I've been telling myself to blog for a week now, before I get so behind I forget something. Every time I sit down to do it, I think to myself, "I could spend time on the computer, or play with Lilah" and I always end up playing with Lilah. She's sleeping now, so it seems like the opportune time to do it.
She's eating cereal before bed nearly every night now, because she was waking up famished in the middle of the night. She sleeps in her crib every night, as well. Mostly it works out well. She always wakes up around 7 and realizes there are toys within reach, so one of us has to drag our lazy butts out of bed and retrieve her. Whenever it's my turn, I find a grinning baby with chubby arms wrapped around one of her favorite stuffed animals in place of the peaceful, sleeping baby I had left in the crib 8 hours earlier.
She loves to experiment with her voice. She always seems surprised at what weird and bizarre noises she can make come out of her own mouth. Her first sounds were just squawks, which evolved into "conversations" with us. Then she learned she could screech like a hawk, and liked to wake us up that way. Then she taught herself to whisper. She sounded possessed. She would roll over to me and nurse in the morning after we got her from her crib, then roll over to Dano and proceed to grab his beard, smack his cheeks, or just grab both sides of his head and whisper menacingly until he woke up. Now she's moved on to the deeper range of her vocal cords. She sounds exactly like a mourning dove when she makes those sounds. Larry swears she said "Mama" when she was upset the other day. I think 5 months is still a little young for that.
She's crawling! It blows my mind to think about. A week ago, we could put her down on the floor and she'd have so much fun rolling around and playing with her toys. She'd occasionally give a half-hearted effort to scoot a few inches, but didn't seem too interested. About 3 days ago, she discovered that if she got her knees under her and her butt in the air, she could go about a foot if she pulled herself along with her arms outstretched in front of her. It was cute to watch her try. I guess I didn't realize she was getting better and better at it until last night. We were at Ann's and Larry's house, and Lilah was on a sheet on the floor (she likes to put fistfuls of dog hair in her mouth) and every time I looked up, she was off the sheet and headed somewhere else. We laughed at her the first few times, but then it became very clear: Lilah Rose Marie Alexander could crawl, and was very good at it. God help us all.
