Della Plum,

You turned six months old on August 28^th. Happy Half-Birthday! We had your 6 month checkup and it was confirmed what we already suspected … you are one short plum! You are 24 inches long, that’s the 4^th percentile on the growth chart. That means if you were in a room with 100 babies your age, 96 of them would be taller than you.  I think you may be destined for life in the front row.

We started you on pureed foods a week before you turned 6 months and you are doing fantastic. You are now weighing in at 15 lbs 3 oz (45^th percentile).  If you were in that same room with those same 100 babies, you would probably steal all of their lunches. You have been trying everything we’ve been giving you. Your favorites are still sweet potatoes, peas, carrots, apples, pears, mango etc. We make our own baby food, so we went a little crazy and tried zucchini, eggplant, asparagus, and all kinds of gourds, and you liked them all. I think the only thing you don’t like so far is broccoli.

We had your 6 month photos taken. That day you were so sick, but you still managed to be charming during the photo session. You can’t even tell by the pictures that you were running a high temperature with an ear infection, and that later we had to make a trip to the urgency room.

Here is what else you’ve been up to this month:

-You are in size 2 diapers. 3-6 month or 6 month clothing.

 -Without the swaddle you are now free to roll on your side and stomach easily at night, helping you sleep better. I’ve found you a few times with your face straight down in the mattress though and it scared me, but you eventually learned to turn your head.

-You are starting to put your pacifier back in your mouth by yourself, if it falls out. You prefer to put it in upside-down or sideways.

-You love your toys and you love to play. You are always searching for a toy to play with. You like to take the musical/movable toys and turn them over and touch the screws and battery covers. No matter how colorful or loud a toy is, the screws are more interesting to you.

-This month we went to the State Fair. I’m sure you remember the State Fair from last year, when I was pregnant with you, and forced you to absorb 10 pounds of fried cream cheese. I think you appreciated the State Fair even more, from the outside, this year.

-We also visited the race track and let you bet on a few horses.

We can’t believe it’s been half a year already. I’m excited to see what you have in store for us in the next half! I believe the tough part is over, now it’s all about having fun and learning how to use those extra limbs to do cool new stuff, like, walk the dogs or mow the lawn….

Love you so much, Plum. Please stay so sweet!

Mama

Believe it or not, this is the face of a person who really likes carrots.

She's actually mad i'm not moving the spoon fast enough into her mouth.

Dear Della Plum,

You turned five months old on July 28th. Since then you've been checking off one milestone after the other on your to-do list. Some things you've done only once and decided that’s enough. Some things you do obsessively and compulsively.

Rolling from front to back was one of those one-time things for you. I'm pretty sure you only did it to get us to shut up about it too. We keep trying to tell you, that as a baby with little mobility, rolling is a good way to get to where you want to go. But you seem content with staying put.

You started to sit at four months, and now you have perfected this skill. You like to sit and you do it well. I'm not surprised; sitting was the only trick we could successfully teach the dogs too. We are a family of sitters I guess. Rolling over is for suckers and poodles.

You are noticing everything these days. You noticed things before, but now things are not just things anymore. Everything is something to you. Everything is important. Everything must be touched, tasted, inspected. You must touch every button, salt shaker, ear, shadow, sponge, and dog whisker you can. I envy you, as you can find value in an empty carton of ice cream. Whereas, I cannot.

At the end of this month we wanted to help you kick your swaddle habit, so we planned an intervention. We set your arms free and tried sleep training. "They" say sleep training is important in order for you to learn to "self-soothe".

“They” are idiots. And they obviously haven’t met you.

When you started to cry we had to wait two minutes before going to soothe you. When you cried again, we would increase the wait time by two more minutes before intervening. The first night it only took twenty minutes for you to fall asleep. The next night you caught on to our operation, and you staged an intervention for us. You cried, nay, SCREAMED, inconsolably for over an hour. After five continuous days of screaming LONGER and LOUDER, we decided to nix the sleep training idea.

You've never acted that crazy before. Sure, you’re a not-so-great sleeper. Sure, our whole lives revolve around that dreaded five-letter word. But usually, as long as you were swaddled and pacifiered correctly, you went to sleep (eventually) (without teetering on the edge of insanity at least). Then we go and take away the swaddle and tell you to just deal with it.

We are bad people.

We learned some very valuable lessons that week though: Don’t fix something that isn't hopelessly broken. And don’t try to change multiple things at once.

It took awhile, but we eventually gained your trust back and you stopped screaming at us like we were a colossal threat. You went back to your normal fuss, reinsert pacifier, fuss, reinsert pacifier, then finally fall asleep routine. And we are totally okay with that!

