First "solid" meal, anyway. We started her on rice cereal yesterday at the recommendation of her doctor, who is still a bit concerned about Clara's slow weight gain. At about 25" long and 10lbs, 13oz, Clara is in the 75th percentile for height and well below the third for weight.
She is developing beautifully, becoming stronger and increasingly grabby. One of her favourite games is "Attack of the Forty-Foot Baby," in which she stands on top of her dad's chest while he lies on the floor and makes monster noises. RAAARRR! RAARRRRR!
She did pretty well with the cereal -- as instructed, I mixed it with a lot of breastmilk, so it was soupy. Lots of it ended up on her hand and her chin and her bib, but a fair bit went down. She figured it out remarkably quickly. She figures out a lot of stuff remarkably quickly. We've got a smart one on our hands.
She's been vocalizing a lot: she's discovered she can make long, high-pitched noises that her father points out sound eerily like a howler monkey's calls. She has two teeth already -- first one on February 19, second on February 22 -- and is experimenting with biting my nipples. This is not a fun game.
She caught me off guard yesterday when we were at the Movies for Mommies seeing Pan's Labyrinth (which I hated for its bloody brutality; the retreats into fantasy were not nearly enough to redeem it for me) and bit Leftie hard, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. Instinctively I swatted her, and immediately felt like the biggest shitheel ever. I guess this is a bit of excitement that nearly all breastfeeding mothers have to deal with. I've been experimenting with different anti-biting and anti-pinching strategies: ending the feeding, pressing her nose into the breast (as Dr. Sears recommends), admonishing her sharply. I hope one of them gets through soon.
Every now and then I look at her and start to cry with joy just because she exists. Beloved, beloved baby.
On the knitting front: the baby kimono is done (I'll try to photograph it today; the light is nice), as is the first Lizard Ridge square. The last bit of the kimono was very tedious. I used Japanese short rows for the neck and shoulder shaping, and managed to get one of them wrong as I was picking stitches for the neck edging. Conspicuously wrong, in fact. It took a long time to fix with a crochet hook (I did not want to take out and reknit more than 1100 stitches). My reward for doing that right was knitting the sashes: two 18" pieces of six-stitch rows on 2.75mm needles. Knit 6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. Etc. EIGHTEEN INCHES. TWICE. Bleah. But the good news is: DONE. And the matching trousers are underway.
It took several experiments to get the short rows right for the afghan square. I finally settled on yarn-over short rows. The wrapped-stitch ones didn't look right to me, and the Japanese ones, while the most attractive, are far too fussy for a short-row project of this scale. Once I figured out what I was doing, the first square went quickly. It's beautiful. It is taking all my self-restraint not to throw my little "one square per finished object" resolution out the window and just get down to business on the whole afghan.
I was sorry to miss the Knit Night on Wednesday this week. When I went last week it felt like I was coming home. Knitters are my peeps. This week, Clara's nap schedule was so b0rked that I couldn't get there, plus my sister-in-law came by to say hello. I'm hoping to get there next Wednesday, though, and maybe even pick up the yarn for this, which is supposed to be a great sweater for breastfeeding.
In other news, the cats are still dorks. But I love them.
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