Margo à la Maude

You know, when I was a kid, if you started a blog, you maintained it. You didn't enjoy your summers like today, you sat down in your warm computer room at tap-tap-tapped away at your keyboard until the heat stroke caught up with you.

Course... nowadays, that doesn't happen.

Hopefully, Margo will be able to read this blog and follow along with her own developments until she was one. And she'll come across the Summer of '07, and wonder if she just stopped developing. Well, Margo, you didn't stop; you're just moving too fast to keep up. Here's what you've managed:

• Eliza told us about the 9-Month Revolution. One of the normal developmental stages for babies, often at the 9-month mark, is that they learn to point. And Margo, did you ever learn to point. I remember your cousin Olivier at this stage, except that he used to point palm up. What you lack in panache, you make up for in expressiveness. Just tonight, you pointed at the exhaust fan in the bathroom during your bath, and when I didn't seem to make much out of it, looked me straight in the eyes, slowly turned your head upward as if maybe you moved too fast for me to be able to follow your trajectory the first time, and then, with Oscar-winning emphasis, you pointed. Again. And grunted.

• You're standing. So far, not often, or for too long, but you're standing. Yesterday, it was for about 10 seconds. You aren't really that shaky, either, but you haven't quite come to the realization that you can stand upright and take steps yet. It's alright, Margo... it took your forefathers close to 4 million years to figure it out. With that in mind, you're doing great. Usually, you stop standing because you're bored of being immobile. You are, after all, always moving.

• You're climbing on to things. You started with low things, like side tables, and then moved upward. And when you reach your destination, you're crazy happy, and often thrash about in glee, causing both your mother and I to lunge to catch you. What stuns me is how bloody strong you are. I watched you struggle to step up on our Ottoman, so you literally dragged yourself up with your arms. Like... come on man!

• On that note, you hate being tipped back to rinse shampoo out of your hair. It's not really a question of water in the ears or shampoo in the eyes, because you begin to protest the second you're tipped more than 5 degrees backward. I think it's just because you don't like being forced to do anything, which bodes badly for our future as parents with low blood pressure. The reason that I say "on that note" is because this week was the first week - the first time ever - that you pretty much outpowered me and got free. As a face-saving tactic, I think that I could have taken you, but I didn't want to hurt you. And the sun was in my eyes. And I was thinking of something else.

• Also on the note of how strong you are, get a load of this photo:

The alarmists in the crowd might point out that your ribs are showing and how unhealthy that is. Those people should stick around during mealtime. At supper, it can be a bit of a struggle to get you to finish larger portions, but we usually have to count our fingers after we feed you breakfast and lunch to make sure that you haven't chewed one off.

Back to the photo; you are, without exaggeration, the only baby I know with muscle definition. When you lift your arms, the muscles in your upper back flex, with impressive results, I might add.

• You fed yourself with your spoon for the first time this week. I helped you load your spoon, but you were pretty good at getting the payload to your mouth. The problem with trying new neat things like this is that you expect it to be the new standard, and you're not particularly happy that we occasionally go back to feeding you.

• Over the course of the last month, your hair has lightened a little, and has really become a beautiful mix of different colours of brown, some blonde, and a soupçon of red. If you look closely at your eyebrows and the hair in front of your ears (I prefer not to say that my daughter has sideburns), there's definitely some red in there. A little Celtic throwback, maybe.

I've included a photo, but had to lighten it to the point where I may have overdone it. You do, however, get a sense of what humidity does with your hair, definitely a throwback to your father.


• Oh yeah, one other big change is that you used to love taking things off shelves and dumping contents onto the floor. Then one day, you just started putting things back into the basket. There's hope yet.

And that's July 2007. You're pretty loveable, and you always stun me at what you can do.

- Michel

Labels: developments

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27, 2007 at 10:40 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.