After some fun playtime on the living room floor this evening, we started to wind down for Winnie’s bedtime routine.  When she’s not tired out of her mind, the routine starts around 8 (so that mama can get home and get in a feeding or two before bed!) with a bath, infant massage, Goodnight Moon, and a lullaby.  It’s worked really well for us, with a few bumps during the recent teething spell and that pesky cold we both caught last week.

Winnie absolutely loves her bath.  She splashes, giggles, talks, and plays with her water cup and rattle ball.  She loves it when I pour water over her head, and rarely fusses when it’s time to get out.  We all love bathtime.

Usually, she stays pretty still in the bath— flailing arms and legs, for sure, but keeping, you know, relatively stationary.  Until today, that is.  Five seconds into the bath and Winnie had tossed her arm over the side and hoisted herself up like so (warning: the grout in our bathroom could use some work/a blowtorch):

The picture below is a solid five minutes later— she refused to break her concentration, hell bent on holding herself up.  We gently laid her back against the backrest in her tub a couple of times, but she popped back up instantly.   We let her hang out for a while like that, before I decided she was pulling herself too far forward toward the water for me to realistically avoid a heart attack.   We rinsed her off and headed for the nursery.

Once she was down on the bed, all dry, toasty, and ready for infant massage, she decided she was ready for more.  She likes to pull herself up using my hands as resistance, and she quickly flopped up to sitting, before detaching her hands from mine, and resting like so:

So.  That’s a thing now.  She rolled from here onto her tummy, then onto her back, then onto her side, where she wiggled around, and placed her feet onto my legs to pull herself up to standing.  She’s so strong!  As long as I keep my hands around her waist for balance, she can bear all of her weight on her legs for what seems like an eternity.

Oh, knuckle dimples.  Swoon.