sunday, January 21
Julia is getting closer to being
able to crawl. She continues to do push ups and then flop down onto her stomach
to reach for a desired object. Then she pushes up again and repeats the process.
Unfortunately this tends to result in her creeping backwards
(notice in the video how she gets farther away from the yellow toy) and is very frustrating. However,
today I saw her up on her hands and knees in perfect crawling
position for the first time. We hope for her sake she will crawl soon, because
it’s
terrible to see her so frustrated, but we’re alarmed at the amount of
babyproofing we’ll
need to do!
Yesterday we started teaching Julia to sign. Since babies can understand language long before they can form words, you can give them the tools to communicate months before they can speak, and reduce their frustration. Studies have shown that babies who sign start speaking just as early as other babies, so it doesn’t cause any delays. We’re using ASL with the assistance of a kit called Sign with Your Baby, and we started with the signs for “milk” (which we use for “nurse”), “eat” (for solid food), and “more”.
Wednesday, January 24
Julia
has very specific tastes in art! We have a small
collage hanging at the top of our stairs
by South Carolina artist Arliss Day, and we noticed that Julia was staring at it
with a huge grin on her face as we carried her up and down the stairs. She gets
very excited as she approaches it and does a little wiggly
dance.
It’s very funny. No other art
we’ve shown her produces the same reaction.
Saturday, January 27
A week ago, we moved Julia from our bed to her crib at night. (“Shocking!” say half of you. “They had their baby in bed with them for 6 1/2 months! She’ll never be independent!” “Shocking!” say the other half. “They’re letting their baby sleep alone when she’s only 6 1/2 months old! She’ll feel abandoned!”) It was a difficult decision, but she was waking up every hour or two, and Josh was looking increasingly sleep deprived. We now put her in her crib and rub her back and sing to her until she falls asleep. She is waking up much less, though. She always slept on her back or side in our bed but rolls over to her stomach immediately in the crib, and as our mothers always knew, babies seem to sleep more soundly on their stomachs. We are appreciating the increased sleep, but we miss our snuggly (not to mention wiggly) little baby at night.
Tuesday, January 30
Julia
achieved forward
movement today! I wouldn’t
call it crawling – it
was more of a flopping up and down
– but she did manage to move forward, which is
good since she never figured out how to harness her backward movement to go in a
desired direction. She continues to be very curious and wants to get her hands
on everything around her – here she is taking
a bath
in the sink at Gramma and Grampa’s
house in Clinton, NY, and trying to grab everything in sight.
Thursday, February 1
This
was a day of several firsts! Julia turned
7 months old today, and to celebrate, she started crawling!
She still doesn’t
have the mechanics entirely down
– she will make a few crawling movements, then push up on her toes
in a leapfrog-like motion, then flop down to her stomach and reach for her
target. She also took off hat for the first time. She was in her back carrier on the way to her South
End playgroup when I saw her bare-headed reflection in a store window. I
wasn’t able to reach the hat, so I had to trust her to continue clutching it
until we reached our destination. Fortunately she did, but on the way back home
I was stopped by a passerby handing me the hat Julia had discarded.
Yesterday we attended our first music and movement class at the Community Music Center of Boston. We sing, dance, and play instruments. Julia really enjoyed the class, bouncing up and down and flapping her arms to the beat.
Sunday, February 3
It seems like Julia’s doing several new things every day now. Of course, she’s probably been learning several new things every day all along, they just weren’t as obvious to us – “wow, some things are light and some things are dark”; “hey, if I suck here milk comes out!”; “boy, I keep seeing these same two people an awful lot”; etc. Yesterday she started shaking her head, as if she were saying “no,” although it’s flirtatious rather than contrary.
Today she started saying
“ma ma
ma”
again; she’s done with “ga
ga ga” and
has moved on to a new consonant. She’s
also been smiling broadly when I make the “nurse”
sign, but we don’t
know if she is beginning to understand what it means or if she just thinks the
motion I’m
making with my hand is really funny. Most exciting, she’s
begun pulling up
on the coffee table. She likes to stand against it and play with the remotes.
Unfortunately, though humorously, she thinks she can
stand
, so she’ll
sometimes let go with both hands and start to fall backwards – “timber!”
Fortunately, we’ve
managed to catch her every time, but we’re not sure how she’ll learn to hold
on without taking some tumbles.
Saturday, February 10
Julia is suddenly able to crawl on slick floors, without the traction she gets from carpeting, so she can go farther afield now. She moved off the area rug in the living room onto the hardwood floor and kept going for the first time. Seeing her leave the rug, we rushed to get our gate mounted at the top of the stairs! She also ventured over the threshold into the bathroom from the carpeted hall; in the past she’s gotten to the threshold and started to cry with frustration.
Wednesday, February 14
Not
only is Julia progressing in crawling and pulling up, but occasionally she will
let go of your hands when you’re
helping her stand, and she can maintain her balance several seconds. She’s
been able to stand unsupported a little longer each day
– today it was long enough for Josh to snap a picture
.
Saturday, February 17
We can see that Julia is developing a sense of separation anxiety, which is common at this age. When she’s well rested and well fed, she’s friendly to everyone and happy to let other people hold her. But when she’s starting to get tired or edgy, only Mom will do. She’s usually content to let Josh hold her if she can see where I am – “look, Mama’s just washing her hands” but it does make things more difficult than before. Often, though, she’ll be fine if she and Josh move a different room from me – out of sight, out of mind.
