This is the post I’ve been trying to publish for two weeks now. I’ve been adding things to it, so I’m just calling it her five-month post, as she officially hits that age in four days anyway.

Owlet has outgrown the Moses basket. I retired it the day after Christmas, taking it out of the crib and laying her cushy blanket there instead. She really should have been out of it before, as she was just barely fitting in it for her naps, but she looked so cosy.

Important milestone in our house: Owlet turned her first book pages this past month! And it was the Squishy Turtle cloth book that Sparky loved and first turned, too.

Big development: I actually managed to get out of bed after putting her down to sleep for the night, halfway through December. Her habit was to wake up and scream when I crept out of bed, so I was effectively stuck there with her from about seven at night till seven in the morning, even once we began using the sidecar crib; she’s a really light sleeper. This has stuck HRH with all the house and family-related stuff at night. But one night I managed to slip away, and for the first time in months I had time to myself in the evening. Of course, I discovered that the sound of feet on the stairs woke her up, so for a week I was stuck in the basement at night… but at least I was out of the bedroom! We rearranged the bedroom so her mini crib wasn’t right against the wall under the stairs, and she doesn’t react as much to the feet on the staircase any more. We’ve come a long way from the wee birdie who would only sleep in someone’s arms, and we’ve worked really hard for this.

Her lower incisors are bothering her. We can feel them right under the gum, but that’s no guarantee that they’ll will break through any time soon. We have the red cheeks indicative of increased blood flow off and on, and the chewing of fingers at that spot happening.

She rolled from her back to her front on the bed halfway through December! But then she started to cry in frustration because her arm was stuck under her. It was partially a result of how soft the bed was, and therefore somewhat of a surprise to her. She’s come close to rolling over on the floor, but again, her arm was in the way, stopping her. The other morning she managed to balance in the tripod sitting position for a few moments before she started slumping a bit too far forward. In the bath, when HRH holds her in the deep water, she often makes froggy-style kicks with her legs.

She has mastered holding her soother, putting it in and taking it out of her mouth. In fact, she has taken it out and offered it to HRH, who has thanked her nicely but passed on the experience. She smiled and put it back in her own mouth.

She’s in 6-month size clothes. I have no idea how that happened. She seems to have jumped over most of her 3-6 month stuff somehow. I don’t know; maybe the 0-3 months clothes we had were on the large side and the 6-month stuff is on the small side? I know the cloth diapers add a bit of bulk, but honestly. It’s mostly the length that’s the issue. And I tried to put a pair of 0-6 month Mary Jane shoes on her for the first time at Christmas and was frustrated to discover that they didn’t fit her feet at all.

She can say something that sounds very much like hi (or, rather, “Ha-ai!”), which is what we say to her all the time, and she has started sporadically returning waves. We have achieved big, sloppy, open-mouth baby kisses on a cheek, too, and it’s fun to exchange them slowly and carefully for about five minutes at a time.

The poor wee thing is currently in the throes of her first awful cold/flu thing, and she’s miserable. She was her usual cheerful self through the first seven days when it was a head cold, but yesterday it moved down into her chest and now she’s a sad, wheezy, hoarse baby who sounds just pitiful when she cries. She’s taking two naps morning and afternoon, one in her crib, one on someone (usually me), and clinging a lot.

She ate her first solid food between Christmas and New Year’s. She was on my lap, whacking around with her hands while I ate breakfast, and she grabbed a piece of pancake and brought it to her mouth, where she eagerly gummed it. It started falling apart quite soon afterwards, so I had to kind of cup it in my hand for her while she went to town on it. (This photo is an iPhone shot taken by Sparky.)

Something not as pleasant that happened this past month was both of us received some backhanded (and also some pretty direct) comments regarding not keeping up with stuff involving other people. I’m pretty darn annoyed that people are demanding more time and energy from us than we can supply when they know perfectly well that we have a baby in the house on top of the regular stuff that exhausts us, especially when everyone has been warned that we’d be operating at sub-efficient levels for at least six months. For us, the order of energy to commitments has always been family, home, self, then everything else if there’s energy or money left over. The people making remarks are in different life situations, so their context is different, but it doesn’t mitigate the pique. At least we’re grateful that most people with families and houses to take care of understand where we’re coming from.

(14 Dec: This was sitting as a draft in a folder; I forgot to publish it last Thursday. Better late than never.)

So far, we have:

• A mischevious, tiny dimple on the right side of her face that comes and goes
• Giggles
• An interest in her playmat, and the Tummy Turtle that Sparky also loved
• She has experimented with the exersaucer, which she found tolerable
• She is close to rolling; she can get onto her side from her back
• Almost holding her own bottles, with occasional success

And… singing! She squawks along with great delight to her favourite song, Five Little Ducks, when HRH sings it to her. I worked on some cello recording for study purposes earlier this week and she squawked along with that, too. She loves bouncing on someone’s knee playing horsie (most kids do, of course, but it’s so much fun to see the delight on a baby’s face). HRH has a version of the flying baby where he buzzes her around erratically like a little bee, complete with buzzing noise, which she also adores.

