Cot acrobatics

For most of Anya's life, she's slept in some sort of swaddle. These have ranged from the standard away-in-a-manger arrangement when she was a newborn; to an odd straightjacket-like thing that pinned her arms by her sides when she was a month or two old; to a y-shaped zip-up swaddle more recently that tends to keep her arms up each side of her head.

We've been looking forward to her growing out of these for ages and now she is finally sleeping swaddle-free. And I wasn't prepared for how hilarious it would be watching her try out different positions in her cot.

For one thing, her night time tantrums have gained massively in terms of variety and personality. Previously, if she woke up hungry you'd find her lying on her back crying, maybe twisting her back a bit and likely kicking up her legs in frustration. Nowadays, it's always a surprise when we go in to her.

Sometimes she'll be sitting semi-cross-legged on the mattress, waving her arms in the darkness like a demented sadhu. Other times, she lies on her front and pushes herself up with her arms, bawling at her sheet like an imperious dowager wailing over a gutter where she's just lost a string of pearls. Kate has even found her standing at her bars, rattling them like she'd been imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit.

I don't mean this to sound insensitive. Obviously it's horrible to hear your baby cry and we only see this stuff because we're in her room trying to cheer her up.
But I remember thinking the same thing when I first heard her cry after she was born. Though it's bred in the bone that a baby's cry should be heart-rending to a parent, beneath that feeling there was something wonderful and remarkable in it: this was some of the first communication between us. Crying isn't so different to talking, and it's much more emphatic.

So given she's still going to cry for food occasionally at night, I quite like that she's doing it in all these new ways. All these cot positions are so filled with character that I can't separate them from one of the things I'm enjoying watching so much at this age of her life: the gradual unfolding of her personality.