Here is Maisie, looking even more like her granddaddy Greene than usual, wearing her precious apple hat. In this picture she is three days shy of three months old (three months old tomorrow!).
She is still a hoot (I mean, look at that face). She smiles, laughs, and talks to herself (LOUDLY!). Her mobile might be her favorite thing, and it is one of my favorite things too because she will lie in her crib and cackle and talk happily for a solid fifteen minutes while I take a shower or dry my hair. Well, her mobile is her favorite thing after her feet. She discovered her feet a few weeks ago and became quite taken with them. (She especially enjoys having her feet clapped together to the tune of the Notre Dame fight song, putting her feet on your face, grabbing at her feet, grabbing the dangly monkey on her playmat with her feet, and generally just staring at her feet to make sure they are still there, although I think we are past the hey-they're-still-there phase now that we are in the hey-I-can-kick things stage.) She will swat at things with her hands, too, and can shove the bottle or her pacifier out of her mouth with great success (and is getting better at shoving them back in, too, depending on where they are after she shoves them away). She will grab onto anything you place near her hands though she doesn't reach out for things yet. She does like to hold things. If she doesn't have a blanket or a lovey in her stroller, for instance, she will just grab ahold of her dress or whatever she is wearing and ball it up in her fists. She holds my hands when I give her a bottle or rock her.
Her sleeping at night is still great, but we're not on a predictable nap schedule. She'll do the same thing a couple of days in a row and then do something totally different the day after that. That's okay, though. I drove myself crazy, napwise, a day or two last week after reading the baby sleep books, but quickly realized that we were doing just fine as it was. She naps on and off in the morning and we usually run errands (or create errands to get out of the house) in the afternoon, with her napping along the way and when we get back home. She can still sleep in her car seat, stroller, or the sling (not as much the Baby Bjorn anymore, because she likes to ride facing out now and there's just too much for her to look at that way, nosy thing). She wakes up happy almost all the time.
Our days fly by. When we're at home, I just move her around all the time to different "activities" -- we enjoy "table talk" (where she lies on a changing pad on the downstairs table and I lean over her and we discuss things -- she does a lot of the talking nowadays), "sing'n'stare" (where she sits on my lap and I sing to her and she stares/giggles/talk/pulls up/stands, etc.), time in the Bumbo, time on the playmat, tummy time, reading time (she will pay attention through the reading of two board books at a time), bouncy seat time, and general on-the-floor-squirminess time. We listen to a lot of music, which is great. What's not so great is that I kind of enjoyed watching television while I fed her, but she likes the TV almost as much as she likes her own feet. Maisie will contort herself any way possible to watch TV if it's on. Consequently, it's no longer on while she's awake. That is really too bad for this television junkie.
We are going to SC for Thanksgiving (stopping in NC on the way) and I can't wait for our families to see how much she has grown and changed just in the last few weeks.
