all about bella

this is a bella-only post.

food. she has been eating solid foods 2 - 3 times a day for the last few weeks. she's still not as voracious when she eats as noah is, but she does open her mouth for the spoon and winds up eating about 1/3 - 1/2 of the container at each sitting. she still won't touch cereal and honestly, I can't blame her. the stuff is gross. she's tried the baby yogurt that is premixed with cereal, and she wasn't completely crazy over it, but she's only had it once. she enjoys those gerber puffs but I am afraid of her choking on them, so I hold them in her mouth and she gums off a piece at a time. she doesn't quite understand the chewing thing but she does seem to like them. we got the banana kind.

I've been steadily increasing my pumping and milk output. we have a stockpile of about maybe 3 or 4 full days' worth of milk in the freezer. there is less than one month to go before we head to vegas and bella stays with my dad and Kathy, so the race is on to get enough milk stored up.

development. bella could probably roll over if she wanted to, I guess. she gets like 7/8 of the way over and goes right back. she still hates being on her stomach for a long period of time - long being like more than 45 seconds. she is starting to creep forward though while on her back. it's crazy. I'll put her on the mat lying down while I go do or get something, and when I get back a minute later, she's turned around a different way. so she's either using her feet to move herself around or we have ghosts.

she does this call and response thing with us now...she says "ah?" and I say "ah?" and she smiles and does it over and over. when she wants me to look at her, she says "ah?" and waits for me to look over at her. like noah, she's stringing syllables together. she sounds a little like the hamburglar (where I am showing my age I guess) as she says "arabba-rabba". (the hamburglar used to say something that sounded like robber-robber or something freakish and disturbing like that.)

while she can sit unattended for long periods, sometimes she does tend to fall over. usually it's when she wants to get something that is out of her reach. if she's in a padded area, like her mat, I usually let her fall either all the way down or enough that she realizes she fell, so she'll get the feel of balance. she doesn't hurt herself and she seems to learn from it. she's really into flopping back and forth in the command center (the exersaucer) since we have it on "tilt" instead of in stationary mode. we may start putting her in that johnny jump up thingie that hangs from the doorway.

cuteness. I'm happy to report that bella continues to become more and more cute. her cuteness factor has grown along with her thighs, so that's A LOT. she tends to be cute for most of the day, only resting her cuteness when tired or hungry. though even then, while crying, she's very cute. sean often tears up when she's being especially cute. he's such a softie.

and here's a crazy story for you - we decided to take some of the things that bella has outgrown (and there's alot she's outgrown in 6 months) to a consignment shop in quakertown this past saturday. I had a 10:30 appointment to show the owner of the store my wares, and she'd pick and choose what she thought she could sell. I brought up her infant car seat with 2 bases, a universal infant carrier stroller, my stupid infantino fake-baby-bjorn carrier, the baby papasan (which I will miss) and a few other things, including a bag of stuff that nicole contributed. when I first got there, I was really put off by how rude the owner was - she was really short and irritable with me and didn't offer to help me bring anything in even though I was struggling to hold bella while carrying all that stuff and she was just sitting there reading a book. I was so annoyed, in fact, that I toyed with the idea of saying "you know what? nevermind. if you can't treat me with a little respect, than I don't want to do business with you."

and thank god I didn't.

after I dragged everything in and went back to the counter, the owner started crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she was sorry...but she thought she was miscarrying her baby. I was stunned. I asked her if she needed any help, and she said no. I asked if she called her doctor or if she needed to use the phone to do anything, and she said no. she said she had talked to her doctor before and that the bleeding had stopped, but started again, and she had had 2 children already, so why would this happen....I didn't know what to say. I just listened. I asked her then if she needed to call anyone to come get her, and she said there was nothing anyone could do, that if it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

I just told her how sorry I was. and that I could either take my stuff back to my car or just leave it there or if she needed me to help with anything, I'd certainly do that, but by no means was I going to have her go through all the stuff there at that moment. I quickly signed an agreement of sale (meanwhile, I didn't have time to even look at it, but the terms aren't exactly wonderful, but whatever) and left, and she left immediately after me.

I've read enough infertility blogs to know that there are probably no words that can be spoken that would be universal enough to make a woman in that scenario feel any better other than I'm sorry, so I'm glad I didn't get diarrhea of the mouth and try to make things better by talking talking talking, meanwhile holding my infant right in front of her face, but I felt like I should have said something different. but what? it was a strange, sad experience.