I have legs!

Natalie has been moving her legs since she was born obviously, but she’s gotten more and more interested in their capabilities in the last week. We actually hold her hands and she can stand up for a few seconds. More interestingly, and worrying, depending on how you look at it is that she’ll stand up in her bouncer. Last night during dinner I look over and her legs are fully extended with her feet pushing off the base of the bouncer. I understand now why you need to strap babies in to these things. 

She’ll also do what I call her crunches where she pulls her feet and hips back to where her foot can almost go in her mouth. This is particularly helpful when changing a diaper and if I didn’t know better I’d say she was doing it on purpose because when I wipe her butt she’ll smile as she pulls her legs up to her face.  She’s also got the leg portion of crawling down very well. Granted she’s not crawling because she hasn’t figured out that her arms need to move too. There’s a lot of kicking and digging into the rug or my chest and she will move a little but only a few inches before her arms give way since they don’t move in conjunction with the legs.

I’ve also found that I’ve grown to use to the “wetness indicator” on the diapers. Our latest box of diapers don’t have them. It’s a stripe that turns from yellow to blue when the diaper is wet. Seems to me the color change would make more sense the other way, but I digress. Anyway, for some reason even though I bought the same exact box and brand, no wetness indicator. It boggles the mind how many variations of the same diaper you can have from the same company. I’m not going to take the time to count them, but take a look the next time you’re at the store. Check to see how many varieties of Pampers there are in a particular size.

I will say this, whoever came up with the rib that goes around the legs is an absolute genius. That has saved us on numerous occasions from having blowouts. Despite the mind numbing number of choices, the actual design of diapers today is pretty amazing. There’s some sort of technology that pulls the wetness away from them to where it’s barely even touching. This can make it hard to tell when they need to be changed though because Natalie can be dirty for a while before making a fuss. This is where the wetness indicator comes in handy even though there are diapers that are clearly dirty just by looking and feeling, or in some very special cases...smelling. At one point Tiffany’s mom had floated the idea of using cloth diapers....what a horrible, horrible mistake that would have been .

Pretty soon she’ll be ready to graduate from her tummy time mat to an exercise mat. We don’t have one yet and I have mixed feelings about getting one. It’s not that I don’t want to spend the money, it’s that I know that a lot of these toys get used for like 2 months and then you are stuck storing them for the next X years.

Natalie’s been down for a nice nap for already well over an hour so my time here is probably running out. She’s got in the habit of going back to sleep after eating breakfast...wouldn’t we like to all do that? So that’s it for now.