It's in the way that you use it

We made it! BabyT has been exclusively breastfed for 6 months. I had trouble imagining this point in the first difficult weeks. But somewhere around month 4, it really became no big deal, thanks to baby efficiency getting the feeding sessions down to < 10 minutes (almost not enough time to check email!). And in the last month or so, she's only eating every 3 hours or so during the day.

I imagined that once we got to the magic 6 months, I'd just quit and go on about my life. Yeah, yeah, I *know* the AAP recommends it up to a year, and WHO recommends it up to 2 years, but the first 6 months was supposedly the most important.

BabyT weighed 20 lbs 2 oz, and was 26.5" long at her 6 month checkup last week, 75% for height, and 97% for weight, so clearly she's growing like she's supposed to. So here we are at 6 months, and it seems a shame to stop doing something that's obviously working so well. Plus (and dare I say it?) it's kind of nice to have that quiet (short!) snuggly time with my ginormous baby a few times a day.

So yeah, in a surprising turn of events, I guess I'm going to keep going. Today we're introducing her first "complementary food" to start her on solids. We're waiting for her to get up from her nap to introduce her to the wonders of avocado.

I'm totally becoming one of those crunchy Seattle moms. I prefer carrying her in the Ergo to using the stroller, the aforementioned breastfeeding business, we nap together in the bed, and her first solid food is going to be avocado slices.

Since we waited until 6 months to introduce solids, we're giving "baby-led weaning" a try, which is essentially letting the baby decide what to do with table foods, rather than spoon-feeding purees. It's messy, but looks like fun, and also lets the baby do more "exploring" with different foods. Supposedly it leads to less picky eaters, but that's not a scientific fact. I just like the idea since she still doesn't *need* the nutrition from food, she just needs to get used to eating it, so that after she's a year old and really needs it, she'll be used to eating what we eat.

That's the theory, anyway. We'll see how it goes. But don't worry, no matter how crunchy I get, I still believe wholeheartedly in vaccination ;)

Brown eyes I hold you near

I've done a decent job of keeping up with Trillian's baby blog, but at the cost of my own. Plus that whole work thing is getting in the way of my life of leisure :)

I've survived 4 work weeks so far, and it's going ok. I like that my two days in the office are long because I can just concentrate on work and get a lot of things done. I'm so much more efficient when I know I have limited time. As a full time person, the work sort of expands, and there's technically always more hours you could put in, so there's time for that occasional game of pool, or the coffee break, or whatnot.

But the part time schedule affords me time to do some fun stuff, in addition to the seemingly endless cycles of feed baby - change baby - get baby to sleep.

Yesterday, Lisa and I did CRAFTS! Woo hoo! We got the idea from Stephanie, a friend from Caltech, who told us about creating stencils from freezer paper so you could make cute designs on baby onesies with fabric paint.

I Binged, found some instructions, and collected all the supplies. You know how I am about craft supplies. I got several packs of plain onesies from Old Navy (great quality!!), two starter sets of Jacquard fabric paints - 18 different colors in little 2oz bottles, which is plenty, plus a couple of fabric markers. I also dug out my brand new Xacto, and some old silver fabric paint I got a couple of years ago to decorate the puppies' Christmas stockings.

Here are the results - I was pretty pleased, given that this was my first try. I've got a bunch more blank onesies so I'm excited to work on more designs. Now that I know I can print on the freezer paper directly, and then cut out the designs, I have a lot more freedom, since my drawing skills are non-existent.




Lisa used her fabric markers to draw a bunch of really cute designs - she's an amazing artist. Baby Max is a lucky guy and will be very stylishly dressed this summer!