Tomorrow, Isabelle will be eight months old. Still often smiling, but now displaying an obvious stubborn streak that can make for some not-so-happy moments as she very purposefully sets her jaw and screams at the top of her lungs until her demands are met, at which point she promptly desists and returns to her smiley ways. One of the most common demands these days is to hold onto my thumbs and stand on my lap, with an occasional back-bend thrown in, just to make sure I’m paying attention. While standing here, she will frequently grin at me with her squinty-eyed, cheesy, aren’t-I-the-cutest-ever grin, and practice talking, which at this point amounts to what I think is her attempt to say “belle-belle”.
She abandoned sleeping through the night months ago…much like Ava did as a baby…and has instead decided to wake up 3-4 times a night, almost every night. Occasionally, Ava joins the fun and we end up with nights like last night when my longest stretch of sleep was just over an hour. I assume Isabelle’s two bottom teeth, that both finally made an appearance this past week, are most of the blame for the poor sleep, but since there are always more slowly pushing their way through, I’m not holding out hope for any kind of reasonable sleep in the near future.
During the days, she is making progress in her mobility, albeit with a kind of lazy approach that would still much rather somebody pick her up and carry her wherever it is she wants to go. So, while her two older sisters were well past the just-crawling stage at this point, she is content to still inchworm her way across the floor. It works, though, and we now find ourselves in full pick-that-tiny-piece-of…what-is-that???…up-off-the-floor-before-Isabelle-gets-it mode.
Though still pretty much only nursing, we have started sitting her in a high chair at the table during meal-times. Her first experience with this was met with the biggest smiles all meal long, as she clearly was so happy to have her own seat among us. She has been given small tastes of banana (which she clearly loves), hummus (which she clearly did not love), potatoes and avocados (both which seemed to receive mixed reviews).
She has a fairly well-established bedtime routine at the moment of being held by her Daddy, after the other kids are in bed, while he plays some hymns at the piano with his free hand. This pretty reliably puts her to sleep and she clearly has an expectation when that time comes around each night that this is how things should go.
She still sucks on her fingers. She still stares, smiling, at each person that walks past her…and for certain special people (like her Daddy) she will twist herself around to continue staring until her smiles are returned. She loves music, even when it’s me singing to her. She grabs at anything and everything within reach, and her legs move like crazy when she’s excited about something. She’s learning to be content playing with toys, and is starting to find books entertaining. When I think about who she is, and what God might hold for her, I am struck over and over by how, even now, there is tenacity and conviction in how she behaves. I pray for these to be strengthened in her as she gets older – that she would be able to stand in faith before trials and persecution with an unflappable confidence in the truth of the gospel; that her gaze would be set on Jesus and never, ever waver; that her trust would be a testimony to the hardest of hearts that He is faithful and good. God, may it be so.