Monday, February 19
Today, Julia did something most impressive! She’s been able to pull up if she grabbed onto something at waist level or higher, but today she stood up from a crouch. I was sitting on the floor, and she did put one hand on my leg at first, but that only gave her a few inches off the ground. She did most of the work with her legs, slowly rising from crouching to standing, and put her arms out to the sides for balance. Once she was standing she quickly grabbed on to the coffee table so she wouldn’t fall.
Tuesday, February 20
This morning Julia sat up from a crawl for the first time. Now she can go from sitting to crawling and back to sitting again. This must be very exciting for her, as she’s no longer dependent on us to put her in the position she wants, unless of course what she wants is to be held! Her crawling is improving rapidly, although sometimes she still thinks her feet, rather than her knees, are involved somehow, and crabwalks around for a few moments.
Friday, February 23
A
big milestone
– Julia pulled up in crib for the first time today. Now she will
never go to sleep; she just wants to stand. She’s
also returned
to babbling after a hiatus of several weeks, this time with “da
da da.”
Sunday, February 25
Although
we started feeding Julia “solid”
foods in mid-December, when we thought she was expressing a lot of interest in
what we were eating, she hasn’t
seemed very enthusiastic about baby food. The past several days she had hardly
eaten anything, and neither of us was having any fun with it. (Fortunately,
since she’s
nursing, we don’t
have to worry about her needing the solid food for its nutritional value at this
point.) So yesterday I thought we might get a better reaction if she tried
something with a little more texture
– I’d
gotten a pretty good reaction several weeks ago when I fed her some avocado
I’d
mashed up with a hand blender her Great Aunt Pat gave us. So
we cut up some banana into small pieces and fed them to her, and she really
seemed to like it! I was worried she wouldn’t
be ready for non-mashed food, but she gummed it up quite well and
never had problems swallowing it.
In retrospect, we suspect that the problem for previous few days had been that the two jars of food we were using were things she doesn’t like. We usually have one jar of fruit and one jar of vegetables open at once, and she eats about 1/3 of each jar every day. The two jars we had going were peas, which we had fed her before and thought perhaps she didn’t like, but we wanted to give them another try to be sure, and peaches, which were a new food for her. Because she was never eating very enthusiastically, it was hard to tell when she didn’t like something. But now she readily opens her mouth for food (including jar food we tried since the bananas yesterday), so I think we’ll take peas and peaches out of the rotation for a while.
Tuesday,
February 27
Julia really entertains herself exploring the house. She likes to crawl around and pull up on anything that seems interesting. She bangs on things with her palm to see how they feel and what kind of sound they make, looks at them intently, and finally puts them in her mouth. On the one hand, this means it’s easier to put her down for a moment, since she doesn’t need an adult to entertain her all the time, but on the other hand you have to watch her constantly since there’s so much more trouble she can get into!
She’s also getting more expressive, with more varied tones of voice. And two months after the first one, she’s finally getting her second tooth, on the bottom next to the other one. We haven’t seen her standing unsupported recently, though, so she may have stopped to work on other things.
Tuesday, March 13
After not standing unsupported at all for the last few weeks, she has started again recently. Today she stood for the longest time so far – at least ten seconds. (I know it doesn’t sound long, but it seemed quite long while she was doing it!)
Saturday,
March 17
You can see that Julia’s memory is improving and that she can recognize familiar activities. We have a little rhyme we do that ends with tickling her under her arms. This week, when she heard the rhyme begin, she would start laughing in anticipation of being tickled!
Saturday, March 24
Julia may have made her first sign, although who’s to know? She was nursing, and turned her head away to look at Josh. She reached out her hand and opened it and closed it three times while looking right at him. We praised her and said “Julia, are you saying nurse? Are you telling Daddy that you’re nursing?” while making the sign, to reinforce what she’d done in case she really was trying to sign. Of course, she could just have been doing something cool with her hand. We’ll see if she does it again.
Sunday, March 25
Julia can stand! It’s funny how some milestones, like crawling, require lots of work on her part. You could see her trying to pull up, crawl, pick up small objects, etc., and becoming very frustrated when she couldn’t do what she wanted. But she has never seemed conscious of standing. Recently, she has been letting go of whatever she’s been holding on to while standing more and more frequently, and she doesn’t seem to notice that she’s done it. Just now, she reached up onto the TV tray in front of me to grab a coaster. When she got the coaster down, she wanted to examine it with both hands, so she did. She stood perfectly balanced for a long time (20? 30 seconds?) and then, instead of falling over, she purposefully sat down. It appears that she can now balance well enough to do this any time she wants, at least until she gets tired. (At this precise moment, she is proceeding to prove that by doing it again!)
Friday, March 30
Wow, a big day! Julia’s been standing more and more the last few days, so finally today she really started cruising. Although she’s had the ability to walk while holding onto furniture for some time, she hadn’t really been doing it. If she needed to get from one place to another that was more than arm’s reach away, she would just sit down, crawl over, and pull back up. But today she’s started shuffling sideways along pieces of furniture. Walking can’t be far away!
More exciting, today she made her first clear wave! She’s held out or sometimes flapped her arm at people before, but it’s never been clear whether she was waving or just wiggling. I was holding her and Josh was getting back to work, so I said “say goodbye to Daddy!” and I waved and Josh waved and Julia put out her arm and waved it up and down. It was very exciting, because it’s her first learned “adult” communication. I’d been working on waving a lot recently, waving at people in grocery stores when they wave at her to show her how it’s done, and now she’s waving back. Very exciting.
Saturday, March 31
Julia has been doing so many new things recently. She continues to work on her pincer grasp, picking up small pieces of food between her thumb and forefinger. She has eaten bananas, mangos, avocados, kiwis, potatoes, and pears this way, and we’re adding new foods all the time.
