She's fine

To reassure the grandparents out there, Lia is fine now. We went to the beach again this past weekend, taking a vacation day on Friday. She had no fever on Thursday, so we left Thursday night for Westhampton. Friday, she did have a low fever that didn't really worry us, but she wasn't eating, which did worry us. She was gnawing on the bottle, but after 10 minutes, she barely had half an ounce. So I dug around in my first aid kit that I always bring when we travel and found a tube of Orajel that we had originally bought for Ian. It hadn't expired yet, so Jeff rubbed some on her gums. That did the trick. She promptly chugged 5 ounces and passed out. So we had to rub Orajel on her gums periodically Friday, but the fever went away and she was eating. The rest of the weekend was fever- and pain-free, but she's still waking in the middle of the night.

But let's catch up a bit on eating solids. She now has had rice and oatmeal cereals, peas, carrots (Auntie Zeynep got to feed them to her for the first time on July 12) and squash, which she tried for the first time on Saturday. This past week, we had a really delicious seedless watermelon, so Jeff felt sorry for her with the fever and teething pain and let her gum the watermelon. The first time, she just licked the watermelon, but the second time, she was really gumming it and we had to be careful not to let her bite off a piece and choke on it. She lost interest in the watermelon as soon as the piece warmed up from all of the licking and gumming.