Maia still hasn’t perfected the art of laughing, but she sure is trying to.  She lets out these high-pitched squeals that last four or five seconds and end with a sort of cough.  It’s adorable.  Sometimes, this results in her getting hiccups, and we all know how she deals with having those!

Since writing Saturday’s post on how to calm a baby, we’ve actually been having pretty good luck with naps during the day.  Not that she’s really napping any longer than half an hour in the daytime, but she’s doing it more frequently, and it’s having a positive impact on her personality as well as mine.  She’s in this routine of sleep, eat, play play play, fuss into sleep.  I wish she’d nurse into sleep more often, because I miss having her nestled at my breast with her soft, quiet, sleepy baby breath against my skin, but I’ll take whatever she’s giving.

I’ve discovered that singing to her while moving her arms or legs in time with the music makes her really happy. I’m talking like huge, dimpled smile that goes on forever, and many attempts to giggle.  Since Chris and I have almost completely different tastes in music, I rarely turn it on when he’s home, but if it’s going to make Maia this happy to be sung to, well, he is just going to have to deal!

As for myself, I am trying to find some work-at-home opportunities.  Freelance writing and whatnot.  It’s a little intimidating to try and get my foot in the door, but it’s also really exciting.  Funny, as I’m usually not intimidated by anything like this — heck, even giving birth wasn’t this scary.  I’m ready for it though.  I need the challenge, and my brain needs the workout.

Also, within the next week or so I have some plans to rearrange the website a bit.  I’d like to take my blogroll off the sidebar and move it to its own page, which will allow me to put everyone on there that I follow and not limit myself so much, but I have to make WordPress acknowledge that putting content into columns is okay and HTML tables are not actually all that bad.  I’m also trying to conceptualize a “logo” of sorts for the header, since I’d like to change it each month but I’d like to try and maintain a consistent look to the blog month-to-month nonetheless.