Playdate @ Chloe's

On Tuesday we went on a play date at Chloe’s house. We had a lot of fun. There were about 8 moms’ there with their babies, but Holly was the oldest and only cruiser. Well, towards the end a mom with a 9 and ½ month old, Mackenzie came with her mom Amy and she was able to cruise, but she seemed to mostly stay in one place. She actually could stand independently, like if you pulled her up to a stand she would just hang out there standing and eventually sit herself down, but not take any steps. It was pretty cool to see.

There were a few 8 months old who had the crawling and sitting down mastered, but they didn’t seem to want to wander off and crawl anywhere either. Then, there were a few littler ones who were just getting the hang of sitting. Holly I guess is a very independent baby, she is not afraid of other people, and as long as mommy is within her range of sight, she is happy to be off playing on her own.

It was fun to see all of the babies interact with each other, and Holly is definitely a social butterfly. She goes right up to the other babies and tries to make friends, she of course wants to see whatever it is they are playing with, but then gives it back after she “takes” her turn and she moves on to the next thing. She was friendly with the moms too using them all as a means to travel to wherever she was going simply cruising right onto them and over them and climbing wherever she needed to go.

She loved playing with all of the new and interesting toys, and Chloe has gotten some new ones since our last visit. I decided to get one of those leapfrog tables after playing with it at Chloe’s house, she had two one up on its legs and one on the floor, (which I didn’t realize was the same toy at first, so it sold me that the legs were removable) Chloe’s mom said they are on craigslist pretty cheap, I found one for only 10$ so I am hoping that they sell it to me, but the lady did have some other inquiries. There was also this cool front door toy, that was big and something you could use for Cruising. The door open and closed which she loved and there was a little mail slot with an opening and closing cover that said, you’ve got mail and she did that one over and over. She is starting to understand that she was controlling that sound and making that noise, and loved it.

There were a lot of neat musical toys and new things to chew on of course. It was funny as we had to extra baby proof. Holly found all kinds of neat ways to escape from the play area, like going under an end table into the other part of the room. We also had to move the fence, since she is a wanderer. The other moms like to say that Holly is a very “busy” baby, which is sweet, but what they really mean is that she doesn’t sit still for a second, and is extremely active. She is hard to keep up with sometimes.

We had fun overall. I am starting to try and teach Holly gentle, and she doesn’t really know her own strength and has no notion of where her body is in space. She tramples over all things, be it toys or other babies, sometimes even trying to sit on them, and scotch them out of her way. I think one of the babies pulled her hair, but I can’t recall for sure if it was here or somewhere else we played this week, but I thought it was good for her, she is always in there face, and tries to pull on them and grab there hair. Maybe she isn’t sophisticated enough yet to understand that it hurts, and that is what she does to them, but she is tough, and it took about 3 seconds of me holding her before she was pushing mommy away so she could go and play some more.