Although she has yet to get a sweet bike or acquire nunchuck skills, Ada has developed many new skills in her first 12 weeks of life. And now that I think of it, I have also developed many new skills in her first 12 weeks of life. Her skills are much more impressive.

Quite a few of my new skills involve doing a task while nursing. I am getting much quicker at typing with one hand, and I have managed crocheting, reading, talking on the phone, and even eating while nursing. I have learned, however, that it is best if Ada either wears a hat or has a blanket over her during my eating-while-nursing performance, just so she doesn't end up with cracker crumbs littering her hair.

Breastfeeding on it's own is a skill that both Ada and I have mastered. It's not the "It's natural, so it must be easy" skill that I had a tendency toward believing before being a mother. Luckily Ada caught on pretty quickly. We sure have had a lot of practice in the past 12 weeks. Another thing that we've had plenty of practice on is diaper changing. Although we've undertaken many a diaper change in a variety of places, Ada can attest to the fact that the best place for it is on her changing table with her elephants. Ada's absolute favourite place is on her changing table where she can watch her elephant mobile dance above her head, and she can have HUGE SMILES and kick her legs frantically so that it makes it more difficult (and therefore longer) for the diaper change to happen. We named the three elephants on remembrance Day after listening to God Save the Queen, so now the elephants are Longto, Ray, and Noverus. If you don't get it, say the three names one after the other and think of the words to the song... Let me know if you still don't get it...

A few of my other new skill include: attaching the BabyBjörn to me while holding a fidgety/sleeping/crying/etc baby; jiggling the stroller at just the right frequency for baby pleasure; using a breast pump; dressing a baby that is excited about her dancing elephants; getting through the day on minimal sleep; taking pictures of the cutest baby ever; and that's just to name a few.

Ada's skills are much more impressive. For example, she can now hold her head with minimal jiggling. She can survive tummy time for at least 30 seconds without getting mad. And let's not forget regularly losing socks, pooping 5 minutes after a diaper change, marathon hiccups, kicking her feet to make her arch light up and sing (I'll post videos of that soon), and the cutest goos, aahs, and coos imaginable. She's been talking up a storm these days. And she is also very skilled at stopping strangers on the street almost every day just to tell me that she is an adorable baby. I think that's the greatest skill of all - making people smile.

The following is a video that I made when I was visiting my family in London. My mum and sister were playing with Ada, and I was enjoying watching my mum interact with Ada and didn't think a picture would be enough, so I switched the camera to video but didn't tell my mum and sister. It's all cute and cuddly until the near the end, when Ada decided to put in her own two cents worth. I put this on YouTube yesterday, and already there have been over 300 hits. All I have to say is that, you may not believe it (and my sister didn't, as you will see), but it honestly was the baby.

Okay, so I wasn't in London England, but I did go to visit my sister in London Ontario for a couple of days. The above picture is Ada with my sister, Sharon, and my dad. Ada and I have been keeping busy lately. This post will attempt to summarize our past week's events.

We have become regulars at our building's Moms & Tots group on Thursdays, and I'm actually remembering names beyond "Aidan's mom" and "Luca's mom". One of the moms is permanently moving to Texas in a couple of weeks, so we arranged a moms night out at a local club this past Friday night. We were all nervous for a variety of reasons, but the biggest two were leaving our little ones at home, and what in the world will I wear?? We've all become accustomed to wearing clothes that we don't mind being spat up on. And for me, anyway, my body still doesn't quite fit into my pre-pregnancy fancy clothes (mainly due to the effects of nursing on my upper half...). We had a good time, though. I thought I would be the most nervous about leaving Ada for the first time since I'm the newest mother in the group, but it turned out that we were all just about as nervous as each other, so I felt okay.

I also joined another mom and baby group - at the local library. Every Friday at either 10am or 11am (we're signed up for the 10am group, but we can attend the 11am group if we can't make it on time), a group of about 20 parents and their babies are lead by a friendly librarian. There are 2 bins filled with toys and books for playtime, which are then put away for about 30 minutes of singing and story reading. The songs are mostly interactive, and all the parents know all the words and actions, so I have some work to do to catch up. Then the books and toys are brought back out as the parents pack up and the children interact with each other. It should be fun!

Over the weekend we had a lovely visit from our friends Dave and Jill who were in town getting Christmas presents at MEC. Yes, they are much more organized that Jonathan and I. We just talk about starting our Christmas shopping before December, but we don't actually do it. But we still have time this year! Anyways, we went for dinner at Tortilla Flats, and Dave and Jill were able to meet Ada. We already have plans in the works for taking her on a canoe trip. I hope she likes portaging. :)

Jonathan also snagged the 294th of 300 available Wii consoles from Best Buy on Sunday morning, so that was the highlight of Jonathan's weekend.

