Maia Weekly

The week in Maia news begins with a big one in the "feats of strength" category: Maia is now crawling! Now, granted, she moves backwards rather than forwards, and it's only a little scoot at a time, but she's definitely on hands and knees and is most definitely mobile. She's been getting up on her hands and knees and just rocking and wiggling in place now for a few days, but yesterday evening she started actually scooting backwards. I've read that this actually is quite common because it's easier and more logical to push backwards with our arms rather than reaching forward to move. But, probably in a matter of days, she'll be on her way! Yikes.

Maia has also continued with the trend of being an enormous chatterbox. She's really doing a lot with the /d/ and /g/ sounds at a very rapid pace; the funny thing is the changes in tone, volume, and pitch that accompany her strings of consonant-vowel syllables. (Wow, I hear my training in linguistics and phonemic-based reading instruction in that sentence!) It's really remarkable to observe the pace at which these types of things are changing. Remember the Godfather-esque jaw clenching from a few days ago? Well, I haven't seen it since just around that time I wrote that post. Now, she's tensing her upper lip and stretching it down across her upper jaw in a way that makes her look a little bit like The Grinch. She's playing with all of the structures--muscles, skin, bones--that play a role in being verbal. It's really quite remarkable to watch.

In other baby news, Maia's wearing her very first cloth diaper right now as she's sleeping. We took the cloth diaper plunge yesterday and I think that we're both really excited about it. We're not using a diaper service, but instead will be laundering the diapers ourselves every couple of days. We went with the bumGenius brand, which is a one-size, velcro-closure, user-friendly pocket diaper. We had to drop a nice chunk of change up front, but, we never have to pay for diapers again! Wow!!! Even with the affordable diapers that we've been able to buy (a million thanks to Nana and Papa Hecker's access to the MSU Stores!), this method will save us hundreds of dollars over the next couple of years. We figured out that we were throwing away about $1.20 a day with the disposables, and putting an enormous amount of waste into our local landfills while we were at it. So, for us and for our value system, these cloth diapers will work out really well. We're psyched. Thank goodness for Tree City Diapers.

So that's all for now. I turn 31 on Saturday, and I must say that because my 30th year was so wonderful, I can't wait for the 31st to get started. :) Now that I'm a parent, the concept of "birthday" has a lot of extra added weight and meaning; my thoughts are turning to my parents a lot as I think about what August 25th meant for them, not just what it means to me. Wow. Yep. There are the tears again. :)