They say change is good

Lily is definitely feeling much, much better today. I did not realize how fussy she had become, how much her sleeping was off, or how taxing it has been until Lily changed back to her old giggly, happy, playful, engaging, wonderful self again. I don't mean to imply that Lily has been horrible over the past week, I just didn't realize the drastic change that had taken place within her. It seems that everything is constantly changing with her. Once we get used to one routine or reach one milestone, something new awaits right around the corner. It is hard to tell whether a new behavior marks a new phase or is just a bump in the road due to something like an illness.

One area that seems to change with lightning speed is her eating. Right now Lily is eating mostly pureed fruits, vegetables and cereal. We haven't tried anymore pureed meats because she just doesn't seem to like them, and we can get some protein in her diet with tofu and beans, so meat can wait. But now that she is 9 months old, we can begin to give her more table foods. The world of table foods is a very uncertain world for me. Pureeing foods is straight-forward and very easy, not a lot of guesswork. I know that she needs the gradual exposure to "real" food, but how to navigate through this new territory is a mystery to me. So far, she has had peeled & quartered grapes, slices of kiwi, and teething biscuits. (Peeling grapes is a really fun task, by the way.) The teething biscuits make me a little nervous because she can bite off a pretty large chunk. She has done pretty well with these things though, and soon we will introduce her to bits of soft pasta and other mashable foods. It's just hard to imagine that in the not-so-distant-future, I won't have to puree her food anymore.

The other area that seems to be progressing quickly is her attempts at walking. As I've stated before, she pulls up on everything and will walk around things while holding on to them. More and more, she is letting go of these objects and just standing on her own. Her teachers clocked her and found that she's standing for 10 seconds at a time. I don't think that walking is far off in her future. This is one milestone that I am really looking forward to, but 9 months is really early even for the things she's doing now, so I'm trying to appreciate this time of relative 'containability'. (It's my blog, and I can make up new words if I want to.)

We are also experiencing yet another phase in the ever-changing MD/PhD Program. Every part of this process has been so different from the one prior that sometimes it is hard to get your bearings. When Carl was working in the lab, we were able to check in with each other a couple times a day just to see how things were going. His schedule was so much more flexible, and I knew that he would be able to adjust his schedule if we really needed him to. Now that he is working in the hospital, we can't really check in with each other, and I know that is schedule is absolutely, positively inflexible. This is going to be a roller-coaster of a year because each rotation lasts one or two months, and each one will be very different in terms of hours, duties, level of stress, and even location. I think that this will be our most challenging year thus far, and we'll just have to do the best we can to get through together.