21 weeks!

This week we started rice cereal!  Tuesday night we went ahead and mixed 1 tablespoon cereal with about 3.5 tablespoons of warm milk for a nice runny consistency.  Wren was pretty excited to eat from and nibble on a spoon.  The first few nights cereal time ran fairly close to bed and that seemed to give Wren a little bit of an upset tummy so we backed up her "dinner" time and falling asleep has gone better.  Now, you are all at the edge of your seat wondering if she has actually slept better from this.  The answers is, thankfully, yes. Cereal hasn't been some miracle cure and I still get to spend about 30 minutes with my girl once or twice a night, but piecing together chunks of ~4 hours of sleep is so much better than 2!  Now, if I could just make myself go to sleep at 8...8:30...9 I would be doing even better.  

With a week of just rice cereal under her belt Wren is perhaps ready for a little organic pea mash in her cereal, no?  (Read the last 7 words of that in your best french accent) Then, who knows - avocado.  Green beans.  It's about to get k-razy up in this house at meal time!  

Wren very much enjoys looking out the large front window in the living room, taking in the trees and neighboring houses, watching the occasional car drive by.  The other day a gentleman walking by even gave a wave.  She has a good time grabbing onto the sliding windows and patting her little hand on the glass.  

With all of the reaching and grabbing Wren has been doing we have to be more and more careful about what's around.  Tonight Wren grabbed a dinner plate on the table and started pulling it right toward her and even managed to dip her tiny fingers in a dab of salsa.  Our little explorer is so very curious.  

Not much action this week toward rolling over.  When we help her swing her leg over her body and twist to wind up on her belly Wren is happy to then reach for toys around her but isn't seeming too curious yet about what it took to get her there.  Then when tummy time is no longer interesting we prop Wren up on her forearms and roll from front to back with excitement and clapping, though again she isn't very worried about making this motion on her own.  Just like everything else she has started doing I imagine that one of these days she will just go for an independent roll and it will be another impressive moment in Wren's life.

This past week we have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Wren getting right up in our faces.  She will put her slippery mouth right on my cheek - mimicking all of the kisses she gets? - and then she will start to "chew" on my chin, sending her drool down my neck and causing me to have a fit of giggles.  With Jay she loves to grab his beard and has started munching on his nose - our lady wants no part of a mouthful of beard hair!

When I get asked at work how Wren is doing I often remark "Good.  She's getting so big!"  It's my go-to short answer to keep myself from rattling on about how amazing/strong/smart/adorable Wren is.   I spend a lot of time thinking about how much Wren has grown, developmentally yes, but mostly physically.  Sometimes it feels like we didn't have a little baby for long - her weed-like growth spurt so early is a big contributor - and she seems like a little grown-up at times with her silliness (it's true that a 21-week old can make you laugh every single day!).  But over the weekend as we experimented with ideas to prolong napping (which didn't work) and made a mini bed on her floor to avoid the possibly disruptive lift-over-the-cribside-because-Mama-is-a-shorty maneuver, I stepped back to see our little gal curled up in a big space and realized that she really is still our little baby and that hasn't changed.  I just hadn't paused for a moment to flip my perspective and take in how big the world around us truly is.  

Yum-o!

Washing down her cereal with a bottle and doing a pretty good job of managing on her own.

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!

Future Cirque du Soleil performer perhaps?