baby yammering

It's a baby post. Just thought I'd give fair warning in advance.

My cousin J had baby #2 very late Valentine's Day. It was almost the day after, it was so late. They have a little girl who is just shy of a year old, and now she has a little brother. My friend Kristin had her long-awaited baby boy last week. All these babies.

My own is moving forward with leaps and bounds in her developments. I have long forgotten where her siblings were at this age. I just know that I am not ready for all this mobility. She's been rolling a lot, and she does so with authority. She's sort of scooting, and trying to get up on all fours. She gets rice cereal, and has come to expect it daily. I've long held the practice of putting baby in the high chair at the table with us at dinnertime. Baby gets toys if not old enough to eat what we're eating. Thankfully tonight I made her bowl of cereal at the same time I got my own bowl of chicken & dumplings dished. She saw us spooning food into our mouths and started making fishfaces to tell me she wanted some. The rapid open-close-open-close was funny. She does well with spoon feeding. Like the older 3, if you don't keep that spoon shoveling, she gets vocal. Varying noises are emitted from high pitch shrieks and low 'aaahhh' to things like "nin-gah!", and "na na na na". Clone's word for food was num-num and well, I'm guilty of reusing it. Apparently I'm being mimicked by Miss-Must-Be-Upright.
She later went to sleep a few hours and got back up - you guessed it - hungry. Snacktime was more like it. She spent as much time eating as she did excitedly telling her guardian angel all about her day. She wasn't talking to ME, I can tell you that much.
She's makes no bones about declining an offered pacifier or toy. It gets thrown, her head turns away and she makes a "nuh" noise. In turn, if she wants something, she'll do everything she can to clearly indicate as much, including kamikaze nosedives. She and I are learning our "language", and I think this is happening much earlier than it did with the older 3 kids. Of course by this point, with 4 kids, my brain and memory fail me often, I'm lucky my bra is under my clothes and not on top of them when I leave the house.
She chews on most anything she can get in her hands, or get her mouth onto. It's almost like having a puppy, minus the splintered table legs. And I can't tell you how many times I've reread this post to correct the baby's "help". I'll need a new desk soon. Baby drool is pretty potent stuff and I'm sure the veneer on my sawdust & glue furniture will give out in no time. As I type this, I'm sure my keyboard is at risk for shorting out from drool. She's standing on my lap, smacking the keyboard, chewing my fingers, and knocking things to the floor. Cats do that...come to think of it, she DOES sound just like a cat sometimes when she's talking or crying. I tell people who offer me a pet, "Um, no thanks I have 4 kids that do the exact same things as a pet, but at least I can make an attempt to get slave labor out of the kids, minus the shedding."