Eight months: Rollover Month

Although Katie first managed to roll from her back to her stomach some time ago, it took another two months before I really felt able to describe her as A Baby Who Can Roll Over – it seemed to be a matter of luck rather than skill whether she could do it at any given moment, and, even when she did manage, she invariably ended up with her arm stuck down by her side and didn’t seem quite able to figure out how to move it from there.  However, at seven and a half months, she finally sussed it.  She can now manage the full 360-degrees-around-the-long-axis without difficulty.  And she does.  Combining this with wriggling, which she does in abundance, she can now make it across large proportions of the living room.  Or of her cot.  When Jamie was a baby (more accurately, when Jamie was a toddler, since we never actually got as far as making him sleep in the cot for any period of time until he was thirteen months old), we used to be awestruck by the degree of moving around that he could do in his sleep – hang on, surely he’d had his head at this end and his feet at that end when we put him down for the night? – and Katie is now following in his metaphorical footsteps.  On one occasion I came in to find her peacefully asleep on her stomach with her bottom up against the cot side and her legs dangling out through the bars.  It was a position most people would have had some difficulty manoeuvring into deliberately; Katie had managed it in her sleep.  (And, by the way, if she ever makes it into that position again I’m leaving her in it.  My gentle-as-possible attempt at moving her into a more conventional position woke her up and she flat-out refused to fall asleep again.)

The other event of significance from her eighth month was the Move To The Forward-Facing Car Seat.  Strictly speaking we are not supposed to do this until she’s either nine months old or twenty pounds in weight (the latter may or may not be the case for Katie – we haven’t checked recently), but, after a long car drive during which we had to put up with Katie crying for a fair proportion of the way, Barry decided we should put her in a seat which allowed her a better view, in hopes that she’d be happier.  So the seat has now been installed, and Katie now faces the same direction as the rest of us.  Another Last Time – never again will I travel in the car with a baby facing me (I sit in the back seat with her) or contort myself to nurse a baby in a car seat.  The latter fact is no bad thing, come to think of it, as it always was a bloody uncomfortable thing to do, but I’m still feeling the inevitable nostalgia that goes with the passing of yet another Parental Era.