My baby girl turned six months old today!  It’s like a whole new class of baby.

It didn’t start off easy though.  I fell asleep on the couch with Bruce snuggled up on my arm under the blanket and Harvey splitting time between camping out with me and staying with Amanda upstairs.  I heard Milly fuss a little a couple times, but at 4:30 she let out a huge wail so I went upstairs to check on her.  I gave her back her sweetmaker and covered her back up and she seemed alright.

I got in bed and I think I fell asleep for a bit, but it was one of those sleeps where you don’t even realize it, because next thing I knew it was 5:30 and Milly was crying loudly again.  I got up and checked her diaper this time.  It was pooed in, which is rare because that doesn’t usually happen until after she’s had breakfast.

Anyhoo, I’m pretty sure I didn’t get back to sleep after that one.  Milly cried again and Amanda decided to get up a few minutes early and looked in on her.  I finally got up out of bed a few minutes after Amanda left and Milly cried off and on while I was eating and showering.  I ended up getting her up a few minutes early.

The day pretty much went like this: Milly was happy for a while, Milly bawled unless she got picked up, Milly would be happy, Milly got upset, Milly got put down for a nap.  That whole cycle happened three times.  She did nap quite a bit today, but then, she didn’t sleep well last night.  Milly usually only naps an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and I think her first two naps were about two hours each.  The last one didn’t actually happen- Amanda tried to put her down this evening, but she stayed up, crying in her crib, until we figured there was no point in trying to get her to sleep only to turn around and get her back up to feed her and put her back to bed.

I told Amanda that Milly had wanted her to pick up a half-birthday cake for her on the way home, but Amanda, ever wily, saw through my ruse and realized that Milly a) can’t talk, b) can’t eat cake and c) that I like cake and it would have been for me.

Amanda asked me if I’d sung Happy Birthday to Milly, which I had not.  She pointed out that Milly would only ever have one half-birthday and that I should, so I waited until Amanda was gone for a few minutes then did it.  Ha ha, Amanda!

Milly was hungry tonight.  Her nose has been stuffy lately but wasn’t today, so maybe she got over a cold and got her appetite back.  Either way, for dinner Milly drank all six ounces of formula and just about finished off the green bean baby food mush.

The bottle Milly drinks on the couch, usually holding the bottle and feeding herself.  Usually I just sit her up on the couch to feed her the baby food, but for some reason I moved her to the Bumbo, a little rubber seat, on the floor tonight.  It turned out to be very fortuitous.  I hear Milly making evil gurgling noises that weren’t coming from her mouth, and I didn’t really think anything of it because we change her before we put her to bed anyway.  But when I picked her up out of the Bumbo I beheld a horrendous site.

That which I figured would be contained by her diaper had been too great a mass and spilled out of the diaper.  It was all in the seat and even on her stomach a bit.  I started to clean her off in the downstairs shower, but I realized having a detachable nozzle would be much more helpful in such an endeavor so I carried her, in the baby tub, to the upstairs shower.  Amanda, meanwhile, cleaned out the diaper, the Bumbo and the tub.

I was afraid that Milly had decided that six months of being ridiculously good and easy to handle was enough, but maybe it was just that she wanted to poop really bad (though she’d already had two poos earlier today).  Of course, she still doesn’t have any teeth pushing through her gums yet.  Anyway, she was much happier while eating after that episode and was very cheerful after her bath, talking to her changing table bear and smiling as we put her down to sleep.  So far so good.

So, to celebrate Milly’s half-birthday she had the biggest poop of her life so far and got to take a bath in the big kid tub (though she was still sitting in the baby tub).  Milly also happened to type her first word today, which was “grew”.  Here’s what she wrote while banging on the keyboard (which was the only thing that would make her happy at the time):

aAVV  C YHN 2Z  YUJK MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM                   S,E 1 b  bgv fd c dd grew

Pretty cool, huh?  I honestly didn’t do anything to help that but turn off the laptop’s trackpad and get the cursor back in the typing area when she got it off of it.

Zach Dotsey