For a long time I’ve been convinced my daughter is part owl. The way she can turn her head around almost 180 degrees is quite something to behold as she attempts to watch what’s going on in the entire room all at once.

Now she’s starting to move herself, she’s begun sleeping in a position which I think is reflective of the fact about 10% of her DNA is snail. Somehow she can turn herself from back to front (which is de rigeuer for a baby her age) and then wriggle her knees up to her chest, tucking in the elbows and putting her head on her hands. As I found out today she can do all this with hardly a brushing of the bed sheets.

What you’re left with is a curled-up baby with her bum in the air looking for all like world like a snail in profile. Because she’s lying on her front though, she’s dribbling onto the bedding, which means that as she moves around the cot, there’s a distinct trail of baby drool left wherever she’s been.

As I say, part baby, part owl, part snail.

Lucy has been getting particularly hungry recently and the blissful 11-hours-a-night sleep pattern has once again given way to waking up crying for a bottle at 4am. She’s now reached a point where we can’t keep her fed enough on milk alone, so that’s a pretty good cue to begin the messy process of weaning from milk onto solids.

We went out on Friday and bought a high chair, got home and eagerly began to assemble it. Luckily I’m the sort of dullard who reads the instructions completely before assembly and discovered at an early stage we were two bolts short. It was too late to pop back to the shop, so first thing Saturday morning I went and picked-up a replacement. That went together much better and Lucy’s first lunchtime of solids commenced.

She took the food surprisingly well – the independent little thing wanted to feed herself with the spoon, which I guess is a good thing. She seemed to enjoy it, but pulled some really funny faces. We began with the standard first food of pureed potato. Not too much, and nothing complicated, but it’s a recommended place to start. Obviously there was food everywhere, but when you’re expecting that it’s not really a problem.

All seemed OK, so we did the same for tea that evening. Unfortunately by bedtime she had developed a rash, which by midnight has manifested itself into swelling around the face. After a couple of calls to NHS Direct and the emergency doctor, we decided to stay awake and keep an eye on her for a while. By morning things weren’t any worse, but they weren’t any better either, so we went to the Southampton walk-in centre for some advice.

We saw a very nice GP whose best suggestion at the cause of the problem was what we’d already had a fairly good inclination of: Lucy is allergic to cow’s milk. When pureeing the potato, we added a small amount of milk to smooth things out and this appears to have triggered something. We haven’t had this officially confirmed yet, but it’s a fairly likely culprit.

Lucy, however, has been an absolute angel. She doesn’t seem to have noticed any of the problems or extra fuss over her recently and has been going about her usual business as a baby quite happily. Her demeanour hasn’t changed at all and appears to be oblivious to what’s going on around her.

Lucy is currently fascinated by almost anything. She is unbelievably nosey for an 11-week-old baby and wants to know everything that’s going on. It’s also her downfall, because she never wants to go to sleep if there’s something that looks interesting around her.

One thing which regularly grabs her attention for significant lengths of time is the clown letter-shapes we’ve stuck on her door.

For some reason, she will rest on my shoulder, staring at them. Occasionally, she will make a grab towards them. Now they’re quite nicely made and slightly unusual, but surely everything for a small baby is unusual? Sometimes I wonder why, but at others I am thankful for them: it usually distracts her from crying when she needs feeding for long enough to get a bottle made up.

The official weigh-in of Lucy today put her at 5.78kg (12lbs 12oz), which is over a pound gained in the past 2 weeks. That has also meant we’ve needed to adjust the car seat to suit.

Partly because it looked really comfortable and partly because it would be good for more than 6 months, we chose the Britax First Class Si Ultra car seat for Lucy. It’s a "group 0+1" unit, which means it’s suitable for babies from birth to 18kg, which is about 4 years of age. It has a "newborn insert", which is basically a lump of padding which stops little ones (i.e little 7lb babies) rattling around underneath the harness, even when fully-tightened.

Now that she’s passed the 5.5kg stage we’ve removed the newborn insert, which now means she looks lost in the car seat. It’s not going to be long before I’m adjusting it again though…

There’s a popular phrase in the arsenal of village newsletter writers which fills more column inches than “rained-off”, and that’s “due to inclement weather”.

Due to inclement weather, I went along to baby clinic with Katrina and Lucy today. Despite several disappointments in the past (actually, make that disappointments every time we’ve seen one), today was really good. The clinic woman was very pleasant, seemed to show a genuine interest in children (surely that’s a requirement to joining up?), and offered useful advice without being downright condescending.

My main beef with the health visitor people is that they appeared to be simply passing-off old wives’ tales as medical advice. Take for example the large patch of dry skin across Lucy’s forehead during weeks 3 to 6. It came up really quite nasty-looking, but was nothing serious – only really a cosmetic issue because it didn’t bother her in the slightest. You would assume a reasonably common complaint with a tried-and-tested solution. Apparently not.

The first advice we were given was from a midwife, who suggested the use of olive oil. Being parents for less than three weeks, we dutifully basted our daughter twice a day. That is, until the health visitor suggested we just use plain water. OK, let’s try that. That lasted a week, then another health visitor suggested the use of baby lotion. Independently, Katrina spoke to one of her friends (another health visitor), who recommended E45 cream. Four people, four different solutions. We ended up using baby lotion and it cleared, but whether that was simply due to clearing itself in the goodness of time or the BL actually helped we will never know.

The check today went well and all is good: a 5.30kg (11lb 11oz) baby who’s giggling, smiling, and holding her head up fine.

By the way, it’s going to be raining tomorrow – the health visitor told us. She saw some cows lying down in a field this morning.