Carnivorous Mini Explorer

HG is a very busy little explorer. Not only is she an extremely fast and proficient crawler, but now that she can easily pull herself up into a stand against virtually any surface, including flat walls, she can now expand her mission to include previously unreachable bookshelves, chair seats and table cloth edges (very chewable of course).

Her proficiency at standing has improved to the point where she can hold herself up just by lightly leaning with one hand against something, or sometimes just her chest or her knees are resting against furniture or a wall, while both hands are free to play.

She no longer restricts herself to her matted play area (ie most of the living room), but freely roams under the dining room table, looking for fun handholds, and into the kitchen and side corridors. Now that she has comfortable mastered standing with support she seems to be more confident in venturing out into the apartment in search of new places to pull herself up on. Ima and Abba have started building barriers to her progress and are in search of the right size gates to block off the kitchen and
other more hazardous parts of the apartment.

She has had a ball playing with the new washing machine which was delivered this week. Until the technitian came to install it, it remained packaged, complete useful with handholds, sitting in the hallway. HG enjoyed climbing on it and exploring the new textures. Today she looked surprised to find the hallway empty again and the fun packaging gone.


At Friday night dinner she tasted her first actual piece of chicken. It will be remembered that chicken is one of the first foods HG became interested in, several months ago now. She has tasted veggies from the chicken soup, and rice cooked in the chicken soup, pureed with a little chicken, but this Shabbat was the first time she ate chicken itself, tiny little soft flakes mashed a little between Ima's fingers. HG relished the experience, chewing carefully on the miniscule, mushy little tasters, savouring the new taste and texture, and making it clear that she wanted more. HG is now officially a carnivore.

Her range of sounds continues to improve. After yet another phase of constant rasberries, she is now puffing out her cheeks and making "bvvv" sounds, as well as randomly trying out more and more sounds combinations. Her babbling increasingly sounds like gibberish sentences rather than random sounds.


This Shabbat she wore shoes for the first time. A family friend had given her a pair of pretty shoes that have been sitting in a drawer and when HG tried them on they were just her size. Ima and Abba decided that as it was a rather cold Shabbat it would be good for HG to have an extra layer of warmth on her feet, so just for shul, HG wore shoes. She didn't notice them at first because she was in her buggy, but once she got to shul and of course, eventually decided to find things to pull herself up on, she seemed to find it a little awkward to "cruise" with these strange things between her stockinged feet and the ground...


Once home Ima removed HG's shoes, but put them near her play area so that she could see them. She has been playing with any and all adult feet/shoes that come her way fora while now, so it was interesting to see her exlpore and examine a pair of pristine, baby sized shoes, unmuddied and unsullied. The shoes were placed on a low plastic stool she likes to play with. She at one point knocked them down to the floor, and then spent some time playing with them, holding them and eventually trying to place them back on top of the stool where she could play with them with one hand while holding on with the other.

Then after Shabbat HG got to try on shoes again, just for the fun of it. She was fascinated, and rather than wanting to stand straight away, sat for quite some time examining the funny pink leather things on her feet, before eventually pulling herself up on Abba's hands, most of the time staring down at the shoes on her feet.


While it was obviously a fun learning experience for her, bare feet or socks with treads are much better for her while learning to stand and walk, allowing her to feel the floor and maintain her balance.