Six months old! (Anna and Caroline)

Emma is six months old today! She's really no longer a little newborn. Recently on the Emma channel...

She made the transition from her co-sleeper to a cot. (She still ends up in our bed most nights)She can now roll over, and often sleeps on her front. Sooooooooo cute.


I, Anna, had my first jam session with her. While I played the recorder, she hit the recorder with her rattle. We called it Purcell's Hornpipe, and then had a go at the Pink Panther as well. She put the recorder in her mouth and got the giggles. I never knew woodwind was so funny. Unfortunately, there was only the two us at home, so photos were difficult. It is not easy to photograph your baby while she sits on your own lap.


We went away for the Labour Day weekend. Quite a relief after our last attempt to go away (when Caroline spent three days in the hotel vomiting and in huge amounts of pain, with what ended up being the cause of her recent emergency surgery). We stayed in a lovely B & B. Emma even slept at the right time - giving us both an entire meal to ourselves!

We had to make sure Emma was kitted out appropriately.


Emma now eats solids. The ritualistic putting-on-of-the-bib indicates that it's meal time. She's taken to it really well. Meals start with the obligatory "What the *&%$ do you think you're feeding me" look, usually followed by eager lapping it up. But she is very easily distractable. "Are those my feet? Oh, I'd better play with them for a while." "What's that nose doing stuck to your face?Let me help you with that."


She used to stay on the play mat. Then it was a few centimetres around the play mat. Now the whole living room is fair game. Boy - can she get around. With a combination of back arches, rolling and her backward worm crawl, we are now parents to a baby on the move. Nothing is safe.


We try to encourage her to take new perspectives on the world...upside down is a favourite.


A typical Vancouver day, on a BC ferry. It was grey and windy, but still beautiful. A few hours later, it was completely sunny and hot.

Emma giggles a lot. When we throw her in the air, when we dance with her, when she's the pendulum in Hickory Dickory Dock, when we tickle her, when we blow raspberries, completely randomly...

No teeth yet (although a bit of teething), so a gorgeous gummy smile.

This is more painful than it looks. She has an extremely tight grip. Oddly enough ,I didn't mind.

Taking in the world...

It's hard these days to get photos of her on her back. This is what we call lizard pose - she can hold it for ages.

The cot is right next to our bed. This is Emma and Caroline holding hands through the bars of the cot. They were both so beautiful I didn't want the flash to wake them up.

This gentle, innocent creature has a death grip and a penchant for grabbing people's mouths and hair. When our friends Lydia and Natasha came over, she managed to trap them both - here she has Natasha's lip in one hand and Lydia's scalp in the other (L and N's heads are now hung on the wall above the fireplace, as trophies of Emma's hunt...;))

"I wanna control the spoon!"

She loves to scrunch up paper and chew on it. Here she is helping me with my latest manuscript - her editorial advice is that there aren't enough saliva spots on it to appeal to a contemporary audience. We have to protect Caroline's research notes from her, too - she is showing a clear "appetite for knowledge" and likes to "consume ideas" - literally.

People often comment that she is a very mellow baby, and not just when she's asleep. She takes a lot in - I guess we'll find out just how much when she starts to talk. But she'll also jump in and get involved with things with an intense focus and ferocity. She quite enjoys the company of other babies - for a time - and then gets a look on her face that says "I've had enough. Get me out of here." We think that she sometimes sleeps to escape stimulus. We suspect she might be an introvert.

Car trips are often a good chance for us to have a conversation. When she's not asleep, she will happily join in with her own language - it's babble to us, but that's what she probably thinks of our ideas too.

So there we have it. We are the parents of a gorgeous six-month old and things are changing every day. I am starting to understand why, when I was a kid, adults used to go around saying "My, haven't you grown?" and "Doesn't time fly?"