5 months!

Dear Lucy,
This month went by so fast, I can't believe you are already 5 months old! I have no idea how much you weigh but it's a lot, you wear me out sometimes. Luckily if you are awake, you can support yourself on my hip and that helps. You are also finally getting hair. Last month was the "bald is beautiful" period where all you had was 7-8 really long hairs. Daddy threatened to cut them but I held him off. Then all of a sudden, it all started coming back. It's still short now so it doesn't show up in pictures but it is there, spiky but super soft and thick. How cute you are!
You are developing very well. You can roll both ways now but you don't seem to like to. You're just too mellow. If I take a toy you are playing with and put it out of easy reach, instead of rolling or really reaching for it, you'll just turn away and start playing with your hands. Every once in a while, I can entice you to roll to get to my cell phone or the tv remote, but not often. But while you don't care much for moving to the sides, you do love to rotate in a circle. Last month you could passively turn in circles on your back, now you actively turn in circles on your belly. You can make a full 360 in just a few minutes! And you pretty much always turn clockwise. We joke that we should take you to the southern hemisphere, maybe you will turn counterclockwise down there.

You also spend a lot of time "flying." Sometimes I wonder if you realize you aren't actually going anywhere when you do that.
You love to sit up. You can sit for about a minute on your own if you have a toy in your lap and pretty much forever with a finger to hold. It isn't that you need me for balance as much as you need motivation to stay leaning forward. If you don't have something to look at, you start looking up and leaning back and then topple. I can't get you on video for the same reason, as soon as you hear the camera, you look up. (Update: I got a video using my old friend the mirror, will post as soon as I can get it uploaded. Our internet is sooo slow at uploading)


You also love to stand. Either with help from us or up against the couch.

But the best thing about this stage is that you have finally figured out games are fun. I had been doing pat-a-cake with you for several weeks and you would just look at me like I was a crazy person. Then one day, you realized it was funny. Now whenever I start you do your big smile. Your "big smile" isn't really a smile as much as it is just you opening your mouth as big as it can get before you start laughing. We now regularly play pat-a-cake, itsy-bitsy spider, this little piggy and where is thumbkin and as soon as I start one, you get so excited. You also like to bounce on my legs, be tossed up in the air or dipped low - but only sometimes. You either think it is the greatest thing ever or instantaneously start to cry, we never know which it will be.
You are always studying things. From new people's faces to little tags you concentrate so hard its amazing. You can spend 5 minutes just looking and holding the edge of a blanket. You aren't normally content to only look at faces though. You want to poke and pinch and rub. It's cute but can make it difficult to carry you sometimes. You have just started "kissing." At least I think you are trying to kiss us when you rub your open mouth on our checks. Either that or you are wanting to eat our faces but kissing sounds better.
And you talk so much now, but always with your fingers in your hands. Its cracks us up. You start chattering away in the car and daddy will ask if you are chewing on your fingers because he just knows you must be. How interesting it will be when your talking means something to us and we can learn what is going on in that little brain!