Actual conversation that took place in our home last night:

Haley (gesturing toward a laundry basket full of Kate's clothes): Dan, would you mind folding those for me?

Dan: Sure. (Looks at the basket, sees that the clothes are pink and miniature.) You mean you actually fold Kate's clothes? They're so little!

Haley (laughing, sort of wondering if he's kidding): Yes, I fold them. What did you think I did? Put them in a giant wad in her dresser?

Dan: Well ... yeah.

My sister Hannah and her fiancee Daniel are here this week, visiting us and doing some snowboarding in Santa Fe.We've been baking cookies and playing Skip-Bo and drinking wine and watching Lost. And practicing our sweet ninja moves. Life is good.

Dan found this site the other day. The idea is that you go and play this vocabulary game and every time you get a question right, some rice is donated to the UN World Food Program. But we're not really playing for altruism. We're playing for bragging rights. Dan started playing this weekend and called me in to watch him. After I stood over his shoulder and laughed, hard, about the words he didn't know, he made me play, which I sat down to do secure in the knowledge that I was about to wipe the floor with him. But the interesting thing about the game is that it very quickly figures out your overall vocabulary level and starts asking questions that will challenge you. I have never heard some of the words it asked me about, and have therefore been learning lots of new words, which is great. If the site works the way these people say it does, it may be the only time that my interest in big words has helped end world hunger. Or do anything useful, for that matter.

For the record, my best level was 43, which means I seriously stomped on Dan's top score of 30, but I had to break a sweat to get there. If you get higher than that, feel free to come back here and brag. But if you do, you have to use one of your newly-learned words in a sentence.

Dear Kate,

On Saturday, you turned six months old. Half a year. I can't believe it. I remember thinking, when I had been pregnant for six months, that I could barely remember not being pregnant and that I felt like I would be pregnant for the whole rest of my future life. It felt like a long, long time. But six months of you being here has gone by so quickly that I almost feel like someone is playing a trick on me.

Of course that person could be you. I'm starting to think that you are pulling some kind of elaborate prank where you see how many ridiculous questions you can get me to ask our pediatrician. In my more paranoid moments, I imagine the following conversation occurring in our doctor's office when I've left a message about one of my many questions.

Triage nurse, hanging up the phone after listening to my message: Ha! Hey everyone! That Wachdorf lady called again!
Other nurses, stopping what they are doing: Oh, this is going to be good. What did she ask this time?

The best example of this from the last month was the Teething Fiasco. One night in February, you went to sleep like you always do around 7 p.m. and around 10 p.m. you started crying. You usually have a feeding around then, so I went in and picked you up and tried to feed you. But you refused to eat and started thrashing around and screaming in this very frantic way. Dan came in to see what in the world was going on, and for the next hour, we tried everything we could think of to calm you down, all to no avail. You were clearly in some kind of pain, and the only thing I could imagine that would make you scream like that was an ear infection. I gave you some Tylenol and you eventually calmed down and went back to sleep, but woke up again in the night crying. So first thing in the morning, I took you to the doctor. I had called as soon as the office opened and been told that a slot was available in 45 minutes, so I hadn't had time to shower. I was also sleep deprived and very worried, so it was not one of my finer-looking moments. You, on the other hand, were very chipper. You absolutely beamed at the doctor, especially after she gave you a strawberry-flavored tongue depressor to play with, and it made me look like a total liar as I sat there talking about how you had been shrieking in pain just hours before. An exam revealed that your ears and every other part of your body were in perfect condition, and the doctor told me that the likely reason you were screaming like that was ... teething. Teething! Totally normal and expected teething! This had never crossed my mind. I just went straight to infections and terrible ailments, and straight into the doctor's office. I was so exhausted and anxious that I had started crying when I was describing your symptoms, and our poor doctor, who is a lovely woman, had to spend most of our visit reassuring me. Meanwhile, you cooed and grinned and drooled and generally made me wonder if perhaps our doctor is too nice, and you just like to visit her so much that you try to trick me into taking you there once a week or so. At this rate, they're going to reserve a parking spot for us soon. I take some comfort in the hope that I will learn from this and not be so easy to frighten one day when you have a younger sibling. But I'm sure he or she will concoct new and even more terrifying ways to help me earn frequent flier status at the doctor's office. Fantastic.

At least it's fairly obvious that you are, in fact, teething, and I wasn't hallucinating the whole thing. You will chew on anything, and you are developing some pretty strong jaws. Here is a picture of what happened when your daddy failed to listen to me when I said "You might not want to let her do that. She can really bite hard."

I can't complain, though, because the majority of this month has been hilariously fun. This is mostly due to the fact that you have started eating solid foods. And words cannot do justice to how much you love it. You love it so much that at first, it was really hard to feed you because you would get frustrated by the completely ridiculous two-second wait between when the spoon left your mouth and when I could refill it and put it back in, and invariably every meal ended with you having a little fit of impatience. You also felt very strongly that you should be allowed to control the spoon at all times. Never mind that you don't know how to use it. At all. But as we've practiced more, you've come to accept that I can get the food in your mouth more accurately than you can, and you only take occasional swipes at the spoon. You do kick your legs and wave your arms in anticipation as soon as I put you in your booster seat, and that is very funny. So far, your favorite foods are squash and sweet peas. Oddly enough, you are not at all enthused about apple sauce or other sweet fruits. I will be putting this on your application for the World's Weirdest Baby awards.