Ada and I took a train back from London last night, so it was Ada's first train trip. My mum thought this was significant enough to take many pictures at the train station, so a woman offered to take a picture of the group of us. Anyone watching would have thought that Ada and I were leaving for some distant location for an extended period of time. Ada did enjoy her train trip, and one of the passengers told me that he thought Ada was the cutest baby he had ever seen. He didn't need to convince me of that. :)

The reason I went to London was to provide Ada Cuddles for my sister. Last Thursday, her lovely little cat, Scarlett, became suddenly ill and unexpectedly died. She was only a couple of years old, and was Sharon's first cat after she moved out of our parent's place. Ada Cuddles are magical, and can help a person going through the grieving process. If anyone is need of Ada Cuddles, please let me know. Ada Smiles are also known to have healing powers, but may tear a mother's heart strings.

For Scarlett - you brought a lot of happiness to Sharon's life, and you will be greatly missed.

Since the most famous person that I share my birthday (April 20) with is a person who is widely known to be synonymous with evil (that being Adolf Hitler), I was interested in who Ada shares a birthday with. I found out that she shares it with quite an interesting collection of people. Included are an infamous outlaw, a legendary comic, a 60s blonde bombshell, the ex-girlfriend of both Marilyn Manson and Howard Stern, the lead singer of a famous English rock band, as well as a guy named Dweezil. As I said, quite a collection.

Another reason that my interest in famous birthdays piqued was the result of Ada provoking strangers to talk to me. Her extreme cuteness is too irresistible, you see. I love it - you get to meet the most interesting people. I ended up having an extended conversation with a gentleman on the subway about his collections, which included autographs. He organizes them by birth date, which now means that he has the impressive ability to tell most people which famous person you share your birthday with. I stumped him with Ada's birthday. Apparently he doesn't have the autograph of Dweezil Zappa.

I've been playing more with YouTube, and I now have a couple more videos available. If you're interested, you can see the first time I captured Ada's beautiful smile on video. I took me 2 weeks to finally get, and has resulted in way too many videos of Ada frowning at me as I talk in a way-too-high-pitched voice saying "Hello Ada! Let's see your smile! That's a good girl!" It's amazing how quickly "motherese" sets in once you have your own baby. Scary, but true. The following also contains annoying mother-blabber, but if you want to see Ada dancing (aka kicking her feet) and giving cheeky smiles, then you will have to suffer through it.

I have just discovered that only registered blogger users were able to post comments, which was not my intention. I apologize to those of you who have attempted to post a comment and were not able to.

To reward you for your patience, here is an animation that Jonathan created of a 4 day old Ada.

Here is my first attempt at attaching a video. This is Ada showing off her new rattling skills. She has a cow rattle in her hand, and the little ducks on her feet have rattles in them too. As you can see, Ada takes this rattling business very seriously.

Enjoy!

Yesterday was Ada's two month doctor appointment, which went very well. She is now 11lb 9oz and 61 cm long! At least I know that all this breastfeeding is going somewhere! She enjoyed having the first half of the checkup, which included getting naked, listening to her heart and lungs, getting measured, checking her fontanelle, her eyes, and reflexes. All good! And Ada was happy to show of her healthiness. What she did not enjoy was getting her shots, which my doctor warned me repeatedly is quite common. I asked to feed her during the shots so that she would have something comforting during the trauma. After each poke, she yelled, got purple in the face, and then realized that there was milk to be had and continued happily sucking. Oh, the power of the boob.

Sunday was Ada's 2 month birthday. I can't believe it. It's funny how the time seems to have flown by, but at the same time I feel as if Ada has always been in my life. I couldn't imagine it any other way now. Ada decided that the best way to celebrate each month birthday is with a beer. She is truly her father's daughter.

My goal this week is to figure out how to put videos onto this blog. I have some great ones of her smiling, dancing, playing with rattles, and more, so I would love to share them with everyone. I'll try my best to have it figured by the end of the week, but that will totally depend on my boss, Ada. She runs a tight shift. :)

I finally learned how to add some links on the sidebar there, so now there is a direct link to my Flickr page, a few links to blogs of my friends, as well as few of my favourite links. I'll add more as I think of them. I'm feeling rather chuffed with myself, with these new skill of adding links to my blog. You would think being with Jonathan for almost 10 years that some geekiness would rub off on me, but apparently not.

Speaking of rubbing, I gave Ada an olive oil massage today. It was recommended by my midwife, as well as in a book that was given to me from Pam, written by William and Martha Sears, called The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby From Birth to Age Two. I got her all cute and naked, laid her out on a nice soft blanket in the sun, and massaged olive oil into her skin from her feet all the way up to her lovely little face. I didn't know what she would think of it. I'm pretty sure she enjoyed it, since she spent the time waving her arms and legs around and cooing, and then I got a HUGE SMILE when I was all done. What better payment is that?