It's been too long!

Hello everyone! Sorry that it's been more than my usual few days between posts. We haven't been that busy, really . . . so who knows where the time went??

Maia is upstairs right now (it's 8:08 PM) attempting to chill out enough to go to sleep. Remember when I wrote that I wouldn't write about sleep until something changed? Well, here we are. I recall blogging about the "sleep regression" that we experienced right around the time that Maia was three and a half months old or so. Back then, I read about sleep regressions and how they so frequently occur at the age of four-ish and eight-ish months. Well, Maia turned eight months old (!) yesterday, and we're definitely in the throes of a sleep regression these days. She still sleeps for long, blissful stretches at night, but getting her to that point has been a challenge indeed. It's taken 30, 45, even 50 minutes over these past several days to get her to sleep, both at night and during the day for naps. Ugh. Because Maia is so dedicated to learning how to crawl, she's actually "practicing" while she's absolutely exhausted and desperate to sleep. She'll be up on her hands and knees in her bed, whining and fussing and just generally unhappy, but she really can't relax enough to get down on her tummy and fall asleep. We won't let her cry, so we've had to devise a strategy to deal with this. So, our solution has been to go into the room and stand there with a hand on her back, rubbing her back and keeping her off her hands and knees long enough that she settles into the rhythms of going to sleep.

She hasn't mastered crawling yet, although she gets closer every single day. Now, she's really strong and solid on her hands and knees, and she will rock back and forth there while she checks out her surroundings and sometimes engages in some serious babbling. But, she hasn't yet figured out how to move those hands forward (just like I wrote in the last post). The silliest thing that she's added to her repertoire is the "downward dog" position, in which she's on hands and knees and then straightens her legs, thus taking her knees off the ground and raising her big diapered behind into the air. It's quite funny to see!

The latest Maia tricks include:

1) (After you've clapped your hands in front of her) Grabbing your fingers and very deliberately clapping your hands together. She doesn't yet clap her own hands, but man oh man does she get a kick out of clapping someone else's!

2) A sideways, up and down wave. You know what Eminem did during the rap battle at the end of "8 Mile"? Like that. That's what she'll do to copy you if you wave at her, and she also seems to do it when she's in an excited mood in general.

3) Brian swears she said the word "dog" while mimicking him (while they were both staring at Mona). I'm skeptical, and I was sitting right there. We'll keep you posted on this one.

4) Eating nice chunky pieces of bread and whole Cheerios. She'll sometimes grab onto the desired chunk with her hand and then forget that she has it there; it takes her a few times through the process before she goes directly from picking up the piece to putting it in her mouth. But she's getting to be quite adept at chewing things down into manageable pieces.

So that's the Maia update for the day. Happy Labor Day!!!