Enjoying Those Milestones!

Milestones. Every momma talks about their baby reaching certain milestones in their early months or years of life; the first tooth, first word, sitting, crawling, walking… There’s always ‘the next one’ that we’re looking forward to, we wait for it to happen, wait a little more and wait a little more… when our little humans reach the next one it’s like a major breakthrough, everyone’s elated and it goes down as a historic moment for the family…

Ava awoke me this morning with her own new skill, one which I hadn’t even realised she was gearing up towards. It was a certain sound. A sound very loudly delivered. It awoke me rather abruptly at first, rendering me startled and unsure as to what it was. I was just about to draw my own conclusion; sharply giving Sean one of my elbow-jabs and insisting on him opening a window, when the noise arose again. That’s when I realised it was coming from my sweet little girl… my sweet little girly-girl who’s mastered the art of blowing the loudest and most enthusiastic raspberries I’ve ever heard. Repeatedly. At 6am. I’ll tell you what though, she really put one hundred per cent into it; before each one was a huge inhalation of breath and the force used to deliver each raspberry was quite something! As was the saliva.

So that little ‘milestone’ was quirky and fun but let’s talk about the ‘BIG THREE’ – sitting, crawling, walking. Ava is six months old so she’s just started to work-out the sitting part but that’s about it so far. The closest thing that only slightly resembles crawling is how she squirms on her front like a fish out of water, or an unfit attempt at that disco classic ‘the worm’, with a toy in her sight ahead and yet she somehow always manages to move backwards!

Rolling is Ava’s most effective way of getting from one place to another at the minute. Those first few rolls from back to front were really quite cute. Now, she’s not so content with the one roll, instead she likes to throw two or three in at once! And I can guarantee that if I placed her mid-way between a pile of pillows and a pile of cactuses (cacti??) she would roll to the cactuses every time! She almost rolled off my bed once, at lightening speed in a split second from one side to the other… I almost had a heart attack! She rolled into her own poopy nappy once. She grabbed a fistful of poop out of her nappy once. She regularly foot-splats her poop… I digress…

We’ve been practicing standing and balancing in Ava’s circle of neglect (I think other people call them Jumperoos or excersaucers!) Those things are great. They’re great for motor-skills, are multi-sensory and multi-functional; mummy needs to wash the pots? Here, practice your standing! Mummy needs to make a cuppa? Here, practice your standing! Mummy wants to sit in the corner and rock a little? Here, practice your standing! In all seriousness though, Ava loves hers and gets so much out of it. We’re moving on from the circle of neglect soon as we’ve  very recently purchased one of those door bouncer thingys. We’re yet to try it but I can’t wait to see how Ava gets on with it. I will report back…

Ooh there’s one big milestone I almost forgot… I don’t know how as, to me, it’s one of the best… their first words! I love baby-babbles anyway and I always manage to dream-up that some of those random early babbles sound like actual words; the amount of times I felt Ava was saying ‘Hello’ or ‘Heya’… but when they spontaneously (and really do) say a real word for the first time… wow! Ava says ‘dadda’ quite a bit now. Every morning she lies there shouting ‘da da.. da da…’ She says ‘mamma’ too but only when she’s crying… hmm! They weren’t her first words though, Ava’s first word started just as she turned six months old when she would repeatedly say… wait for it… EGG! She’s eaten hard boiled egg twice now and I can’t help but think that after all that love that Sean and I give her, all that attention, all those laughs and experiences, at that time… that moment of her first word… it really felt like the one thing she loved the most in her life was a *#%!*#! egg!!

So yeah, milestones. How entertaining, exhausting, satisfying, stressful and amazing they are!

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