Dear Harper,

Today, you are six months old.

I feel like every month, I’m going to be a little baffled by the process of remembering what happened in the last 30 days, how much you’ve changed, what you’ve learned to do. You are an ever changing, evolving little girl and I find it hard to keep up. It wouldn’t surprise me if you crawled out of your crib right now and knocked on my door to tell me that you’d like to play outside. Okay, that definitely would surprise me, but you get the point. You are growing and we are loving it!

This past month, Harper, you’ve started to eat “food”. I put food in parentheses because it’s mashed up and I wouldn’t eat it, but you seem to be liking it just fine. We started with bananas which you seemed fine with, moved on to pears which got a similar response, and rounded it out with peaches which were tolerable. Then, Harper, then we started on applesauce. Oh my goodness, do you ever like applesauce! Something totally clicked in you after you licked the spoon for a taste because all of a sudden, you were making weird noises every time the spoon wasn’t in your mouth, feeding you more delicious apples. I couldn’t shovel it in there fast enough! And you didn’t even attack your hands and get it on your feet. I’m pretty sure I called your Dad afterwards to tell him about our triumph because every single day leading up to that point, all I recount in your eating stories was about how the food ended up in your hair and between your toes. But not applesauce- that went straight in to your mouth and stayed there. And you know what, Harper? Apples are my favorite, as well.

About a week ago, you started pushing all of your weight on to your arms and locking them. From there, I have started pushing your legs under you. From there, you’ve started rocking. It’s pretty fantastic to watch because you are still so tiny but you look like you are about to crawl any minute. I always thought you’d crawl sooner rather than later on the count of you hating to sit still, but it still blows my mind to think that it could actually be here before I know it. Almost every single mom, when talking about the transition from being immobile to mobile, says that I shouldn’t wish for you to crawl yet because my life will change and blah blah blah. You know what Harper? CRAWL. I can’t wait! I know it’ll change our lives but I am excited about that change. I know how badly you want to move and explore and I’m pretty sure I didn’t give birth to you so that you could sit in one spot for the rest of your life. So you do it when you want to and I’ll deal with it and love it, deal?

We celebrated your first Halloween this past month. You didn’t care, your Dad didn’t care, but I cared. We dressed you up as a lion (thanks to your Grandmom) and HECK- you were cute. We went out trick or treating with your friends Estlin and Olivia and even though you couldn’t appreciate what was going on, I was really happy to have you out and about with us. Not because you scored me a few treats of my own, but because you make every experience better.

We love you,