Maya is now 5 months old but if I didn’t know better I’d think she was a toddler from the way she’s acting! I didn’t know it was possible for a baby to be so willful! Eating out has become an impossibility as she grabs for anything within arms reach. If she wants something and doesn’t get it or you take something off her that she’s not supposed to have, or if you’re just busy and not paying attention to her she screams. We’ve been giving her pieces of hard fruit to suck on (although she managed to bite a chunk of apple off the other morning and nearly choke so i’ve stopped doing that!) and she threw a fit when i was eating a pear until I let her have the core to suck on.

I’m sure she also knows when she’s being naughty as she will laugh and stick her tongue out at me! She went through a phase of puffing her cheeks out and sticking her lip out and then sticking her tongue out all the time.

She is trying so so hard to crawl and can drag herself along by pushing with her feet and pulling herself with her elbows but it’s a slow process and she still gets quite frustrated. I really thought she’d be sitting unaided by now as she’s been able to sit propped up on her hands for a few seconds since she was about 3 months. Well now she will sit for a lot longer but she still ends up with her head on the feet because she tries to suck her toes or reach for a toy on the floor – i’m pretty sure she’ll be crawling before she’s sitting the way things are going.

i’d been putting her in her bouncy chair when I wanted to go do something although she gets bored in it quickly now, but she just figured out she can use the toy bar as a pull up bar and pull herself forward out of the chair! so that is being retired now too.

She’s growing out of her 3- 6 months clothes pretty fast and a lot of the 6-9 stuff fits her fine now. I’ve had 2 people in the last couple of weeks ask me how many years old she is which is going over the top a bit I think. I do think she’s had a growth spurt in the last few weeks though because she suddenly got really heavy and all her bodysuits which were really big are now kind of fitted.

I finally managed to track down a decent reasonably priced high chair (in Carrefour, hurray for carrefour!) but I still want to hold off to six months before giving her food. Made is not so patient and keeps sneaking her pear juice and mcdonalds ice cream… honestly, he’ll be giving her a bag of crisps and coke next. I’m going to have a battle on my hands, I can tell! Think I’m going to try her on papaya and banana and other soft things first as i’m still a bit freaked out from the apple incident.

She’s started coming out with all sorts of new sounds and is getting a lot better at communicating. She’ll wave her hands and jump up and down in the direction of something she wants now. If you give her a new toy or object to play with, she’ll go oooooh oooooh ooooooh. We went to Sanur the other day and she was saying “hi!” to everyone complete with full beam smile, which was cute. She’ll also go “wow”. In the morning she babbles away to herself when she wakes up and we’re pretending to still be asleep and agoo and agee have been joined by aba and aweh.

We;re planning a trip back to the UK in the summer so I’ve applied for both her passports. I took the photo for the british one myself with her lying on a sheet which wasn’t so bad but it was hilarious today trying to keep her still and looking at the camera for her indonesian passport.