Today is Cate’s four month birthday, so I thought it would be a good time to brag about some of our girl’s latest accomplishments:

* Just this past week, she’s figured out reaching and grabbing at things. It was so weird, it seemed to literally happen overnight. Her hand-eye coordination isn’t totally perfect yet, but it’s starting to make things pretty interesting. She now loves her baby gym since she can grab the rattles on it, so she’ll often have a parrot in one hand and a giraffe in the other (er, it’s a jungle-themed gym, obviously), and she’ll just yank and yank on them like there’s no tomorrow. Sadly, this new skill means that it’s the end of me being able to wear my hair down, and all dangly earrings have been banished for the foreseeable future.

* She’s figuring how to squirm around on her back – the other day I put her on the baby gym and walked away for a minute, and when I came back, she had done a total 180. Her head was at the opposite end of the gym from where I had originally placed her. Another time this happened, she wiggled off the gym completely and I found her halfway under the coffee table. Hmm. Seems that it’s time to get rid of our rectangular metal-and-glass coffee table and trade it in for something less hazardous.

* A few days ago, we gave her her first taste of rice cereal. The books all say to introduce solids in the “four to six months” range, and I figured that since it was only a few days before her four-month birthday, we were close enough. It was… not a huge hit. In fact, she sort of hated it and freaked out. We’ve tried it a couple of times since then, and she’ll get maybe a drop or two down her throat, but I stop the second that she starts to cry. I don’t want her to develop some kind of aversion to spoons, and there’s plenty of time to work on solids. God knows it isn’t like she’s wasting away.

* One thing that I absolutely love is that she no longer screams when she wakes up. I’m not sure when that happened – I think it started last week when we were staying at the hotel in California. Now I’ll hear her making little babbly talky noises on the baby monitor, and I have time to toss a bottle in the warmer and pee before I go fetch her. And when she sees me or Dave in her room, she starts laughing and kicking, which is awesome.

* She’s now able to hold her head up completely. She used to get tired after only a minute or two in the Bumbo, but now she can sit there for ages and be totally content. This morning I put the Bumbo on the kitchen counter while I emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, and cooked myself breakfast (providing a running narration on everything I was doing along the way), and she was totally happy the whole time because she was up high where she could see everything. She usually gets fussy if she’s on the bouncer on the floor, because the view from there is pretty dull.

And in honor of this new ability to hold her head up consistently, today we put together her jumperoo and let her try it out. It was a huge hit:

Check out those purple mary jane socks. They were a gift from a friend in Mississippi – they come in a whole bunch of different colors, and I love them. They’re called Trumpette’s – here’s the link, if any of you are interested.