This month, you have started to divide the people around you into two categories: "Mommy" and "Everybody Else Who is Not Mommy." You want nothing to do with people in that latter category, and that has resulted in some interesting situations. Our sweet friends, Cody and Erika, parents of your buddy Lily, called us up and offered to babysit you one Saturday night this month so that we could go on a belated Valentine's Day date. Knowing that you are a little clingy at the moment, Erika suggested that we could just go to a restaurant near their house, which we did. We were gone all of 45 minutes. And apparently, you were fine for about the first 30. And then you noticed that you had been left, and you started crying. Eventually you upset Lily, who started crying to support you. Cody and Erika were good sports about it. But you might want to tone it down if you want to get invited to Lily's sleepover parties in a few years.

Developmentally, you are right on track, if a bit strangely proportioned. You weigh 14 pounds, 10 ounces, and are 25 and a quarter inches long. You are in the 20th percentile for weight, 40th for height and 70th for head circumference. That's right. 70th. We love you, so we're chalking that up to superior intelligence and brain size, but for your sake, I hope those numbers even out a bit before you start school. You could get some rough nicknames otherwise. Sputnik comes to mind.

You have mastered the art of sitting up, which seems to have been the height of your ambition, because since you learned that you can hold yourself up and play with your toys, you are completely uninterested in crawling or other forms of mobility. I am told that I should enjoy being able to put you in one place and know that you'll still be there if I turn my back on your for a few minutes, because soon enough you'll be all over the place. And I'm sure it's true.

You do like to stand up and dance.

You are also getting very affectionate and snugly this month. One day last week, I was getting ready to put you down for a nap and sat down at the computer to send a quick email. Most of the time if I have you on my lap while I work on the computer, you try to assist me by pounding on the keys and grabbing the mouse. But that day you put your arms around my neck and put your head on my shoulder, and in a few minutes I realized that you had fallen asleep there. It was so sweet that I just sat there for a few minutes, because you really are growing up so fast, and I know that soon, you will have better things to do than fall asleep in my arms. And oh, how I will miss that.

I love you,
Mommy

We recently purchased a video camera, and we are ready to share with you our first productions, called "Baby Kate in her Jumper" and "Baby Kate Eats Sweet Peas." Our films promise to be rather mundane, but at least now that Kate is a little older, there are actual activities to film. If we'd had a video camera in those first days of her life, you'd have been subjected to movies called "Baby Kate Breathes In and Out" and "Baby Kate Blinks." It's probably best for everyone that we waited.

This first clip is of Kate enjoying the jumper/baby space ship we bought for her a few weeks ago. After some time trying to figure out how it works, she has become a big fan of this thing, and we have become big fans of watching her jump in it, because she looks like she's doing some kind of Riverdance-style Irish jig.

And this is footage of one of our early sessions with solid foods, where you can observe for yourself Kate's determination to be master of her own destiny and control the spoon. She's mostly quit doing it now, but she had gotten pretty sneaky about darting her hand in at the last second to grab the spoon. A few times, I just let her have it, but then she'd invariably try to stick it down her throat.

Today, we are celebrating March 18, or, as Aaron refers to it, "Third Annual Survivor Day." So we remember all of this. And we are thankful, because today is a day when we were shown great mercy.

Psalm 103
Praise for the Lord's Mercies

Verses 1-5
"Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of His benefits.
Who pardons all your iniquities.
Who heals all your diseases.
Who redeems your life from the pit.
Who crowns you with lovingkindness and compassion.
Who satisfies your years with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle.

Verses 13-17

"Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him.
For He himself knows our frame. He is mindful that we are but dust.
As for man, his days are like grass. As a flower of the field so he flourishes.
When the wind has passed over it, it is no more, and its place acknowledges it no longer.
But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him
And his righteousness to children's children to those who keep His covenant."

A dozen beautiful roses arrived for me yesterday morning from Dan, who sent them not because it is a holiday or our anniversary or anything like that, but just because, to quote him, he loves me and wants me to feel special. (Awwww.) I did not waste the opportunity to have a teaching moment with Kate, and told her, while she ate her peaches and tried to calculate how she could get one of the roses into her mouth, that when she grows up, she should marry someone who loves her so much that he will send flowers for no reason. That information will come in handy when she's 25 and we let her start dating.

This is a portrait Daniel took of us when he and Hannah visited a few weeks ago. I'm not sure what the technique is called, but it involved him taking lots of little pictures of us and our surroundings and then piecing them together like a puzzle for the big picture. To see more pictures done this way, visit Daniel's Flickr page and check out the pictures tagged "New Mexico." Amazing.