Five and a half months and counting

Since Maggie is taking an incredibly long nap (yay!), I thought I would throw a quick update out here on the blog. Time is just flying by these days. I meant to make a "five months" post, and here Maggie is five and half months old already and geting ready to go to her first Super Bowl party tonight!

We've been quite busy since Christmas, but I'd say our two main activities have been trying to stay healthy and trying to get some sleep! Maggie's cold in early December turned into bronchiolitis (RSV). She's quite well acquainted with our friend Bubbles the nebulizer mask now. Healthy for a few weeks around Christmas, we had a relapse in early January. We are just trying to be super careful with this, since Steve has allergy and asthma issues to which she could be pre-dispositioned.

A few hit or miss sleep issues started around that time. We'll have a few good days (waking up once to eat) and then a few bad days (waking up 4-5x a night and not going back to sleep for over an hour). Nothing we can't deal with, but mom and dad have been boning up on different sleep 'training' books and trying to make some adjustments to nap habits. We'll figure it out eventually -- hopefully we don't fall asleep at work in the meantime!

But otherwise, Maggie's had quite a fun month of holidays parties with family and helping her dad, granpda, and mom all celebrate their birthdays in December and January. And she is changing at lightning speed again. She's SO much more mobile all of the sudden. No crawling yet, but she has a bunch of the motions down. While she can't pull up into a sitting position yet, she can sit and balance on her own with an occasional topple. She's kicking like a maniac in the bathtub, and she's been thrilled to discover that she can get her toes into her mouth now.

Maggie's been getting really grabby with things on the dinner table, and she drops off her toys off the highchair repeatedly these days. Of course between that and her obsession with the TV remote, mom and dad think that she's figured out cause and effect already. :) Dad's been teaching her to buzz her lips, and she spends a lot of her day trying to do this with fairly good success. She's also getting really vocal -- lots of fun syllables and giggles these days. She's a wonderfully good-natured baby and still is full of smiles for everyone.

Our big milestone this week -- Maggie had her first cereal yesterday! We had dinner at Grandma and Grandpa Easter's in Peoria, and then we gave it a go. She seemed a bit confused, but she didn't seem to hate it. I'll have to update with some fun pictures soon. Stay tuned for the latest snapshots and eventually some six month pictures!