WE LOVE THIS KID! She is so wonderful to have in our family and makes us all so happy. I can’t say enough how blessed we are that she is all ours! She is 9 months old and is quite a busy body. She has been crawling and pulling herself up for a couple months now. It all happened very quickly….she went from sitting up on her own and army crawling, to full on crawling and then pulling herself up within a few weeks. It’s as if she discovered a whole new world and couldn’t get enough of it so she kept moving forward. Although, there are absolute ‘downs’ to having a baby that crawls everywhere–she is into everything everywhere!!! That poor kid gets scolded multiple times a day by everyone in this family for getting into something she shouldn’t and making a mess of things. Crawling only leads to walking so we know this problem is not going away any time soon. She isn’t very far from it either. She began in early January to stand on her own. She did, and still doesn’t, realize she is doing it. Just like her crawling, she is progressing incredibly quickly with the standing. Each day it seems she does it more and more, and is also willing to take steps when we hold her hands.
She loves and adores her sisters. She enjoys watching them, following them, and playing with them. She is quick to let them know if they are making her angry or have taken a toy she wants away from her. She will fuss, grunt, or scream at them, and occasionally she might cry. It is so funny to watch them interact. Sophia and Phoebe can make her laugh harder and longer than BJ and I can or ever have! She loves to babble and squeal and scream when she is playing with them as well. She has proven she is just as loud and high pitched as them too. I honestly don’t know what I am going to do when Phoebe goes to school. Phoebe is her best friend and playmate right now, and I think she will be very lonely when she is gone. (As I am doing this post they are both in the older girls room with the door closed playing sweetly.)
When she is happy her whole body shows it. She throws her arms up and waves them around, she kicks her legs, or she might tighten up everywhere and do a little body shake (all while she is smiling so big her face looks like it will explode). She has big baby cheeks and when she is smiling real big her eyes close. We have recently discovered she likes dancing. She has several different ‘moves’ like bouncing up and down, a shoulder shake, a shoulder roll, or twisting her whole upper body back and forth. It is a great source of entertainment!
Her favorite word is “Mama” and she likes to babble it when she is hungry, sad, playing with me, or when I am holding her. Hmmm, that sounds like all the time, huh? She likes to huff and puff to herself (that is the best way I can think of describing it). She will do various forms of sucking in her or blowing it out while she is playing or crawling. Sometimes we know she is coming because we can hear her heavy breathing as she comes crawling toward us. She also loves to do ‘raspberries’ and will soak herself in spit from doing them over and over.
She knows her name very well and looks at us when we say it. I wish she had more hair, and both Sophia and Phoebe had more hair than she does at this age. However, she has no teeth yet like her sisters did. Teeth take forever to come in with my kids!!! However, it doesn’t stop her (like my other girls) from eating whatever she wants! She likes goldfish, cheerios, guacamole, pineapple, pasta, strawberries, mashed potatoes, peas and so much more. I am very thankful for this because Sophia was not, and still is, NOT a picky eater. Phoebe, on the other hand, IS and it is exhausting some days just to get this kid fed properly.
She relishes bath time and plays and plays until she is all wrinkly. I taught her about splashing a few weeks ago, and that is just about all she wants to do in the bath now. It is so bad I have gotten to the point of closing the shower curtain while I am in there with her so I don’t get all wet.
Daphne, much like her sisters, loves soft blankets. Give her one and she buries her face in it and rubs it around. I have a much harder time getting her to sleep if I don’t have one of her soft blankets clean. I know because I made that mistake a few times before. Never again!
I can’t make a post about Daphne without mentioning her helmet. Why did she need one? She had plagiocephaly, which is a fancy way of saying she had asymmetrical flattening in the back of her head. Upon evaluation we were told she was a mild case so it would only take 6-8 weeks to correct the problem. They were right! It was put on October 31st and removed 3 days after Christmas. We had one week of transitioning her into it. Once she was used to it she had to wear it 23 hours a day, only to be briefly taken off for changing clothes and/or to bath her. I feel so blessed I was not one of those parents whose child had to have it on 6 months or more. I don’t think I could have emotionally handled it. The helmet traps in the sweat and then sits in there. IT STINKS! You have to clean the helmet with rubbing alcohol at least twice a day, and even though you do IT STILL SMELLS. Which also makes your sweet baby’s head smell bad. Since she only has it off a short time each day I wanted to be able snuggle with her and rub and kiss that fuzz head. It’s really hard to do when you are repulsed by the way it smells. Bathing helped some, but not enough. Also, having it on makes the baby look different. It squished her cheeks together more and covers most of her head so all you see is a small portion of her face. I didn’t think her having this helmet would affect me emotionally like it did. I got frustrated with looking at my baby, but not really seeing MY baby, the baby I made. I hated not being able to snuggle with her head and cradle it into my neck. The helmet is very hard and would hurt if it bumped you so we had to be cautious so we wouldn’t get bruised or worse. So all in all I am thankful that it fixed her head, but I am more thankful it is off now and we can see her little fuzzy head and get all the sweet smelling snuggles we want.
