When we left Bali a month ago I had a newly crawling baby who still sometimes forgot how to balance when sitting up by herself. Coming back we have a crawling at lightning speed, climbing up not only furniture but also walls, reaching up to high cupboards and pulling things off, cruising, keeps letting go, desperate to walk baby. She is also very jetlagged which is not fun for anyone.
I knew that having practice holding onto sofas and a softer landing to fall onto the carpet would mean she would be better at standing up by herself but I wasn’t quite prepared for her to be able to pull herself up on the wall and climb on things to reach higher places…. the babyproofing I did before we went away is laughably inadequate now and anything below about a metre in height is fair game for little hands.
As well as standing and cruising she’s also mastered sitting back down and squatting and kneeling without holding onto anything (all my baby update emails and books say that my baby will cry to be helped back down when she stands up but this never happened). She’s started letting go and balancing on her own for a couple of seconds so it won’t be long before she can stand unaided i think and then walking won’t be far behind.
She’s a pro at crawling now and I feel happier letting her explore on the ceramic tiles as she’s not as likely to fall but we’re still planning to cover the entire floor of our room in foam tiles.
Her other new trick learned while we were away is putting both her hands up in the air, which my mum taught her. She seems to do it mostly while she’s eating, not sure why!
The last few days she’s been coming out with all sorts of new sounds – there are lots of da das getting mixed in with her favourite ba bas and yeahs and yaas. Still refusing to say mama although she says mam a lot when she’s eating.
Talking of food, she’s now eating everything and anything in vast quantities. She’s started to master her pincer grip and greatly enjoyed eating cheerios and peas one by one in the uk. It’s very entertaining watching her eat peas – she picks them up with her thumb and forefinger, closes her fist around it and squeezes until it pops out of the top of her fist to eat. Thankfully the in-laws have now accepted she can eat real food and she’s having a non spicy version of whatever we have for the day with tipat (rice cooked in a block) instead of normal rice. She still loves her bread and we’ve developed a very bad habit of giving her biscuits to keep her quiet.
She has her 2 bottom teeth now and her hair is growing back fast. She’s wearing a lot of 9-12 month clothes although most of the 6-9 stuff still fits her. I think she’s about 9kg now but we’re not due back to the doctors until august for me to check properly.
Favourite games of this month include pulling my nose and stealing my glasses, standing up and sitting down, crawling away fast so we chase after her, trying to eat my mum’s plant and playing at her new musical activity table.
She also had her first fever while in the UK – for three days her temperature was high and she then got a rash over her stomach and back which spread to her legs and arms. We checked at the doctor before the rash appeared but they couldn’t find anything wrong and said it was just a virus. My research leads me to believe it was roseola which most kids pick up at some point before they’re 2. Guess it’s just the first of many illnesses we’ll be dealing with over the years.
I was dreading the flight but I guess it went as well as could be expected. We had rubbish seats on the way over, stupid staff in bali airport had just put us in normal seats instead of the bulkhead ones they normally give to families with babies. The plane was nearly full but luckily they managed to ask some people to move so we had a spare seat for her to sleep on and she slept for about half the flight and didn’t cry too much. On the way back we got a baby basket and she slept for nearly the whole flight but has been horribly jetlagged since we got back and not sleeping until the early hours of the morning.
Maya had lots of fun meeting all her UK family and the babies of my friends and my dad’s cats. She also very much enjoyed crawling around as far as she wanted to on the grass, which we have a lack of in Bali. The weather wasn’t great and we were freezing a lot of the time but we had a few nice days at least. I invested in a Beco carrier and she was happy to be carried around on our backs on days out as long as she wasn’t too tired or hungry. She’s also been enjoying her new buggy and travel cot (although she sees the latter as somewhere to play and walk around rather than sleep). I bought lots of lovely wooden toys, most of which I’ve put away for later but she’s enjoying her walker with blocks already. Also the hideous plastic musical activity table which I bought for something she could stand up on when we get back (although turns out the walls and high cupboards are fine) which she loves dancing at, hitting the buttons and saying “ooh!”. It’s a long and expensive journey to get back to the uk so not sure when we’ll be repeating it but it was nice for my friends and family to meet Made and Maya at least once.
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