There has been further refinement of reaching for things, picking them up, and bringing them to her mouth. Her “talking” is becoming more sophisticated, too, as she experiments with inflection, syllables, and sounds.

She didn’t attend my fall concert as we’d originally planned. She has to go to bed right after dinner or the entire evening devolves into screaming and flailing, and has been resisting the car seat and the car in general the past month, so we cut our losses, erred on the side of valour (or some such thing) and Owlet stayed home with Daddy while Sparky and I went to the concert. Ceri and Scott generously had him over to play and have supper while I went to the venue for warmup, and Lu brought Sparky and Ceri to the concert with her. It worked out quite well. But she is slated to attend our cello recital this coming weekend, as that happens in the late afternoon and only lasts an hour.

We have begun using one-piece winter gear, which results in what I call the Happy Seal Baby, complete with flipper arms and legs. She likes being bundled into it, which mystifies me, unless it’s because I laugh at her while we do it, and because it means she’s being put in the mei tai to walk to the boy’s bus stop. She always enjoys that because it’s time with her beloved Sparky. We have a lighter and looser one-piece winter suit for the car, because this thick fuzzy one is a just-barely-fit, being a 0-3 mos piece, and also because our car seat is already being pushed to its strap limits with her cloth diapers adding so much bulk.

On the diapering front, she’s still a heavy wetter, which is stressing our light cotton flannelette diapers. My local mama-baby shop is having a moving sale, so I picked up two organic cotton terry diapers and liners to test out; if they work (and I cannot see how they could be less effective than the thin ones we’re currently working with), I have a coupon for 25% off when they reopen after Christmas in their new location, so I can pick up more.

The cosleeper/sidecar crib is working well. I have been delinquent in showing it off!

It’s gotten her out of our bed, thank goodness, and given her her own space. Now we just need to work on her sleeping in it without me there to have an arm around her. As it is, I pretty much go to bed when she does at sevenish, which leaves HRH with handling everything else house-and family-related at night. But one step at a time. Even having her in the mini crib is a huge stride forward from the baby who would only sleep on or curled up next to someone.

Because she’s such a slow and inefficient eater, we’ve figured out that a bottle delivers her the full tummy required for more successful daytime naps on her own, so that’s what we do at her nap times. How long a nap lasts is completely unpredictable, though. They’re mostly about twenty minutes to half an hour, but a good day will yield forty-five minutes or even an hour and a half. Once or twice she’s done three hour stretches, usually on a day when I have no pressing scheduled chores to do at home that could benefit from a sleeping baby, worse luck (although the break has been wonderful, don’t misunderstand me). Because we need these bottles, I’m trying to pump more milk, which depends on those naps too, so that I can actually get time to do it. We’re still relying on formula as a part-time source for those bottles, but I’m hoping to get the pumping output up enough so we can go back to a diet of completely breastmilk. It’s weird, but her smell changes when she has any amount of formula, and I like her natural smell better. (It’s not weird, really, it’s perfectly normal that one’s smell changes as a result of what one eats; it’s probably also not weird that I prefer my baby to smell the way she does when on a diet of my milk alone.)

She’s still eating every two hours around the clock (formula makes no difference as to how long she goes between feeds), which is pretty exhausting overall, especially since she eats so slowly at night and takes a while to be soothed to sleep, so I don’t get much sleep myself before she wakes up for the next feeding, if I fall asleep again at all. I do a lot of repeating, “This isn’t forever, this isn’t forever” to myself. But it would be nice to have more sleep, and more time to myself mentally and physically.

There haven’t been any huge leaps lately, just refining the recent developmental achievements like chatting and grabbing for things. Owlet is officially in size 3-6 month clothes now; she’s a very long baby. She makes a lot more noise all of a sudden. We have reached the squeaky, shrieky stage of vocal exploration, which is a lot sooner than I expected.

One of the significant acquisitions this month has been a Wubbanub. What is a Wubbanub, you ask? It’s an Avent Soothie pacifier with a small plush animal sewn to it. Soothies are terrific pacifiers, used by hospitals all over, but they fall out of the baby’s mouth when they stop actively sucking on them. That may be a deliberate design thing to avoid dependence, I don’t know… but it’s problematic when you have a child who has a strong sucking need. The addition of the small stuffed animal means it’s less likely to fall and bounce away, and it more or less stays put. Chantale told me about these (her daughter got one in the hospital) and I tracked one down at my local high-end mama-baby supply shop. They had only one left, and it was a giraffe, which was the one I wanted out of the half dozen or so available. Owlet loves it: she can cross her arm over her chest and hold the animal in place, and the soother doesn’t fall out of her mouth any more. She can also pick the giraffe up and drag the soother part to the vicinity of her mouth, or just turn it over and over in her hands, exploring all the legs and ears and horns and tail. We call it Gracie.

