In the past two weeks, Maia’s suddenly gotten more “fun”.  She feels so much more interactive, happy, and interested in things.  She smiles when she sees us, even if we don’t smile first, which is pretty much the most amazing feeling ever.

Yesterday she smiled at me, and for some reason the first thing I thought was, “Someday soon will be the last time I see that toothless smile,” and, as you can imagine, I started crying.  I mean like ridiculous, copious amounts of crying, as if someone had told me I’d never see her smile again, period, ever.  So silly!  I know that she’ll be cute with teeth too, but now I want to take ten thousand more pictures and videos of her the way she is right now, all gummy.

For awhile now, she’s been rolling onto her left side, and now she’s decided that she enjoys rolling onto her right as well.  This is great, except for the fact that when she’s on the changing table, the edge is to her right.  More than once she’s tried to roll off the edge and I have a minor freak-out trying to stop her from doing this.  I mean, in one way it’s pretty funny that she’s finally realized rolling onto her other side is possible and enjoyable, but in another… oh my goodness, child.

Paired with this new-found rolling to both sides thing, she’s also rolling onto her stomach.  Or, I should say, she’s rolled onto her stomach a few times but mostly, now, she rolls almost all the way over but has one arm trapped beneath her that disallows a full roll.  This pisses her off to no end.  She’ll scream and cry like a banshee over the fact that she’s not fully on her stomach, but then when I move her arm out of her way, she gets angry that she’s on her belly!  I just can’t win.

We’ve been back home for two nights now, and I tell you… she is sleeping really badly at night.  Two to three hours at a time, waking up and feeding for what feels like forever, fussing when I put her down so that it takes a few attempts for her to go back to sleep.  However, she’s had such a busy time with all the traveling and meeting people that I really can’t begrudge her taking awhile to get back into sleeping here.  Yesterday we laid down together at 10:30am or so and the next time I woke up, it was 2:30pm and she was still sleeping beside me.  I think her internal clock is all screwy, or maybe she just really needed a nap.  Hell, I needed one too, so no complaints here!

Maia’s also starting to grab at things more reliably.  Her rattle, her stuffed firefly, my hand, my hair… it doesn’t matter, if it’s nearby and she can grab it, she will try her hardest to do so.  Of course, these objects soon make their way towards her mouth so she can gum at them and drool all over them, so I’ve been washing my hands even more fanatically than usual.

Speaking of which, at one of the rest stations in New York, I was washing my hands while holding Maia (no easy feat), which involved quite a bit of fancy handwork.  As I dried my hands with a paper towel, a woman looked over at me, grinned, and said, “That was some impressive juggling!”

I felt like super mommy.  It’s nice to be noticed.

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