Where did our waif go?

Somebody jumped from the 10th percentile at eight weeks (oh noes, she’s not gaining enough weight, we’re really worried about her…), to the 25th percentile at four months, to the NINETY-FIFTH PERCENTILE at six months (although really, she was five days short of seven months at the appointment). We have twenty pounds and one ounce of Owlet. No wonder I could barely handle the infant car seat any more! We officially moved up to the next size of car seat this past weekend, which brings with it its own host of issues like Owlet sitting on her own in grocery carts and so forth, with which she is not entirely comfortable yet.

So much happens in a month. The things that happened more recently are more present in my memory than the ones that happened thirty days ago. For example: Broccoli is the best thing ever!!11!1eleventy! Except roast potatoes were the best thing ever about four weeks ago, and two weeks after that it was green beans that were the bee’s knees, and so on. Since we’re already talking about food, this past month she has added green beans, oatmeal, roast potatoes, toast, broccoli, carrot sticks, mixed grain cereal, and yoghurt to her already rather varied diet. Generally I steam the veggies a bit and cut them into sticks, and she goes to town on them. She just adores food, any food, all food: she is so excited about it. Witness how enthusiastic about her first taste of broccoli was last Friday:

We introduced her to Baby Mum-Mums, the ubiquitous rice rusks that essentially melt as soon as they hit the tongue, and she is, as I feared, insane for them, and can recognise the package and throw a fit if she doesn’t get one after seeing them. They’re like potato chips for babies: they can’t have just one. They are reserved for treats, and she gets one when Sparky comes home from school and has his snack. She loves to eat with other people; it’s a huge social inclusive thing, so she feels very important sitting eating her rusk while Sparky has his cookie and milk. Toast serves much the same function when we’re at the table.

A week ago she figured out peekaboo on her own; it was like someone flipped a switch. It’s so much fun to watch her figure stuff out. A few weeks ago it was playing with her tummy turtle, a toy that has a mirror in its tummy so when the baby has tummy time they can look into it. I happened to be on the floor with her and she saw me in the mirror, then she angled the mirror again so she could see only herself, then again so she could see me, and so forth. Every time she moved it she’d look over her shoulder to see me in real life, to see if I’d moved, too.

She is dragging herself around with her hands and wriggling to get from point A to point B now, too. Crawling will happen in the next couple of weeks, we think. She loves tummy time; I can put her down on a blanket in her room with a box of toys on its side and she plays quietly for fifteen to twenty minutes, pulling things out and exploring them. She’s very social, however, and if other people are around she demands to be with them.

Sleeping in her own room continues to go well enough. Naps are still tricky at the twenty- and forty-minute marks, and if we can get past those she sleeps for over an hour or two. Nights generally are four to five hours of sleep before midnight, then three, then two, then she’s awake for the day, but after a horrible night of gastro last week she’s regressed to waking up every hour to two hours. Except last night, when she celebrated turning seven months old by sleeping five hours straight as of 11:30 PM, which, in casual medical parlance, is called ‘sleeping through the night.’ We shall see if she can repeat it.

