One Month

Cora is officially one month old today! Hard to believe.

In the past month she has:

• Gotten a lot of hiccups (we both have them right now).
• Started looking directly at us and following us with her eyes for a few seconds.
• Developed more predictable eating/sleeping/playing patterns. 
• Started staying awake and alert for several hours at a stretch. Thankfully she's still a great sleeper and lets us get our shut-eye at night!
• Developed better head and neck control. Cora can now hold her head up stably for a good 10 to 15 seconds at a time.
• Given us a few precious smiles.
• Finally lost her umbilical cord stump, just yesterday. I kept it instead of throwing it away so Geoff could see it when he got home from school. I just new he'd want to see that shriveled up little piece of nastiness. Which reminds me, I think it's still sitting on the changing table - must remember to throw it away.
• Learned how to read and to solve differential equations.

Okay, that last one may not be strictly true.

Anyway. One of my coworkers gave me this really great idea of a way to document Cora's first year of life.  It's called "Marshmallow Pictures" and it's meant to capture your baby's development not only in growth, but also in her ability to interact with her surroundings. Here's how it works:

On her monthly birthdays, set her up in the same place. Same surroundings, same furniture, same everything. In front of her, set a marshmallow with an unlit candle in it - one marshmallow for each month of life. Then take a picture (or several). My coworker loves looking back at the pictures of her 3 kids and seeing them change from sleepy newborns who don't care about the marshmallows to inquisitive babies trying to grab them and shove them in their mouths.

It was a fun little photo shoot! Clark (the dog) just observed for most of it, but then decided to see what all the fuss was about for himself.