Keep Thou My Feet

[I was looking through my drafts and found this one that I apparently didn't publish.]

Heidi will be eight months old next week. She has found some new vocalizations. She can do the Indian sound by bouncing her hand on her mouth, and she will say "Bababababa." She also will look at you and say, "Hah," then pause, then repeat, several times. I guess Ryan also won the race, because she's taken to saying Dadadadada. Her first tooth just barely started popping through on Tuesday. She waves her hands in excitement when she sees someone she loves.

She loves eating solid foods, although she still doesn't eat a lot quantity-wise, mainly because I'm so busy chasing Kevin that I don't think about giving her food. She figured out the whole chewing  food up thing pretty quickly, so we haven't done a lot of pureed food except for applesauce. At dinner time I just give her small pieces of things like cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, green beans, and bananas. She's even figuring out how to do pincer grabbing, which means no crumbs on the floor go unnoticed (or untasted!). One day I was mortified to find her happily chewing on one of my old laptop keys.

Heidi has also for the most part converted to a full-on crawl, and she's already pretty fast. I don't think she'll be walking within the next week, but I think it will likely happen within the next couple of months.  She can balance for a few seconds on her feet without help, but once she realizes what she's doing she sits down or leans forward so you'll catch her.

We used disposable diapers last weekend to try to get rid of some awful diaper rashes. We put all the prefolds through several rinse cycles without water. I don't know if it's soap build-up or if diaper rash germs get caught in the prefolds, but there have been a few times (in over two years of cloth diapering--so not too bad) where this has happened, and doing several rinses was what seemed to fix it. On the one hand, I quickly realized that's it's sort of nice to be able to just fold up the disposable diaper and stick it in the trash. Sometimes dunking soiled diapers is kind of a pain, even if our diaper sprayer makes it a little easier. But I think the convenience is outweighed by the fact that the trash can fills up really fast (dumpster trips with Kevin in tow generally take about an hour), and the packages of diapers also disappeared really quickly. I think we'd be spending about $15 a week just on diapers if we weren't doing cloth. I expect that our prefolds will last through several children and we'll only have to replace covers, so if we get twelve covers per child then that would be less than $200 for diapering one child until they're potty trained. So it was nice to get a reminder that the small amount of extra work actually is saving us some money. But then, I don't mind doing laundry too much. And I don't have to wash my diapers by hand.

This week I had two tests. Then Ryan got sick, then Heidi and I got sick. On Friday we decided to just order a pizza. It took me a while to get over the fact that I was giving up and ordering a pizza instead of making dinner, but then when it occurred to me that this was the first time I've done that since we got married, I decided we're not doing too bad. While Kevin and Ryan picked up the pizza, I made some pretty good headway in getting everything else cleaned up.

I am enjoying both of my classes. In my history class, we write two papers, take a midterm and an exam (which are also actually papers), and read seven books, which we discuss in recitation sections. It has actually been a blessing to have reading books incorporated into school, because normally I don't have much time to read books during the semester. So far I've enjoyed all the books, and I appreciate the new views they have given me about recent world history.