all i want for christmas is my two front teeth...

In the tradition of the Mott women, Marie has an affinity for carrots. Not only does she like the mushy, baby food kind, but she has also taken an interest in crunchy raw ones.

Unfortunately, she doesn't quite have enough teeth to do much with them. She gnaws, but without much in the way of results.

"Hey, get back here, carrot!"

Alas, Oko is also a big carrot fan. For now, he gets to munch on them. Marie's gonna have to wait for those upper incisors to come in.

who woulda thunk it?

So a few nights ago I put Marie to bed (which is a kind of misleading way to phrase it, since she hasn't slept for more than an hour at a time in the evenings in several weeks, meaning every time I've put her down it's been for something more resembling a catnap than a good night's sleep), only to have her wake up crying a short time later. In my Mama-knows-it-all kind of way, I just assumed that it was Toffi's banging stuff in the kitchen that woke her, but when I walked into the bedroom, I saw that she was on her hands and knees, crying her little heart out. Turned out she had rolled over in her sleep to practice crawling, thus waking herself up. Good lord, I wish she would hurry up and figure out how this crawling thing works. Maybe we can all get some decent sleep again.

creepy crawly critter

Sometimes even the cutest little babies can be monsters. Since we got back to Berlin, Marie has been trying to crawl. I mean she's really been putting her heart into it, like, "Come Hell or high water, people, I am gonna crawl RIGHT NOW!" The only problem is that it hasn't actually happened yet, and after every failed attempt - some of which end with Marie landing on her face and some with her moving backwards - she gets very frustrated. I've been telling myself that her being thiiiiiiiiis close to reaching this developmental milestone has been the culprit behind her rather... ahem... trying behavior. She's been nursing constantly, scratching and clawing at me, sleeping lightly (when she sleeps at all), trying to crawl off her changing table, and, best of all, sometimes spends an hour or more making loud noises in the dark while we are all trying to sleep. This last one is particularly bad because as soon as Toffi and I make attempts to ignore the loud baby in our bed and just fall asleep, her experimental noises turn into real crying, which means any chance I had of sleeping has been delayed even more.

Of course, I have no idea if this behavior is linked to the crawling at all. I'm just guessing, which is pretty much all you can do when you have a baby. Seriously, you get an idea from baby books about what sorts of things they go through at certain times, you get a heads up from other parents about which behaviors might mean what, and you have a certain amount of your own intuition. But when it comes down to it, you've only known this person for a few months, and they can't be all, "Yo Mom, I'm trying to finally get this crawling thing down, so if I seem a little cranky, that's why." So here's hoping that she crawls one day soon and that things calm down after that - at least until she learns the next cute thing.

tooth number two

Well, Marie now sports two pearly whites. It's funny how they appear so suddenly. One day I'm telling people, "I think she's about to get a tooth," while simultaneously wondering if that's actually true. And the next day I suddenly notice a sharp little edge on her gum. I ask myself whether Marie actually feels the moment the tooth breaks through the gum.

she suffers in style...

Anyway, we're back in Germany. The flight was a little harder than the flight over, mainly because we didn't have a nifty bassinet mounted to the bulkhead wall in front of us, so one of us was holding Marie at all times. She actually slept quite a bit, but neither Toffi nor I slept a wink. We only managed to stay awake until 6 pm that first evening in Marburg, and I still feel like I'm recovering. We'll be heading back to Berlin in a few days, and we've rented a minivan to ensure that we can fit all the stuff we've got with us - the luggage barely fit into Toffi's parents' Benz for the drive home from the airport. Between now and then, we'll be relaxing here in picturesque Marburg, continuing our adventures in feeding Marie solids and having fun playing with our new laptops.