Babies don't do much at this age (4.5 months)

or do they? We saw cousins Bruce, Lyenne, Luke and Bella last weekend at the Oakland Art and Soul festival. Luke asked me if Leeloo was crawling yet and I found myself listing off all of the things she can do already. It seems like a big list to me but didn't contain most of the big "firsts" people ask about. It's just such a difference from her initial state of lying in one place screaming - you know -what she was capable of doing for the first month or so... After all, she can hold her head up, grab anything and put it into her mouth, lean over and apply her mouth directly to any surface, speak fluent baby-lonian, laugh and smile in response to things that are amusing to her (skin raspberries are popular). She can grab her feet, use her feet to manipulate things, drink (semi-productively) from a regular cup of water, eat rice cereal and flip over both front to back and (just since last week) back to front, blow spit bubbles, blow raspberries into my shoulder in the shower, fall asleep mostly on her own, imitate Jack's very strange wookie-like meow, and sort of pet the animals without pulling out too much hair. She doesn't cry constantly in the car anymore and is down to less than one hour of crying a day for the most part. Also - she has got spitting up, and drooling incessantly completely down - no further work needed in those areas. From my standpoint, she is basically done and can move out on her own any minute now :-) Ok, maybe not yet, I would miss her - but really how hard can college be when you've already gone from being an unthinking ball of cells to a mostly functional human being in a little over a year.... most Republicans never achieve this. Plus she is cuter than like ANYTHING - except maybe baby tigers... she is just as cute as baby tigers :-) She started sucking her thumb and I just about exploded due to the sheer volume of cuteness. Even when she gets really angry and sticks both fists in her mouth - cutest pissed off baby ever! and don't get me started on the frowny face she makes mostly in response to loud sneezes - oh my God - I could just die from the unicorn marshmallow rainbow kisses of cute. So I think she does plenty - I've certainly filled up a large volume of scrap book pages so far - I need to remember to save room for her doctoral paper citations.
(written on 8/25/10 by Rachael - just got around to posting today)