Smile like you mean it

Last week, knowing that the weekend was going to be crazy busy with lots of visitors and at least one morning away from the house, I decided that I really needed more time with Margot. So I took Monday off to have some baby time and we had the best day! First, I have to share a piece of information that I've held back because I'm afraid of jinxing it, which is that Margot has been sleeping through the night now for almost a week. We put her down at 7pm and she generally goes through until 4:30am without waking up. So, for the first time in almost six months, we are all getting some sleep. This is key.



We went to the coffee shop for a little while in the morning, an experience that is getting more adventurous now that Margot is at the stage where she wants to grab everything (EVERYTHING) and put it in her mouth. She is also sitting up by herself (!!) and standing by herself when holding onto a table or something. This means she's now big enough for high chairs, though not necessarily that she is patient enough for high chairs. What, a child of mine who's impatient? How on earth could that possible have happened? It's a mystery. Anyway, so at the coffee shop she now grabs things, puts them in her mouth, then throws them to the floor so vehemently that it looks like the object in question has done something to mortally offend her. She likes the throwing.

After her morning nap, we packed up and headed out to Walden Pond for a baby beach day. The weather was spectacular--clear, sunny, hot but not brutal or overly humid. We met my friend S and her son, who is exactly one week younger than Margot. These two babies like each other a lot, which makes play dates a ton of fun. Miraculously, we found a good patch of dirt to plunk our towels on (the water level at Walden this year is astronomically high because of all the rain so the last stretches of actual beach are a hard-won commodity as we found). Then we changed the small fry into swimsuits and hit the water.



Margot wasn't feeling very confident about the whole thing at first, so we spent a good amount of time sitting in the sandy shallows, patting the water and discovering that sand was fun to grab and try to eat. Eventually she decided she wanted to go further out (indicated by the lurching in the general direction of the deeper water), so we went out a little more. Lo and behold, she did not freak out when her feet didn't touch the bottom. In fact, she really liked floating! This was important to me--I feel strongly about helping her have a safe, positive experience with swimming and I tried hard to be extra careful so she wouldn't associate water with being scared. But by the end of the swim, we out far enough that the water was up to my waist and she was having a ball being swished around with no pond bottom in sight. We may have a water baby on our hands! Yay!



Then we put the kids in our Ergos and walked around the pond. S's son fell fast asleep but Margot stayed stubbornly awake. She fights her naps SO HARD. God forbid she might miss seeing something interesting if she let herself sleep. I didn't care, really. It was just so great to have her close to me for a whole day with no errands to be run or work projects to stress about. She passed out cold in the car on the way home. Anyone want to pay me to stay home and hang out with my baby? Srsly.