In general, her day looks something like this: She wakes between 6:30 and 7:00 and nurses, then is up and playing and socialising until we take Sparky to his bus stop at 8:20. We’re home at 8:30 and she’s cranky for her bottle and bed, which happens around 8:40. This nap lasts anywhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours. Then it’s usually some more hanging out or watching Sesame Street if she’s awake in time. If she wakes early then there’s a snack of nursing or a rice rusk around 10:00. Lunch is a bowl of cereal and a pile of finger food, and happens between 11:00 and 11:30, after which she gets a small bottle and goes to sleep again. This second nap is usually about 30 to 40 minutes long, though there are the days where she throws a curve into plans for errands or such and sleeps for 2 hours. (Never on the days where she has a long nap in the morning, though.) Then it’s up and finding things to do till it’s either time for a quick nap at 3:00 (if it was a short midday nap) or going out at 3:40 to meet Sparky’s bus (if it was a longer nap). We’re home from the bus stop at 4:00, and she has a snack of rice rusks while Sparky has his own after-school snack, and then if she didn’t have a nap before we went out then she gets one between snack and supper, or supper is a nightmare for everyone. She usually has a twenty-minute catnap, and is fine for supper at 6:00, after which we have another small bottle chaser of milk, and then bedtime is between 6:30 and 7:00. There is a lot of fluidity in the daily schedule because the length of her naps are so unpredictable, which makes it really frustrating to try to plan things. The multiple brief naps are crazy-making in a lot of other ways, too, because I don’t have enough time to do more than toss a load of laundry into the machine. I’m very solitary by nature, too, and not having a social break from another person, however small and dependent, is really wearing. I feel like I spend my whole day trying to get her to sleep. And she does need sleep, or she’s miserable.

She adores jumping in her exersaucers. We tried a Jolly Jumper but we can’t get it short enough for her body to be in the optimal position. Her weight pulls it too close to the floor and her legs end up too bent. We started showing her the younger Baby Einstein DVDs here and there, too, and she loves those as well.

She has turned into a little chatterbox, constantly murmeling, whispering, and vocalizing in various ways. Shrieking was thankfully brief. She beeps and natters away to herself while wiggling around her crib when she wakes up from a nap if she’s had enough sleep; if she hasn’t she jumps straight to crying. She has a really fun gurgly belly laugh.

She completely lights up when HRH comes in the door at the end of the day. She fights to stand up on the sofa and hold on to the back so she can look over it and watch him get his coat off, bouncing up and down till he cones over and picks her up. Then she turns to me and gives me a lovely smile as if to say, I love you, Mum, and we had fun today but I’ve got my Daddy now and he is mine! And that’s usually fine by me, because by that point it’s always nice to not have a small squirmy limpet clinging to me in some way. She loves Sparky just as much. If he’s reading she wants to be next to him to listen and help turn pages. If he’s having a snack, she has to have one, too. The sun rises and sets in his eyes.

When we read books she touches all the pictures, but she doesn’t do it the way Sparky did, with a finger or the fingertips. She puts her whole palm down on the page and moves her hand around, like it’s absorbing information. She does it rather methodically, too; it’s not random.

So many babies in our online birth group are crawling, pulling up, or even — eep! — walking, but Owlet is happy not doing any of that. She didn’t even roll very much till this past week, although now she is the Incredible Flippy Baby when we put her down for a diaper change (goodbye changing table, hello bed). If I were less laid back about development I might be worried. But I know that those babies are early, and we’re doing just fine. Owlet is almost exactly following Sparky’s developmental schedule, actually, which I find interesting.

I’ve given up on any clothes that are smaller than 12 months, because I know the 12 mos ones will fit, whereas anything else sized between 6 and 12 months has zero guarantee and a very slim chance of fitting. I’m a bit wistful, actually. My doctor was delighted with the roly-poly baby with the rolls of fat, and I love to cuddle and squish her, but I miss my more delicate girl. How’s that for a shallow first world problem? I know she’s bulking up for a stretching growth period, though, and I know when she starts crawling it will burn off, too.

Photobombed by Sophie the Giraffe:

Ahem: again, please? Without the giraffe?

Six months. Half a year, people. We’re simultaneously baffled and thrilled.

This baby just keeps growing. The fuzzy snowsuit I bought her that was all floppy and too big a month ago now fits her perfectly from shoulder to toes. She’s wearing her 12-month clothes most comfortably; she’s got long legs, and the cloth diaper adds bulk to fill out the waist and hips. Most 6-9 month tops are too short and too tight across the shoulders. The good thing is I know she’s going to slim down as she achieves mobility, so she should be wearing this lot of clothes for a while.

