Lily Love, 5 months

 

Lily, Lily.  Five months old… sigh.  Lily is 15 pounds of pure delight.  I love her, love her.  I do.

She has hit so many milestones lately.  Grabbing (and sucking on) her toes, rolling over and over and over, jumping, rocking, grabbing every object in reach and sticking it in her mouth.

She laughs and coos and smiles and giggles.  I have no idea what she’s so happy about.

And oh how she babbles, nonstop, for hours at a time.

On and on she prattles.  If I look away, she grabs both of my cheeks, looks me straight in the eye, (“Pay, attention, Mother – this is important!”) and continues her story. 

Then she’ll suddenly laugh, like she’s just told the best joke ever.  She is starting to be so affectionate.  I’ll be playing with her and suddenly she’ll grab my face and give me a huge, slobbery, mouth-wide-open kiss on the cheek, giggling all the while.  Such kisses are  a little hard to escape from – she has a pretty strong grip.  Also, she loves my hair so much – she runs her fingers through it, bats at it, squeezes it for dear life, and … of course… munches on it.  All. Day. Long.

She’s so proud of her accomplishments.  She beams whenever she thinks she’s doing something brilliant, like standing up or doing cobra pose.

But she’s not all giggles.  She has a short fuse.  She goes from elated to devastated in nanoseconds, and occasionally in the midst of playing starts screaming obscenities (her version… I can tell from the inflection they’re meant to be profane), and then sobbing hysterically.  Luckily, she has some self soothing mechanisms.  She sucks her thumb and rubs her arms, face, or head in circles – especially when she’s trying to fall asleep.

Occasionally (read: very rarely) she settles down and observes her surroundings. 

But it always ends the same way:  “Are you made of matter?  Very well, then you shall be mine and I shall attempt to ingest you forthwith.”

Oh, how we love our little Lily Love.  It is so strange that she has only been here for 5 months – I feel like I’ve known her forever (cue 80’s Mormon musicals). 

I could (and do) kiss these sweet cheeks all day long.