maya is army crawling!

feeding herself a rice rusk

On saturday we went to a baby shower at airport beach (with bouncy castle that kalia loved!) and we came home and maya started crawling. She's doing the army crawl, using her forearms and her legs, but she can really get to what she wants. She still uses this with a little bit of rolling, but she's quite fast when she wants to be. Maya is much more aggressive than kalia ever was at this age. Kalia has this Baby Einstein The World Around Me - Ocean book and it unfolds and if you connect the ends, you can sit inside a circle that has a 360 picture of the ocean. Kalia loves it, even though it's for 9 months and she just got it for the last Christmas, she pretends it's a pool and she fills it with her pretend hose everyday. We put Maya in with her and Maya attacks the pictures of the fish and other sea animals. She loves it, but scares me because she's so crazy sometimes! Maya crawling means that I really need to cleaning up around the house. The other day Maya just wanted to practice her crawling on the floor, so I let her go in our room while I read stories to kalia on the bed. Next thing i know she's grabbing the cable wire and a picture frame that I don't know what to do with is toppled on top of her (it's small)...I'm not ready for this stage. I thought I had more time! OK, that story just makes me laugh because it's just one example at how lax you get with the second one. I always heard that and I thought it would never happen to me, but it's true. You're just too busy to go crazy over all the little things the second time around. Sometimes I find Maya chewing on something and I think, well, that's not too dirty and I need to help kalia go potty, so chew on that for a minute.

Maya is basically a totally different animal than kalia. When I used to feed kalia, she was so neat! She would see the spoon coming and open her mouth and I didn't even get a floor mat for under her highchair until she was much older because she was not messy at all! After Maya eats, she has food everywhere. I have to wash food out of her nose, off her eyes, off her ears and hair. She's always grabbing for the bowls and spoon. So far maya has been eating: sweet potatoes, avocado, banana, rice cereal and pears. I have also given her rice rusks - kalia likes to eat them too. Tomorrow we start mangos and I need to grind up some brown rice too. I've been using Super Baby Food by Ruth Yaron - same as I used with Kalia. It's funny because with Kalia I tried to give her avocado, but after a couple tries and she didn't seem to like it, so I gave up. With maya I just kept trying and after a week she eats them now. I was pretty much thinking, maya I just bought this $3 avocado and you're going to try it again! Erik was right, I just always said kalia didn't like something after two or three tries, but it just takes a while for them to get used to the flavor. So see Erik, I'm admitting that you're right once in a while!

The other day I was telling kalia that i wanted to eat maya up and started pretending to eat her because she is just so yummy. Kalia said, "no, mommy maya needs her skin!"

Kalia also has been repeating everything i say to her back to me. The other day we were in kalia's room and she was cooking with her kitchen. I was holding maya and didn't have time to let go of an arm, so i turned my head to sneeze away from the girls. Kalia said, "You need to cover your mouth when you sneeze. You just sprayed our lunch!"

Thanks Auntie Kim for reminding me that I have to teach kalia to trade a toy for a toy with maya, instead of snatching it away. I've been doing that with Maya, but didn't show kalia until the other day and she's pretty good at it. Maya just started screaming when kalia takes something away from her and maya is pretty scary when she does that - kalia thinks so too.

Maya has also been doing a lot of "yayayaya" and also "dadadada". In the morning she will just babble, babble for a long time. Unlike Kalia who would always cry for me the minute she woke up from a nap or sleep, Maya plays in her crib and will stay in there for a long time. Erik loves to go in the morning and see the first look she gives when she sees someone. I sometimes take advantage and let her play for a while.