Six months… half a year. That’s hard to process. We have a generally cheerful little girl who has a kooky laugh, and who loves pictures of babies and watching videos of the kids from my online birth group. She loves watching Sesame Street while playing in her exersaucer, so that’s part of our current morning routine if she doesn’t sleep past her usual wake-up time of her morning nap. She enjoys watching me spin on the Louet wheel downstairs during Sesame Street, too. She tries to hum when people sing to her, and she adores being bounced and flown around the room. There is a lot more babbling, and she has been working very hard to make raspberry sounds. She gives us fierce hugs when we come home and say hello to her, or after a nap, and she loves giving big sloppy openmouthed baby kisses but only when she chooses to. (Sparky doesn’t let her give him kisses any more, after the one where he pulled back and exclaimed, “Ew, you licked me! I’m all wet!” Her eyes are beginning to change colour. We have no idea which way they’re going to go, but we can see that the colour around the iris is beginning to shift away from the standard baby blue. And in other baby milestone news, Owlet has finally discovered her toes. She grabs them during changes with a cheeky grin, and tries to pick them up while sitting down, so she falls over. She does it again and again, too, especially if there’s embroidery on the hem of her jeans or she’s wearing new socks or shoes. And I’m kind of heartless because I just set her upright and keep laughing when she falls over again. She doesn’t seem upset by falling over… probably because she’s successfully grabbed her toes.

And the teeth. Good gods, the teeth. Dear lower incisors: Please, please, please stop making life awful for everyone. Just come out and join the party already.

The biggest milestone this month (other than rolling over, which she still doesn’t like to do very often, and sitting up, which she prefers to do in the security of the chesterfield or her high chair without leaning against the backrests) is solid food. Oh, how she adores it. She squeals and cranks if we’re too slow with it. If she’s eating something off a spoon she’ll grab the handle and try to take over steering it, and if you won’t let her, she keeps one hand there and pulls the bowl of the spoon into her mouth with the other hand and scoops the food off with her fingers onto her tongue. (That neat, tidy eating she demonstrated in the first few days went out the window as her enthusiasm developed.) If, while eating something that she’s holding on her own like a rusk or a piece of cucumber, she drops it into her chest, she can’t see it any more and she thinks it’s gone, gone forever, and she starts crying. If you’re eating something within her reach she will grab for it, and if you try to fend her off, she’ll think around it and do something like pull the place mat towards her instead. (That’s a scary cognitive leap, by the way.) The day I first offered her roasted acorn squash, she turned into an aggressive roasted acorn squash-chunk-eating machine. Yikes! The little lunges she made at them and the quiet “mmmrrrrrmmmmm” sounds she made to herself while squishing it around in her mouth were hilarious.

The mesh feeder thing is a great concept, but she doesn’t get it at all. It’s like if she can’t see the food, she doesn’t clue into the fact that the mesh end goes in her mouth. And if I show her the food then put it in the feeder she howls, because then the food is gone, woe! She’ll wolf down spoonfuls or chunks from her or our hands happily, but the feeder is only good for chewing on the handle at the moment.

Foods she now eats: rice cereal, barley cereal (both of which are rapidly becoming spurned in favour of Real Food Please Mum), acorn squash, butternut squash, sweet potato, bananas, pears, apples, pancakes, cucumber spears, pizza crusts, bits of homemade scone… we tried carrots but she wasn’t big on them. She is desperate to eat anything someone else is eating; she’d drink tea from my mug if I let her (and don’t think she hasn’t tried, both casually reaching for it as I lower it and lunging for it when my attention is elsewhere). If she doesn’t immediately like something we give it a second try, then put it aside for a couple of weeks. She went crazy for the Baby Mum-Mum rice rusk I gave her, but they’re expensive so I’ve been experimenting with making my own. The commercial ones melt; the ones I’m making (part applesauce, part rice cereal) are hard and good for teething, like baby biscotti. They make a huge brown smeary mess as she gums through them, but they keep her busy and she loves them. We’re doing a mix of roughly fork-mashed stuff and what’s called baby-led weaning, where you put a chunk of steamed whatever or something you’re eating in front of the baby and let her explore it. We’ve skipped purées entirely.

