Sitting and Eating and Crawling, Oh My!

While all has been quiet on the blog front, changes have been happening by leaps and bounds.  Sarah's six month check up (almost a month ago now, yikes!) went well.  Here were her stats:
     Weight: 17lb 12oz (82%)
     Height: 26.5 inches (77%)
     Head: 17inches (71%)

Right after her six month birthday, I took Sarah into the nursery at church and one of the little girls plopped her down in a seated position and she fell right over.  The little girl apologized, she thought Sarah could sit up because her little sister (about 6 weeks older) could.  It got me thinking that I needed to have her practicing sitting up more, so that afternoon I took her outside and we got to work.  See this big smile?

Well, it was because she decided that she was going to sit up by herself after all!  Ta-da!

A few days later, Daddy was home (post-call, I think) at a good time for us to feed Sarah solid food for the first time.  We went with baby oatmeal for her first foray into real food.

As you can see, she was super cheerful about the whole thing, but had no idea what to do with the cereal.  I would say about 99% was spit right back out of her mouth.  But its all about baby steps, right?

Oatmeal does not an impressive "messy face" make.  But you gotta love these sweet smiles!

The next day we didn't have any more luck with swallowing vs. spitting out the oatmeal, but she did enjoy practicing using a spoon herself!

Since we are now experienced parents (haha! not quite), we threw caution to the wind and introduced lots of foods to our second child in rapid succession.  The baby oatmeal was followed by carrots, sweet potatoes, avocado, applesauce, pears, prunes and "Baby MumMums", all introduced within the course of about a week. I did keep a log of what she ate each day just in case she did show sensitivity to any of the foods, but thankfully she was perfectly fine.

A week or two after Sarah started solids, I sprinkled a few cheerios on her tray to keep her entertained during our meal and surprisingly she got a few in her mouth that first day. It was cute because she would work really hard to grab some in her hand, but as she brought them up to eat them, her thumb would pop into her mouth instead of shoving the Cheerios in. I guess that motion was just reflex! Over the next few days she quickly overcame that small obstacle and now she loves Cheerios and gets visibly excited when I bring out the box.

Sarah also started crawling at 6 1/2 months and is working on her speed and endurance.  I have videos that I was hoping to share tonight, but I was having trouble uploading so they're not going to make it.  Hopefully tomorrow night they'll be up as part 2 to this post!  And I plan to be back with posts much more often now that I'm done with my unplanned two week blogging vacation.