Magrilless

We have a new favorite activity to do with Tessa: bathtime. It is so much fun to fill up the big bathtub and put her in the water with me. She loves it! Her little hands grab at the water and her legs kickety-kick. Her eye-brows are always up and her mouth shaped in an “o”. And she floats so well! All you have to do is have a hand under her head and the rest of her body just bobs in the water. It’s awesome!

Tessa is so much bigger than Maggie at this age, so we’ve had to ask a friend for her seasonally appropriate 3-month clothes. Remember when Maggie got all those hand-me-downs from a friend in Boston? Now we have all sorts of new perfect teeny clothes for Tessa. Thank goodness; we’ll have a chance at telling them apart in baby pictures.

Maggie and Tessa are great together. Maggie continues to be absolutely gentle with her. And has just recently started saying that she loves Tess. For her part, Tessa watches Maggie like a hawk. When Maggie talks, Tessa listens. And all those times when I’m tempted to say “Back off! Give her some space!”, Tessa usually has a big smile on her face when Maggie moves away. Here’s hoping they continue to be good friends!

Maggie has decided she wants to be a princess when she grows up. This is fairly typical I believe. It either stems from assorted Disney movies we’ve watched (some over and over again, so much so that Mags does the sound effects along with the movie); or from a friend at school who dresses in tutus and garlands and says he wants to be a princess when he grows up too. We sure like it better than the last thing she picked up at school: the months of cat obsession.

Maggie is more grown up every day. She’s now getting dressed by herself, even socks, which I consider to be tricky items of clothing. At school she pours her own milk and goes to the bathroom without help. She likes having jobs at home like throwing away diapers, setting the table, dumping measuring cups in the bowl for recipes, and feeding Eliza. We’re still working on things like getting out of the bath civilly, not playing with food at the table, and stopping when told to do so. She’s like a little person, this little girl.

We’ve learned some things about Tessa over the past weeks. We think she’s a very visual person. She absolutely loves the mobile Bill and Maggie made for her. It’s simply a few big construction paper shapes dangling from a hanger, but she’ll gaze at it and talk to it for long periods of time. She’ll mostly let me fix dinner if she sits in her carseat in the kitchen or hang out on the boppy on a stool next to me. Her bassinet will only do for very short periods of time because the sides are too tall to see over.

That being said, Tess loves to listen to music. Not so much just someone singing to her but recordings with instruments pretty much always calm her down. Especially if someone sings along with it.

Other things are steady and the same. The sleeping, the smiling and cooing, the eating, and also unfortunately the spitting up.

Oh. And her 2-month appointment was great. She’s average in all things (except head size: 74th percentile), weighing in at 10 lbs, 10 oz. Things are great!

We tried an experiment this week: Instead of arranging Tessa’s meal times in the afternoon so we’d get a last snack in somewhere between 8 and 9, we let things fall where they may. Anything after 6:30 was considered her last meal of the day. We were nervous that she’d wake us up half an hour after we went to sleep. But she pretty much stuck to her old nighttime schedule: waking up between midnight and 2, then sleeping on me until 5:30 or 6. This kid rocks it!

The one exception to the sleeping like a rockstar routine was last night. Tess has had a cold for the past couple of days. Her temperament has not been affected; she’s the same contented little baby she’s always been. But she’s been boogertastic, plus in the mornings and after eating she has a little rattly cough. Last night she just got too snuffly to sleep. When we turned on a light at about 4 to suck her nose clean, she took it as a wake-up call and so we were up. Boy, by the time she hits school, this girl is going to have the immune system of a rock.