Dada Progress Report: Week 6

This was our fourth full week home and our sixth with Dada. It seems like it's been much longer than that. We're definitely starting to reach that "what did we do before?" state. Fortunately, our lifestyle was so boring before that it hasn't really been that much of a change, although we did have to take a pass on the midnight show of Southern Culture on the Skids down at the Continental Club, which we really wanted to do. But we realized it would require getting somebody to babysit all night and we weren't sure we could actually stay up that late. So maybe next year.

So what interesting things has Dada done or experienced this week? Let's see:

• First live TV appearance. We went to the Mighty Texas Dog Walk and Aunt Joanna, who is one of the organizers, asked me to be interviewed on the local news so Dada and I got to answer some questions. Later on the walk we ran into a lady in her driveway who said she had seen us on TV and that we looked "cute". Not sure I said anything intelligable...


• First Mighty Texas Dog Walk. Not sure how much fun it was for Dada. She didn't want to be in the stroller for the whole three miles. Unfortunately, we didn't break the record this year. Even with Band Aunt Venessa and Band Aunt Sherry to help with dog and baby wrangling, it was a lot more work than we had expected.


• First day care. The local YMCA offers day care for up to 1.5 hours for children Dada's age. We tried this out this week and it worked great--she seemed to have no anxiety about being there without Mom, who was able to get a quick workout.


• First baby sitting. We had theater tickets for Saturday night and Uncle Jay and Aunt Kay had agreed to babysit for us. We had no problem leaving after dropping her off. But we blew off the play and just went and had a nice dinner. Jay was able to get her to go to sleep in the portable crip without too much difficulty. We were back home in bed with lights out by 9:00. We are old.


• First mac and cheese. We went out to lunch with Marla, Andria, and Hallie Jane and Dada got to try her first mac and cheese, which she seemed to enjoy but didn't eat a huge amount of (but then she wasn't much into eating at that point anyway).


• Dada has moved from halting walking to full-on motoring. That was one of the challenges at the Dog Walk--she wanted to walk, which is sort of problematic in a press of people and dogs. She seems to be pretty fearless and bouncy, which is mostly a good thing but means we have to be extra sharp. Since I finally got the back yard mowed, we tried walking on the grass a bit. Juries still out on that.


• She's started saying "hi" and using the "eat" and "more" signs more or less intelligably. We think she may also being using a form of the all-done sign, but we're not sure.


• She's cutting some more molars and these are bothering her more than they have in the past, so she's actually cranky, although only in little bursts.

So I guess the next thing will be running, at which point we might as well hang it up. Having had a week or two more or just crawling wouldn't have been too bad, in retrospect....