Today is Coco's six-month birthday. It may be cliché but, my, how the time has flown and she is growing up so fast!
Coco is a very sweet and easy baby, thankfully. She started sleeping through the night at three months. (Don't hate us for that, please.) She fusses only when her daddies are a bit slow on the uptake. If she has a point to make, she'll make it pretty clear: "change my diaper, please," "it's bottle time, big guy," "entertain me, I've got things to learn," or "okay, daddy, put me to bed 'cause I'm tired." Her personality is starting to blossom. She loves to sleep. She gets that from Ken. She is happy when she wakes up in the morning. She gets that from Ken too. She loves to talk and make noise (more and more all the time). Uh, she gets that from Ken as well. She also loves her social calendar. Yep, that's Ken too. And her social life has been active for a baby. Lots of dinner parties in the country on the weekends. However, she has now reached the "grabby" stage. Reaching for things on dinner tables which makes dinner parties a bit more challenging.
She has been achieving some other milestones lately in addition to reaching and grabbing. She has been enjoying solid foods for three weeks now. Apples, pears, bananas, peas, sweet potatoes and carrots. She started rolling over last week, although that's still pretty infrequent. In the last couple days she has taken a keen interest in screeching, but maybe it's her early version of singing.
It's a good thing Coco's such an easy baby (knock on wood). In the past three months our lives have been pretty logistically complicated. In mid-August, Ken was invited to appear as a designer on Home Made Simple, a TV show on the Oprah Network. Initially he was asked to appear in two episodes. The show films in Los Angeles and each episode takes about a week to film. So Ken went off to Los Angeles for two weeks. Two weeks turned into three week, four weeks, five weeks . . . . in total Ken will be in Los Angeles for nine weeks coming home only on the weekends. He has two weeks left to go. The entire experience has been terrific for him. He loves the design work which is focused on simple, do-it-yourself home decorating projects which is his strong suit. And the people are terrific as well.
We've managed the logistics pretty well. For the first two weeks my parents came to San Francisco to look after Coco while I was at work. Then for four four weeks we found a terrific babysitter. She adores Coco and Coco adores her. Although I admit I was just a bit sad when after three weeks with the babysitter Coco showed some signs of baby consternation at the end the day when the babysitter left. Now my mom has returned to San Francisco for the final three weeks. It's been an interesting experience. I've had a taste of life as a single parent and Ken has had a taste of the life of a parent on the road.
We're definitely looking forward to the holidays and some "normal" time at home.
