Staceytown: 24 Weeks

This week Josie celebrated her first Christmas :) But first, we had yet more medical issues, with a trip to Urgent Care on Thursday after she broke out in a rash, presumably due to an allergic reaction to the new medication she was on for her ear infection. She's on new medicine now and the rash cleared up within a couple of days, so hopefully this medicine will do the trick. We kept her out of daycare for the week, first because of her fever and virus, and then for the latter part of the week since she was being a bit needier and more easily upsettable than normal, so we wanted her to be able to get a bit more one-on-one attention. Ryan's family really helped us out last week - Ryan and I alternated staying home with her at the beginning of the week, then Ryan's mom, dad, and youngest sister each helped watch her for the second half of the week. That is a huge benefit to living so close to family, because it turns out it's really not very easy to work and watch her at the same time, although it does really help that she can entertain herself with her toys for a little while now.

This week really brought a lot of changes with Josie - she seems to have made some big developmental leaps, and that on top of being sick and feeling miserable! She is now babbling, which is apparently the next step in language acquisition after cooing - cooing was working on the vowel sounds, now she's working on her consonants, "bababa" being a favorite so far.

She has also gotten far more active and precise with her hands. She went from grabbing my camera strap for the first time (which was oh so cute and charming - little did I know just how quickly she was going to progress in this skill) to being super quick with grabbing things (and usually sticking them directly in her mouth). Josie even grabbed my shirt as I was walking by, which was crazy since normally she had been a bit slower to grab onto anything - first she would usually touch it with just the tips of her fingers, then bat at it a few times, then eventually grab onto it. In the space of a couple of days, she went from that level of contemplation to basically seeing something and immediately grabbing for it.
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[The first of probably many pictures like this]

Josie has also gotten much quicker to laugh, which is just great :) She randomly started laughing at me the other day because I was doing... approximately nothing. I was walking to the kitchen and Ryan was heading up the stairs with her, and something about that situation was hilarious. And each time I said "what?" or "Josie!" she would just giggle more :) Ryan also called me out on the fact that I had yet to do "superbaby" with Josie, which she just loves. I tend to be a bit more restrained with her physically since I'm not exactly very coordinated (I especially take to heart Ryan's song entitled "You can't fall off the floor"), but I buckled down and agreed to do it last night. There were just a couple of problems: 1) it's hard to focus when there is a baby with a huge grin of gleeful anticipation laying 2 inches from my face, and 2) I apparently have no upper body strength, because I could only lift her up a couple of times for a matter of seconds. In the meantime, I could always just bounce her toys off her, which she also inexplicably loves:

Anyway, on to Christmas pictures! We had a last-minute change of plans and spent Christmas Eve with my family at our house this year (since we thought it might be pushing it to stay overnight at my mom's like normal with Josie feeling under the weather), and then went to Ryan's sister's house on Christmas Day with his family.
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