When baby and dog seem more and more alike

BabyDumpling now has six teeth! All of a sudden the other day, we noticed that she had four teeth simultaneously coming out from the top. I was expecting her two front teeth to come out because we knew she has been teething lately, but I didn’t expect that four teeth would come out at once!

Although she had been fussy a little while ago, it wasn’t as bad as I imagined. I had heard from other parents that teething was horrible, that their babes would wake up constantly at night, that they would scream all the time and it would be hard to calm them down. BabyDumpling would only wake up once or twice at night, and most of the time, she’s able to soothe herself back to sleep with Mr. Hippo (a soothie with a stuffed animal attached). Also, it was hard to tell if the fussiness was due to teething or because she was sick, since she had caught some kind of virus a couple times this past winter.

BabyDumpling has been doing so well with sleep lately, I can hardly believe it. We can now put her down for naps without rocking her at all, just putting her directly in the crib with Mr. Hippo, and she will easily nap for 2 hours at a time. This past weekend, she napped for nearly 4 hours straight in the morning, and then another 2 hours in the afternoon, for a total of almost 6 hours! PapaDumpling was even worried she was sleeping too much. But since she doesn’t sleep much at daycare, I want to let her sleep as much as she wants to at home. Even if she wakes up earlier during her naps, she just rolls over, grabs Mr. Hippo, sticks it in her mouth, and goes back to sleep. Mr. Hippo has now become her sleep-time buddy, and our saviour. I don’t know what we would do without Mr. Hippo.

Lately, we have been encouraging her to speak. She has said “mama” and “baba” lots of times already, but I am not sure she actually knows what they mean, that they refer to us. Sometimes she makes the sound “babababababa” when she’s playing by herself, so I think she is just fascinated by the sound she can make. She seems to find it easier to pronounce “b” rather than “m” (or maybe PapaDumpling has been brainwashing her a lot on their way to/from daycare), but I still maintain that the first word she spoke was Ra, the Egyptian sun god.