All in all, a busy but relatively good weekend.

First, a few parental moments:

Today, Penny is five months old! Happy birthday, little girl!

Penny has apparently decided that it will be easier to learn how to stand and walk than to roll over and crawl. I know that in a few months, when she's mobile and we have to hurriedly childproof the house, we'll be hating it, but right now I think it's kind of cool. It means I can stop fretting that her lack of interest in rolling over is a sign that something's wrong. She's just one of those babies who doesn't care about rolling over.

Right now, of course, her standing is even weaker than her rolling - Matt or I have to help her to her feet and then help her keep from tipping over. But she does support all of her own weight, and she seems to love standing.

The second brag, I don't have a picture for: Last night, Penny slept through the night for the fourth night in a row. I'm beginning to hope that she's finally going to start doing so regularly. Now, if only I could start sleeping through...

(Mind you, "through the night" is a somewhat loose term. She was up Saturday morning at 6, and Sunday at 5.)

Actually, it wasn't so much our weekend that was busy, but our Saturday.

Around noon, we packed up and headed out. We visited with my parents for an hour or so, then went over to K.T. and Kevin's. Ostensibly that trip was so that I could give K.T. her housekey back that she'd given me so I could feed the animals while they were out of town, and we fully expected to linger and socialize for a little while. But it turned into a kind of playdate for Penny and Jessica.

K.T. and Kevin have these large foam squares with the alphabet in them - all the pieces punch out, and in a few years, I'm sure it'll be a fun way for Jessica to work on putting together puzzles and learning her letters. But in the meantime, the squares interlock and make a nice play-pad that's big enough for two.

Penny and Jessica didn't play together, naturally, but they're too little to have a sense of possession, so we swapped toys a little to see what the other might be interested in, and they looked at each other a lot. Mostly with a kind of confusion. Hey, that's not the baby from the mirror!

K.T. and Kevin got to hear Penny's pterydactyl shriek. K.T. thought it was hysterically funny, but agreed it would probably get old pretty quick. I'm beginning to think that we serve to keep K.T. and Kevin appreciative of how calm and relatively quiet Jess is. Penny spent the whole visit requiring constant attention, and did everything at top volume.

After that, we went back up to Williamsburg to meet the Brandts and Jeremy and Elizabeth to have a slightly belated birthday dinner for Kris. We met at Olive Garden, and Penny was pretty cool while we waited for a table, and while we placed our orders, but by then she had Had Enough.

She almost always gets a little fussy around 7 or 7:30 in the evening; her busy day had conspired to make her even more tired, and the Olive Garden was very noisy. You know what a tired, overstimulated baby does?

Yeah. She screams and cries a lot. I wound up having to take her to the bathroom to find a place that was fairly quiet to calm her down, and then when we got back to the table, I put her in her carseat and draped a blanket over the handle to try to reduce the stimuli a little.

Still, it could've been worse. She did in fact calm down enough to let Matt and I eat our dinners. After dinner, she was starting to get bored, so we took her out of the carseat and let her sit (and stand) on our laps through dessert.

At one point, she started to get a little fussy, and Matt tossed his napkin over her head, hoping to distract her. Amazingly, it worked, and she apparently really enjoyed it, so we left it there. She looked like she was wearing a little green burkha.

By the time we left, though, she was tired and overstimulated and hungry, so we raced home to feed her and put her to bed.

After such a busy day, we stayed home and relaxed on Sunday. Though we did perform a few experiments on the baby.

Wait, don't call Social Services yet...

Penny's daycare feeds her on a 2-hour schedule, which is kind of ridiculous for any baby over about 2 months of age, but getting them to do otherwise is an enormous hassle. She's actually not eating more than she should be, especially if she's sleeping through the night, but Saturday she refused to let us stretch the time between feedings by even so much as five minutes. Matt and I became concerned that she's learning to eat every two hours, whether she's hungry or not.

So Sunday we tried an experiement. We fed her six ounces instead of the usual four, and waited to see if she would be satisfied longer.

Sure enough, a 50% increase in the size of her meal resulted in a 50% increase in the length of time before she decided she needed to eat again. Which was a relief.

Daycare will still continue feeding her on a 2-hour schedule, which means weekday evenings will remain on a 2-hour schedule, but now we know that on weekends we can push that to three hours with a larger bottle. Whew.

The other experiment was related. For a few weeks now, she's been occasionally grabbing her bottle when we put it in her mouth. A few times, we've let go and let her try to manage it. If there's only an ounce or so left, she doesn't do too bad a job.

Yesterday I dug out the little handles that I bought to fit on the bottles, to see if they made any difference. As it turns out, she can handle four or five ounces with them.

This morning, I got to give her breakfast and check my e-mail at the same time. It was kind of cool.

Five months. Wow.

--Liz