Love, bubs and life on our little farm

Time for an Elka update, she is now over 5 months and is a very happy little settled bub at the moment. She is now eating three meals of solids a day - rice cereal and pear or prunes for breakfast, and then three cubes of variations of pumpkin/sweet pot/carrot and two cubes of pear or apple for lunch and dinner. Her weight gain has slowed however - she was still only 7.4kg when I had her last weighed. I need to take her again..

She is still sleeping like a trooper - 2x 2hr and 1x 45min sleeps during the day and from 7pm - 7am (well she wakes about 6.30 but just talks to herself!) at nigth with a 10ishpm dreamfeed.. Next step is start moving the dreamfeed forward in an attempt to phase it out, but since her weight gain isn't the greatest I am not in a rush to drop a milk feed at this stage.

She can sit up quite well now, although she tends to lunge for toys and face plant quite easily so I prefer to be there to hold her up! She is also worming a little, pushing herself along on her tummy and is very good at doing 360's. She is very good at rolling from her back to her tummy and basically does it everytime you put her down to play on her back! She also does impressive push ups when she is on her tummy and is getting little biceps - very cute! I guess she is builing up her strength for the next step - arrgh crawling! I am in no rush to have her mobile, I must say!

She has discovered that her hands are very useful and loves to wave them in front of her face wiggling her fingers and looking amazed that they are hers. Cracks us up! She has also started grabbing at our faces when we are carrying her - touching and pulling at everything. Likewise, her feet are new playthings - she loves to hold them and pull them up to her face. Just today, she started putting them in her mouth. She also plays on the playmat by grabbing the toys with her feet.

She loves to sit on my lap and read her board books. She has learnt to turn the pages, which is just beautiful. We were impressed at how clever she was to learn that! The cats, particularly poor Ferdie are her favourite things - she watches them in preference to any of her toys. She loves to stroke their fur although it does somethimes end in her pulling it. She screams at them in high excitement which of course scares the cats right off!

She is starting to display some "stranger anxiety". I have noticed her burying her head into my chest at times when people try to give her eye contact and when I handed her to my mum the other day and dashed away for a few minutes, she was inconsolable. However, she is still flirting and smiling with people out at the shops - seems to be as long as I am with her it is OK.

Quite awhile ago now, we bought her an activity centre that has a little stool that rotates around the toy table. She loves it - particularly the little piano. She bashes away on the keys with a big wide mouthed grin. She is pretty wobbly but she can push herself around it to reach all the different toys.


She had her first paddle when we went to Cabarita to celebrate my Dad's 60th bday. It was a huge hit as you can see from her happy face.