If you don't feed me soon...

...something drastic is going to happen.

Last night as I was eating some pizza (what else?) Fiona made the most serious attempt to eat some real food to date. I mean, yes, there was the candy incident, but since then, she has expressed curiosity, yet doesn't seem frustrated when she, ultimately, cannot have the object of her desire. Last night, as she was nursing, I was eating (always multi-tasking, I am) and she would stop, try to sit up and reach for my plate. I kept things just out of her reach, so she would eventually give up, lay back down and latch on, but her eyes always seemed to be on my food. After several rounds of this, she finally managed to get her hands on my pizza, yanked some cheese and a piece of pepperoni off of my slice and it was headed to her mouth, lickety-split. We managed to clean it off of her before it hit her mouth (since even though she may be provisionally cleared to try solids, she's still not supposed to have dairy or protein for another 6 months), but she is READY. I think this weekend we will start the transition.

Other notable news - Fiona goes to the dog park every day and when she goes with Auntie Gae, she sits in her car seat, which is placed in the stroller (they are designed to work that way). Yesterday, Fiona officially graduated to the stroller, sans car seat. She has been sitting up, unassisted for several weeks now, she's fine in her high chair, so we figured, hey, why not try the stroller - with the weather being so gorgeous here (yesterday it was 78 in the shade at my house when I got home at 4:30 pm), she will love to be sitting up and able to SEE everything at the dog park, instead of bundled up in her car seat (she has always hated that thing - it's like some sort of torture device, really).

Fiona continues to work on the crawling thing. She scoots around, pushing herself backwards and she will assume the crawl stance, then rock back and forth - any day now she's going to figure it out and then it will be: off to the races! Look out, Jezebelle.

Speaking of Jezebelle, the kids still get along just fine. In fact, when Jezebelle was still a puppy and we were working on the idea of fetch and drop, Jezebelle's favorite game was tug. So she would fetch her toy, but then she wanted to play tug, instead of dropping it for another round of fetch. Once she realized that ultimately her jaws were stronger than our hands...and that we didn't like to play tug, unless we could win, she figured out how to pick up each one of her toys so that she could get a bit of a tug game in, but it wasn't TOO hard for us to get the toy away from her to continue the game of fetch. It was pretty amazing to watch that process unfold. Especially because sometimes she would have a GOOD grip on the toy, we'd be tugging, she'd be winning and she would put the toy down, manipulate it so she would lose faster, then offer the toy to us again to finish the tug portion of the game. So that was a long story to explain what happened the other day between Jezebelle and Fiona. Jezebelle has this rubber bone toy that she LOVES and I had been throwing it for her. Fiona was sitting on the floor with me and after several fetches, Jezebelle really wanted to play some tug - which I no longer indulge in. So after several failed attempts to get me to play tug with her, Jezebelle manipulated the bone so that it was barely in her mouth and she offered it to Fiona instead. It was so cute. Fiona was ALL ABOUT IT. She tried and tried to figure out how to reach the bone and grasp it tightly without falling over. She never quite got it together, but Jezebelle did everything SHE could think of to help the baby play tug with her. SO CUTE!

And my final story for the day: For the last 6 weeks or so, Fiona has had some wild hands. Specifically when she's nursing, whichever hand is on top is just a busy, busy, wildly flapping extremity - when this behaviour first emerged, it happened mostly when I was trying to get her to go to sleep (its very difficult to get a wildly moving baby to go to sleep), so I started trying to capture the busy hand and I would bring it to my mouth and kiss her fingers, one at a time, each section, her knuckles, over and over. I found that this almost immediately slowed her breathing and I think it actually distracted her. Usually she would fall asleep (although sometimes she would pull her hand away a couple times and I would have to chase it down each time and try again). Often now, when she's nursing and the wild hand is on a rampage, she will reach up and place her hand on my mouth...so I can kiss it and she can calm down. It's so sweet. I love kissing that little hand. Apparently, even she has realized the benefits of having her wild hand kissed by momma. She is so precious. I can't stand it.