We have graduated to a legs-out carry in the mei tai, as she had been resisting being tucked in with her legs froggied inside. Because she’s so small, I had to cinch in the middle where she sits with a ribbon. It’s getting chilly, though, so we’ve been opting for a stroller to go to the boy’s bus stop since we don’t yet have a winter outfit for her and all her pant as are too short to keep her warm. She began to complain about lying flat in the landau, so we’ve switched to the seat unit instead with a big thick snuggly cover, and she likes to look around.

The biggest thing to report from the past two weeks is that we gave her a taste of formula. With HRH’s mom retiring and looking forward to grandma days, and Owlet not giving me time to pump to build up a stash, she’s going to need to be fed somehow. And with her digestive system nicely settled down, her feeding issues mostly resolved, and my supply firmly established, I felt a lot more comfortable introducing it to her. I wanted to be sure we had a tested and approved alternate way of feeding her in case I couldn’t for any reason. We tried Sparky on formula as a back-up around three and a half months, too, so the timing seemed good. I had a sample of Nestlé’s Good Start, so I mixed up two ounces of that one evening, and before I gave it to HRH to feed to her, I tasted it myself. It was atrocious, so much so that I told HRH I didn’t want her to have it, but he said we might as well try anyway because it was there. Well, she took one gulp and spat it back out, and I cannot blame her. HRH described the taste as something like rotting fish, and I added tarnished pennies to that description. (I later did some reading on Nestlé’s unethical practices and conscious, ongoing violations of WHO’s rules concerning marketing formula and if she’d taken it, I still would have switched brands.) A couple of days later I picked up some liquid Enfamil, which was the brand we’d fed to Sparky, and I tasted that before giving it to her as well. It tasted a heck of a lot more like my own milk, which was reassuring, and she drank it without batting an eyelash. Her digestive system handled it just fine, too, so it’s good to know we have a backup. She takes about three ounces of milk or formula at a time from a bottle.

Feeding is still happening every hour and a half to two hours. She’s a slow eater and a snacker; she doesn’t ever fill up, she just takes the edge off and then leisurely enjoys the experience, dozes a bit, then does it all over again. I try to stretch the time between feedings by occupying her attention in other ways; the bounce chair, cooking shows while she’s in the high chair, the play mat (now not total anathema, but still not good for very long). I managed to have her for about twenty minutes in the bounce chair while I sat at the spinning wheel last week, where she alternated between whacking at the dangly toys and watching what I was doing while I narrated my long draw technique to her. She’s been resisting the car, which is irritating, because she used to love it; she’ll shriek when put in her car seat, and then she’ll shriek in the car, and that makes going out stressful for us both. The boy was home on a ped day last week so all three of us went out together in the car, and she was like a completely different child: she watched Sparky in fascination, cooing at him now and then. She adores him. We had the first shared sibling bath last week, which was fun, and made bath time a lot more palatable to her, because she was distracted by watching Sparky play while we washed her up.

She is what books call a high-needs child. She craves lots of physical contact, and doesn’t do well on her own. This means she’s been sleeping on or right next to us nine out of ten times. Sometimes we can succeed in slipping her into a cot for about half an hour, but only sometimes, whereas she’ll sleep for an hour or more in a lap. She often falls asleep in the mei tai on the way back from the boy’s bus stop, and sleeps there for an hourish while I answer e-mail or clean or bake. We finally packed away the Amby Bed that was standing unused next to our bed, because she hated being in it. She slept in bed with us until a couple of weeks ago when I started to transition her to a co-sleeper that goes in the parental bed. She hated this thing as a newborn because she was still too far away from us, but she tolerates it most of the time now, because I can snuggle right up to it and she can feel my breath and reach out to touch me. It’s a step towards transitioning her into a sidecar cot, a kind of three-sided mini crib that attaches to my side of the bed that will be her own space, but she’ll still be within reach of me. She’s still eating every couple of hours all night long with each feeding taking about an hour, so getting up to feed her is just out of the question; I’d never sleep. With her in bed with me or right next to me, it’s much easier. I’m looking forward to the sidecar cot. HRH is building it, and so it will be gorgeous and exactly what we want instead of something expensive that isn’t quite right.

I am so looking forward to Owlet growing out of the glomming stage. I’d like to have my evenings back instead of going to bed at eight with her and being stuck there till the next morning. I’d love to have more than an hour of sleep at any given time. I’d really, really like her to eat efficiently, but I don’t think that’s ever going to happen; the way she breastfeeds is just really slow and not very focused, unlike how she’ll take a bottle. That has probably a lot to do with the five weeks of tongue-tie back at the beginning. Granted, she’s a lot better than she was initially, and we’ve done very good work on retraining her, but I suspect it will never entirely click into place. Not an enormous obstacle, because she’s on the cusp of four months, and in a month or so we can think about offering her solids.

I know all babies are different, but I am continually amazed at how she is really so very different from the baby Sparky was.