Half baked

It is suddenly more difficult to bake...

...Or cook, or tidy up, or do anything around the house. That must mean that Claire is changing. She doesn't sleep for hours at a time on end the way she used to, but instead takes shorter naps and is awake for more hours of the day. This is good because she sleeps more at night which is better for all of us. Unfortunately her best sleep is in my arms because when I put her down she wakes up.

Strapping her in the Sugli is a good short term solution, but now that she's on the brink of 20lbs, I'm on the brink of breaking my back if I carry her around for too long at a time.

I used to stick her in the Bumbo chair up on the counter so she could watch me bake, but now that she has a tad more mobility she reaches out to grab whatever is nearby.  Last week she managed to reach the terra cotta kitchen utensil holder and tip it over sending the utensils all over the place.  And if she's not grabbing at things, she'll arch backwards to try pop herself from the chair. So not safe.

Today I was determined to try out a new muffin recipe so I plopped her in her ExerSaucer and got down on the floor with her to prep some of the ingredients. This worked for a while but there's only so long you can watch someone grate carrots before you'd want to cry. So she eventually started to cry and I put the muffin making on pause to feed her. There were lots of feeding pauses actually. I just pulled the muffins out of the oven now so I'd say it took about 3 hours from start to finish. Was it worth it? I'm not sure yet. I'll see once the muffins have cooled down and I try them out.