I think I’ve finally figured out her current personal rhythm and schedule. I almost had it, but charting everything pretty intensely over the last couple of weeks has shown me that while I was close, I was missing a bit of the big picture… like the fact that because her afternoon nap was so early (I was putting her down when she was tired) and so short (grr, she’s such a light sleeper), and because we have to be out the door to meet Sparky’s bus at a specific time, she ended up being awake for almost five hours straight before supper. No wonder she was melting down on a semi-regular basis. I knew she was missing sleep because the naps were crazy brief, but I didn’t really get the stress of that length of time awake was putting on her little brain because I didn’t know how long it actually was. So I’ve been working out a new schedule instead of going purely with her biorhythm and cues. I offering her the breast more often (it’s harder to cope with stuff if your tummy is empty); there is a defined morning and afternoon snack; I make her lunch of veggies and cereal a bit earlier so we can have two shorter naps in the afternoon, or we have it after she wakes up from her midday nap instead, depending on how she feels. I offer her nursing as soon as we come home from the boy’s bus stop, and a nap if she didn’t have her second afternoon nap before we went out. It cuts into our time with Sparky, but if she goes down within half an hour (which she does, if she needs it) then he gets my undivided attention for homework and some reading or playing till she wakes up as a trade-off. If she doesn’t go down then, HRH puts her down for a twenty-minute catnap when he gets home before supper, and then she’s much happier at dinner. Just being aware of the time blocks helped a lot, though, and scheduling in an extra morning snack and doing a midday nap instead of trying to put her down in the early afternoon after lunch has made a big difference.

Nights are still hard. We started swaddling her again to stop her from waking herself up by flailing her arms and rubbing her eyes so hard that she scratches herself. She generally sleeps from about seven PM to anywhere between ten-thirty and twelve, at which point she has a proper nursing meal and falls back asleep. Then she wakes up two hours later, has a snack, and falls back asleep, then wakes ninety minutes later for the same, then an hour after that, and then she fusses and drowses and snacks off and on till we get up between seven and seven-thirty. The diminishing blocks of sleep nightly are wearing away at my ability to cope with just about everything. Fragmented sleep is a killer for me. Other than the first waking after her four to six hour stretch, she’s not waking up because she’s hungry; she’s waking up because she reaches a light sleep part of her cycle and wakes up enough to know that she isn’t asleep, and she wants to be comforted.

This has prompted HRH and I to plan transitioning her into sleeping in her own room at night, which had always roughly been the plan when she hit six months. Now, when we went househunting, we looked for one with all the bedrooms on the same floor, but we couldn’t find one within our price range. Both children are on one level, and we are one floor below. This is a bit problematic in connection to this transition. If we move her into her own room alone, we’re going to be up and down the stairs all night as she gets used to it, and in the time it takes us to wake up and get to her she’ll be worked up enough to make getting her back to sleep a lot harder than it would if a parent in the room pats her gently back to sleep when she first starts stirring. So we’re going to move the other twin bed from the bunkbed set into her room for one of us to sleep on until she’s used to sleeping on her own and is down to a single nighttime wakeup. Unfortunately, if I’m the one with her she expects to be nursed, whereas HRH can get her back to sleep in almost no time at all. So it looks like we may be splitting the night at first: I’ll do the first half, and then we’ll switch places so he can get her used to falling back to sleep without me nursing her, and I can get a few hours of proper sleep. (HRH can fall back asleep in about thirty seconds. It is a skill I envy.)

I know all this will pass. It feels like an eternity, but I look at the boy, and I remember teaching him how to sleep properly because he went through the twenty-minute nap phase, too, and I remember how long it felt at the time. We went through it all with him and everyone survived, and even turned out pretty well. It feels like it’s going to be forever when you’re in the middle of it, and it feels as if things never change, but they do, slowly, and for the better.