After all that you did learn to sleep with your arms free. We have been a swaddleless household ever since. This is by far mine and your dad’s greatest accomplishment-to-date, besides, you know, creating life.

Here are some other things you’ve been up to this month:

- The week before you turned 6 months old we introduced you to solids. That was the same week we tried sleep training and removing the swaddle. Again, I think we changed too much too fast. No wonder your system malfunctioned. Fortunately, you took to solids pretty well. You love sweet potatoes. Avocadoes not so much. You obviously don’t understand the gloriousness of guacamole yet.

-We were quite busy this month. We went to the county fair, Valleyfair, the splash pool, a waterpark. One good thing about a baby that doesn’t nap is that we can take you anywhere, and we don’t have to worry about your nap scheduled. Because you don’t have one.

- You weigh about 14 lbs, and are in 3-6 month or 6 month clothing. Size 2 diapers.

You’ve taken the biggest leaps forward this month. So many huge changes for one little girl, but you handled it well considering. We love you and are so proud of you!

Every mother thinks they know what is best for ALL babies in the ENTIRE world. I am no exception. I've been a mother for a whopping 4 months, and here I am giving my expert opinion on what I think other mothers must have. Maybe you have a baby like mine though: a short ninja  baby who sleeps more like a manic floppy fish out of water, than like a baby. In that case, you will NEED what I have.

Swaddles:

We've tried them ALL.

First, we had the Halo Sleep Sack/Swaddle.

(By the  way, this is not my baby)

Sorry to say, I hated this one. We have the shortest baby, which is weird because neither Carl nor I are all that short. Della has been hovering around the 5th-10th percentile in height since she was born. She is très petite, and the newborn sized Halo Sleep Sack/Swaddle was just too much for her. Kind of hard to explain, but there was too much extra fabric in the sleep sack part, so when we swaddled her it would bunch up in the middle by her face. During the night, no matter how tight we swaddled it (which we couldn't get it as tight as possible because of all the extra fabric) she would shimmy all the way down in the sack and it would end up covering her mouth and nose. HATED that. Drove me insane and it scared me every time I woke up to find just her little eyes peering out at me over the swaddle.

 We also have a Miracle Blanket.

(again, not my baby. )

I liked it because the fabric is lightweight and it has arm cuffs, so you can pin your baby’s arms down so well that it would take a miracle for baby to breakout of this thing. This would work well for the criminally insane. However, it takes a very patient and calm baby to get them strapped in. If you have a baby like mine, who fights bedtime, fights the swaddle, thinks she fights crime, and definitely fights sleep...then this will NOT work. Della's limbs are always moving very rapidly. The upside of that is she has fantastic looking abs and great upper body strength. The downside is we could never get her in this complicated apparatus fast enough before t-minus meltdown happened. We needed something simpler.

My favorite swaddle in all of swaddleland is the Summer Infant Swaddleme.

It met all my requirements. No extra bulky fabric, simple enough to get a Tasmanian baby into, good enough for short baby-folk. The only thing that scared me is that she could, and would, easily breakout of it. I was nervous that she would break free, and then grab the swaddle and bring it up to her face (like she does with everything she can get her hands on) and cover her nose and mouth with it. I'm paranoid like that.

 SO, we also bought this Summer Infant Swaddle Pod that we zip up over the Swaddleme.

 (also not my baby. This baby looks like she enjoys sleeping too much to be mine)

This way she is double swaddled. If she breaks out of one, she is still trapped in the other one. And to date, she hasn't found a way to unzip herself from the swaddle pod. She can, however, fit her tiny fists up through the neck of it and punch herself in the chin. Resulting in a wide awake baby. That's why we have to keep double-swaddling. Two layers of protection. That's always been my motto.

 (my baby.)

Delphine (Della):

Very early on in our relationship Carl and I started playing the "let's name our future children" game. At this point, I still wouldn't let him see me without makeup and he still wouldn't pass gas in front of me, but we were adamant about naming all ten of the children we were destined to have. By the way, I'm working on finding a way to go back in time, so that I can throw past-me over my knee and give past-me a well-deserved spanking for being so dumb. Obviously I didn't realize back then that ten kids meant ten pregnancies and ten people to wiggle out of one very sensitive area down below.

For two years, whenever one of us thought of a name we would say something like, "what do you think of Lallulah-StormTrooper?" And of course, the other would then throw-up in his/her mouth. We could never agree. One day, we went over to Carl's 90 year old grandparents’ house so I could interview them for a Women's History paper I was writing for class. His grandpa brought out a picture of his mother from the 1900’s. She looked so polished and striking, like she could be in a James Cameron directed period piece about an epic romance and a ship. In the picture she was tightly corseted into this gorgeous dress and wearing a titanic sized hat loaded with feathers. She was a very beautiful, exotic looking woman with dark, piercing features. Carl's grandpa told us her name was Della. We both looked at each other in that moment and said "Della" simultaneously. We had a mind-conference, and telepathically agreed Della was our future baby's name. Then we found out Della was a nickname and her given name was actually Delphine. We loved both names, and there was no question from then on, that was what we would name a girl if we had one.

