Her new stages are lots of fun. She’s so social and loves nothing more than to look at people and talk to them. Her vocabulary mostly consists of vowels, but sometimes she strings three or four sounds together into little ‘sentences.’ Her engagement with the world means she’s started to fight sleep because she’d rather play than take a nap. Hmmmm – I think we’ll have this battle many, many more times. It’s pretty typical now for her to make eye contact with me and coo when I’m trying to rock her to sleep – it kills me to ignore her when she’s being so cute but I know that what she really needs is a nap and that we can play later. Besides, I’ve learned that a tired Clare is a cranky Clare so nap times are very important around here.

Besides being social, Clare is using her hands more. She runs her hands over my shirt when I’m holding her, grabs onto toys, pushes things away and sort of bats toys to her. She’s starting to connect that these hands are attached to her and that she has some control over them. She also finds them fascinating and will stare at them.

I’ve been back to work now for a week – I started last Wednesday full time. It feels good to be back and reconnect with a pre-Clare part of me (it reminds me that I was an adult before I was a mother) but my favorite part of the day is still coming back home to her. We love our nanny and so far our nannyshare arrangement is working out great. It is such a huge help knowing that our baby is being loved and cared for while we’re at work.

Playing with toys – though she was getting sleepy and went down for a nap shortly after this picture was taken.

A picture from last week when Great-Gramma visited. Four generations of McCloy women. I just love how Gramma is holding onto Clare’s hand. You can’t tell by our nice smiles here, but this picture is Exhibit A of where Clare gets her feistiness from (Exhibit B is a picture of the Dion women).