dinner of champions

We could tell Maya had been practicing. She ate her first serving of rice cereal like a champ.

chomping

We decided to start Maya on "solid" food (rice mush). We think she saw it coming, though, because she started doing this, a few hours before mealtime.

sitting with style

In addition to babbling in two syllables, Maya can sit on her own now, for a few minutes at a time before slowly toppling over. She is also showing interest in being mobile but only for really important things like the laptop, her favorite book and (sadly) the remote control.

While she is most often still astonished, she has added 'perplexed' to her facial expression repertoire, seen above, with a variation seen below.

First egg caught on film

To respond to the popular demand voiced by a miriad of tiny people inside our heads we decided to post the video of the bluebird laying the first egg. For those of you who don't have four and a half minutes and way too much ADHD to even last a minute here is a quick synopsis:
Chapter 1 - sitting.
Chapter 2 - being fed by a spouse.
Chapter 3 - heaving.
Chapter 4 - pushing.
Chapter 5 - is it out yet?
Chapter 6 - egg bowling.
Chapter 7 - sitting.

faces

Maya loves faces. She loves her Mirror Me! book that has a cartoon animal on one page making a face, and a mirror on the facing page. She looks at the baby in the mirror, and smiles, and then I tilt the book so she can see a Mama in the mirror, and she smiles.

But as much as Maya loves faces, she has been pretty much concentrating her own face into one main look-- astonished. Sometimes she deviates from astonished to practice happy, and occasionally, upset. But mostly she's astonished. Recently our friends came to visit and practiced some of these facial expressions with Maya.

end of May wrap-up

I am a little late in my end of May wrap-up, but here are some of the exciting things that happened:

We got Maya's high chair, so she can sit at the table and eat her fist like a grown-up.

Maya helped her Mama with some landscaping.

I now appreciate why agrarian cultures all over the world use baby slings of some type.

We have a song sparrow incubating at least 7 eggs in the front yard (see nest picture).

Our lady bluebird is incubating 5 eggs, the last one laid yesterday, in the bluebird house in our backyard. We have a tiny camera in the box so that we can watch her live on our tv, which we do pretty much all the time. As I type she has her eyes closed, listening to the pouring rain.