Six Months and a Confession

I'll indulge you in the confession first -- because, if you're being honest, you'd much rather hear about that first anyway. So here it is...

I bought Autumn one of those ridiculous, expensive, thin rubber, French teething toys. For $17. If you don't have kids, or if you do but they don't hang with celebrity kids on weekends -- you probably don't know about this perplexing phenomenon -- and I'm sure you don't care. But in the world of expensive "must-have" baby accessories, this is one of the few that I was certain we would avoid...

Until Autumn got her hands on Dax's Sophie the Giraffe, and it was all downhill from there. While playing at the Schleen's last weekend, Autumn became truly enamored with Sophie, despite our best efforts to keep her occupied with the cheaper, less high profile teethers. Nikki explained that Sophie now has a new line of mushroom-shaped cousins. Two days later, for her six month birthday, she became the proud new owner of this:

Poor Wally can not handle it. The thing squeaks, feels and looks like a dog toy. The day we brought it out, Wally was so sure it was for him, poor guy. He paced around, whining, howling, even shaking at the anticipation. I had to run to the store to buy him his own, apparently shitty squeaky toy. He still wants the mushroom and spends most of his day trying to figure out how to sneak a moment with it.

But anyway, six months! Autumn's half birthday was last Tuesday, but she's been keeping pretty busy these days, with some of the following:

--Trying her darndest to crawl. She's pulling herself onto hands and knees, and rocking back and forth. She'll lunge forward with both hands and flatten, and sometimes will move one knee forward, but can't coordinate the hands yet.
--Wanting to stand all the time. She can pretty much pull herself up on her own if your hands are at the right level. She also likes to stand up just holding onto the couch or some of the taller toys we have. She can do this on her own and even play with things for up to a minute.
--Trying to walk. She's nowhere close to being able to stand unassisted, but she loves having us hold her hands while she takes steps all over the place. She pretty much likes anything that doesn't involve being in the same place for more than a couple seconds.
--Sitting up. She's pretty much mastered this, and can usually catch herself when she starts to fall.
--Eating. This kid loves to eat. When she sees her bowl of (gross, pasty) cereal, now rice or oatmeal, she gets a huge smile on her face and leans forward with her mouth open...while we're still across the kitchen with the bowl. She's also been eating sweet potatoes for the past few days. She acts like it's no big deal, like she's been eating them forever. We were hoping for some better faces to be honest.
--Sleeping in her crib, unswaddled (finally), in her sleepsack. She started sleeping through the night without any feedings a couple weeks ago, when we stopped swaddling her. She'll still wake up disoriented and cry about once a night (usually before we've gone to bed), but is pretty much sleeping from around 6:45-7:30pm to 6:30-7:30am. We like this a lot.
--Growing like a weed. She's up to 16lb 6oz (59th percentile) and 27 1/4 in (93rd percentile).
--Being awesome. At least we think so. Pics to come, promise...