8 months

Yesterday, Anya turned 8 months old. Here's a little summary of her recent accomplishments:

• Mobility Anya has got crawling down and is getting faster. Baby gates are often up now (we're still waiting for the stair gates to come via UPS, though). She very easily can go from laying down/crawling/sitting in any combination. She also is pulling herself to stand using various objects (some of which aren't the most stable :-/). I think she will start cruising in the coming weeks.
  
  For some reason, I don't think it occurs to her to sit back down when she pulls herself to stand while in the crib. She can do it just fine anywhere else in the house. For naptimes over the past few days, I've had to come in and lay her back down once or twice in order for her to fall asleep. I just did it a minute ago. Silly babies.


• Communication I still catch her occasionally saying "kitty," but that's the only word. She did sign "food" the other week, but I haven't seen her sign since. Well, actually she might be signing "milk," but the context isn't usually right....so I'm inclined to believe she's not trying to communicate anything there.


• Tricks Anya claps often. She's waved a few times (which may have just been "lazy" claps...hard to say). She hasn't been doing too much of the "baby war cry" (see most recent video). Something I have noticed about our lovely daughter is that when she learns a new skill, she usually does it for a few days, and then stops. She usually will pick it back up (or re-learn it?) a few weeks later and it becomes part of her normal skillset.

In other news, we hired a babysitter for the first time Saturday night. Cousins Amy & Matt so awesomely took us to a Seattle Sounders game (thanks!!!), which was fun. Being a neurotic first-time mom, I was of course worried and thinking about her the whole time. She was in good hands with Nicole, though. Oh, but poor Nicole. She was extremely allergic to something in the house (most likely Chris' cat Morgana, the most hyper-allergenic cat in existence) and her eye swelled up. So much that she had to take out her contacts. She said she laid on the floor cuddling with Laika and listening to the TV (since she couldn't see it) the entire evening. It looked pretty bad when we got home, and she said that the swelling had gone down at that point. Poor thing. I felt so bad for her.

I hope the weather cools down today. It hit 90-something yesterday and high 80s (possily 90) Saturday. No AC being in Seattle. Anya was cranky and had trouble sleeping. The fan didn't help that much.

We're almost done with the balustrade. I hate how home improvements now move at a snail's pace, around Anya's sleep. Pre-baby, the whole project would have been done over a weekend. Now it has taken a few weeks, with almost no work being done weeknights. Should be up and usable by tomorrow. After that, Chris will just need to do some finish work and I'll paint it. After all this work, it's almost a shame that it will be coming down when we gut the upstairs...but that's realistically 5+ years away.