Six months passes a lot faster with your second child. It felt like an absolute age with my first. You’re learning how to look after a baby, second-guessing everything you do, and also adjusting to the massive change to your life; the sledgehammer of parenthood. With your second, you’re too busy to dwell on time passing and so it speeds by.

Things I’m enjoying at 6 months:

1. Frances’ constant smiles and laughter. It seemed to take her quite a while to laugh, and when she first began it was an odd, forced sound, very similar to the sound of her sobs. Now it is an easy chuckle. She is most amused by her brother, and sometimes sits there laughing at him while he’s doing something very ordinary, much to his bemusement and occasional irritation.
2. Watching the steady progression of new skills – she has been rolling both ways for a while, and seems to be making progress towards being able to sit, although currently she still lurches and falls over a few seconds after I carefully place her in a sitting position. She is very focussed on new things she can do with her hands at the moment, and spends ages concentrating on moving a toy around, or tearing paper to shreds (I must confess until recently I let her go to town on catalogues we get in the mail, as she “plays” happily with them for so long, but then she started eating them, so I’ve discontinued that baby-entertainment method). She babbles away with consonants in random emphatic streams of sound – dadagagadamamama.
3. Starting solids, which we did a few days before she turned six months old, as she was very interested in our food. I thought we would try more of a baby-led weaning approach this time, but Frances was very perturbed by the chunks of soft food she managed to gnaw off from larger pieces of food and immediately gagged them back up. I’ve been mashing up things with a fork instead and spoon feeding her, which she enjoys much more, and I love her fascinated/horrified expressions whenever she encounters something new.

Things I’m not enjoying at 6 months:

1. The lack of sleep is my major complaint, but then again it usually has been with both my children, and Edward improved. So, I trust, will Frances.
2. I am beginning to chafe slightly at my stay-at-home-parenthood lifestyle. I return to work in three months, and I think by then I’ll be really looking forward to some time on my own – oh that’s an odd thing to write, as I don’t have a whole lot of social time with other adults at the moment. But I am never without Frances – particularly at the moment, as she has been in an intensely clingy phase for the past month or so, never happy with anyone else, and I am beginning to look forward to a break from that. When I returned to work after my first maternity leave, I really enjoyed the novel feeling of only being responsible for myself in my hours away from home.
3. In almost equal measure, I find myself worrying about my return to work and Frances going to a family daycare for four days a week; an arrangement which we are experienced with and will no doubt work perfectly well, but I dread the awful feeling of removing yourself forcibly from a crying baby and rushing out the door. It’s never a pleasant experience.
4. Not being able to hand off the baby to anyone else without her howling – I don’t remember Edward being this excessively attached to me, and I hope it’s a short-lived stage.