Leah at the Five Month Mark

At five months Leah is getting to be a handful. Sometimes she wants to be held, and sometimes she wants to be down, and she is more than ready to let me know that whatever I'm doing is wrong. I'm almost ready to say that she has learned to be willful, which bodes ill because we have 12 more years until she is a teenager.

She is showing no signs of sleeping through the night. I put her down at 8pm and it is normal for her to wake up 10, 2, 4 and 6am. I attribute it to the breast feeding (which I would never give up). Eli likes to think that is partly due to some quirk of genetic makeup common to all three kids.

Leah has a trick that she has learned, or that we have taught each other. We used to do it with the boys when they were crying: cupping or patting fingers against their open mouths to make a "baa baa baa baa" sound. Leah will do it with us even when she isn't crying. In fact, it normally makes her coo and start to talk.

Leah is also walking now. Ok, not really walking, but she scoots around in her walker quite well. We started her in it 3 or 4 weeks ago and she has already gotten the hang of it. Like all kids, first she only moved backwards. Then she learned to go sideways, and now she can cruising forward. It is adorable when she tries to follow her brothers around the house because she can't get on and off the carpets. I love this stage because I can pop her in the walker while I cook dinner or prepare lunch for Avery and Zach.