Party Animal!

Tara attended her first birthday party yesterday! It went as one would expect. She spent a lot of time watching other kids being silly, was a little silly herself for a while, and then fell asleep just when the cake was being cut. Vir also behaved pretty much as expected. He grabbed a car from the birthday girl's collection of toys, stood with it in a corner and watched all the other kids being silly, managed to convince the birthday girl's grandmother to give him some icing from the birthday cake before it was cut, and spent the rest of his time protecting Tara from potential claimants. He thinks everyone wants to take her home and is always wary of strangers and friends when it comes to her. Poor girl - she has a few fights ahead of her in this regard. And poor boy, all he wants to do is make sure only he is allowed to annoy her. For now though, it's a totally love-love relationship with only worshipping looks on either side despite the occasional pinching and toy snatching from the big brother who, I'm often guilty of forgetting, is only a baby himself.
Honestly, anyone reading this and contemplating having a second child. Go for it. You'll only regret it once in a while but you'll be constantly in awe of the relationship your little ones will share.

My little rocket!

She's learnt how to do push ups and she uses every minute she can find to practice this new skill. It just never gets old. I think the next step will be bending her knee forward and pushing ahead, aka crawling! But how can this be? She's only 5 months. Here I was thinking we have a few more months of sitting around calmly with a rattle in one hand and the laptop in the other.

"No such luck, mom! Watch out, I'm on my way!"

Already?!

Tara is constantly amazing me with the stuff she's up to! I don't really remember the timing of Vir's early milestones and have to keep referring back to this blog for that, but I'm pretty sure that Tara is doing some of this stuff sooner than he did. She's already being able to make her way across the bed in a really random combination of crawling and creeping and frog jumping and rolling accompanied by lots of noise and has been doing this for almost a month now! In fact, I'm not proud to report that she has already fallen off the bed once. I just didn't see it coming. I left her on the bed for a minute thinking she's my little infant who is still totally safe on the bed and when I came back, she was on the floor. It was horrible, but brave little girl that she is, she was smiling almost the second I picked her up!

She has also recently started reaching out for things that are held out in front of her. Which, of course, opens up a world of options for her to put in her mouth. Because in Tara's world, things have only one purpose - to be tasted! I'm looking forward to when I can give her real food and also really hoping she actually eats what I give her and saves me round II of the torture that Vir is putting me through these days.

I'll report that when it happens. For now, I just watch her with wonder as she troops along, learning new and wonderful things everyday and overwhelming us with gratitude that she can and that we're lucky enough to be witness to her miracles.