Plum:

I was given complete middle-naming rights, it was considered my “push present” seeing as I was the one with stretch marks plastered on my mid-section and a baby traveling through my body. Personally, I think middle names are silly. They are like cheese graters, everyone has one, but no one knows why. (You can buy cheese already shredded you know.) Middle names are not really good for anything except as insulation between the first and last name. So, I wanted to have a little fun with it, since it’s basically just a conversation piece anyway.

I loved the names Rose, Grace, Mae, Rae, etc. and they all would’ve worked wonderfully as a middle name, but I wanted something a little crazier than that.  I started coming up with non-name names, like, Winter, January, Snow, Snowflake, Snowman, Shovel….if you can’t tell it was the middle of winter. Carl just sat in the corner and shook his head in shame.

I tossed around some nature names like, Lake, Rice, Wren, Bird, Sun, but what I was really sold on was the name Blue. Later, I found out John Travolta’s kid is named Ella Blu, so I really couldn’t have a Della Blue, that would look like we copied them. We don’t run in the same social circles as the Travolta’s, but how awkward would that be if we bumped into each other one day and had to introduce our Della Blue to their Ella Blu? Oy.

After Blue was out, I kept thinking along the lines of color. My favorite color is purple or plum. I liked the sound of Plum, it wasn’t as hippie-ish as Strawberry and a little less shocking than Apple. I looked Plum up and it is an actual (sorta) name, used over in Europe. The name Prune (the equivalent to Plum in French) is becoming quite the popular name there. There is also an author/vogue editor from England nicknamed Plum Skyes. And since she is from England, and they’re used to the U.S. stealing all their television programming ideas from them anyway, I didn’t think she would mind if I used Plum as a middle name for my daughter.

And there you have it Delphine (Della) Plum.

Some people love the name, some hate it. Some say, aren’t you worried she won’t be able to get hired for a job with a name like that? I say, REALLY? First of all, I have never worked at a job where sharing my middle name was a requirement. Nor do I know the middle names of any of my co-workers. Second, the CEO where I work, his middle name is Nutmann. I only know this because he loves it and openly shares it with others. Thirdly, Barack Hussein Obama also has a unique name, and he got hired.

Others say with an uncommon name she will grow up thinking she is too special and entitled. I say again, REALLY? A few people around my office have different and unique names, and some are hardworking, and successfully moving up the corporate ladder. Some are playing angry birds. I don't think it has anything to do with their name, but how the people who named them raised them.

Others are concerned about her getting teased….umm, as long as there are other kids out there being named Brodini and Sycauphony, I think she’ll be alright.

Della’s Law: If you tell a room full of people you have the perfect baby who is a genius at sleeping - that is the week you will get no sleep, whatsoever.

In Della’s defense, she is one poor, sick baby. Eye infection, ear infection, nose infection, I think she has all the face infections one can get. I feel so sorry for her, her little head must feel like it is going to ignite.

She’s a newbie to this cold thing, and she’s handling it about as well as a freshly graduated college student on his first day at a new job: dehydrated, crabby, and helpless. At times she tries to smile, and she still tries to coo and talk to us, but her coo’s are coming out more depressing sounding. Like, “coo-ah-oowwww.  Mom, my head feels like you’ve been dragging it  across an Astroturf lawn and snot is leaking from every hole in my face, but I still want to say what up to all my peeps out there, love ya, even though I am miserably, miserably  sick. Also, I’ve been sitting in my own toilet for about twenty minutes now. Help a girl out. Coo-oww, ah-goo. Oww-oww-ow.”

I’ve been sleeping curled up on the floor in her bedroom, at the foot of her crib, with a booger sucker in my hand. I’m scared that she’s going to choke on her own snot, so I want to be able to get to that air-passageway-blocking-phlegm as soon as possible. Plus, she’s been waking up every 20-30 minutes coughing, hacking, sneezing out her snot, and then sniffling it back in, so it’s easier not to have to get out of bed each time that I need to wrestle Della’s head still so I can suck up all the boogers.

Flashback: 7 years ago, it was quite possible that you would find me passed out around a bonfire, sleeping on the hard rocky ground, hugging a tree stump. Present day: now you can find me passed out in a baby’s nursery, using a stuffed lamb as a pillow, hugging a humidifier.