I’m officially on maternity leave again and doing even less blogging – but I’ve been reading blogs more than I was. I’ve found that my iPod touch is a fabulous blog-reading tool for motherhood: it’s small and light enough to be easy to read while nursing, even when I’m lying down and have the lights off trying to convince Jessica that it’s time to sleep. And Google’s RSS reader works beautifully on the iPod, rendering the images and text of most blogs very clearly on the small screen. And while it’s very hard to blog myself while nursing, it’s easy to click the little “share this post” button in the Google reader – so if you want to see some of the blog posts I’ve particularly enjoyed, you can check out (or even subscribe to) my shared blog reading.

I love this photo of Jessica I took this morning – despite the focus being on that cute tuft of hair instead of her face, and the framing being wonky. She’s four months old now, and absolutely wonderful. We’ve got to know each other so well I can almost always tell when she’s sleepy now, and put her down just as she wants to go to sleep, which is fabulous. Unfortunately that doesn’t work at bedtime, which is a bit of a mess, still. She’s just started reaching for things, very, very slowly – you can really see her brain working so hard to tell those hands to grab something. She’s smiley and laughs sometimes, she can roll a Bergen RRRRR right at the back of her mouth, she’s remarkably calm and can spend 20-30 minutes on a mat on the floor amusing herself just looking at things or with her baby gym. She used to roll from her tummy to her back but hasn’t in a few weeks. The other day she rolled from her back to her tummy, but hasn’t repeated that. And I’m absolutely loving having a baby.