(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.

In the past two weeks there has been an explosion of interaction with her environment. She has increased her dialogue with people and at toys, making adorable sounds, and smiling has gone off the charts. And the past couple of weeks have seen a major increase in the production of drool, so much so that some days I put a bib on her so that she doesn’t soak through her shirt.

Socially, things proceed apace. Two weeks ago she had her first full day out at an event, and she did beautifully. She ate well, napped well in my arms, and was cheerful and smiley when meeting new people. The crying at the tail end of the event in late afternoon was definitely exhaustion and having had quite enough of the foreign environment. Then the last weekend of October we hosted a mums and daughters tea party that confirmed our suspicion that she’s incredibly social. She was enthralled with all the children, staring at them and breaking into huge smiles when they looked at her. I wish we’d taken photos, because she wore a darling antique red printed dress from April Cornell that had circulated through five other girls in our circle of friends. We had tiny tea sandwiches, tiny sweet scones with preserves and cream, tiny lavender-lemon shortbread cookies, and tiny cupcakes (tiny was a theme, as you may have figured out), and enjoyed using our vintage real china tea set. It was lovely, and it’s definitely something we’ll do again, often.

Physically, she’s a little powerhouse. She’s not very interested in sitting; she wants to stand on our laps all the time. She has terrific head control and leg strength. She’s much less shrieky about being on her back now, like on her playmat, for example, but she shows zero interest in rolling over. A couple of weeks ago she started making vague, broad movements with her arms while looking at things, which rapidly focused into more deliberate batting at objects with her fists. Then earlier this week things focused even more, and suddenly she’s reaching for specific things and catching them. Last Wednesday, after a week of batting, she deliberately grabbed for two danglies on the arch of her bounce chair, and caught them both, one in each hand, one after the other. When I put her in yesterday, she grabbed for the left one right away and looked really pleased that she’d remembered how to do it.

She’s grasping things like blankets and shirts and bringing them to her mouth to chew on them as well. Thursday’s milestone was grabbing a rattle and shaking it for the first time, followed by grabbing my glasses and pulling them right off with a cheeky grin. And so it begins…

Another first is using her high chair. We used to pull her swing over during supper, but she’d complain to sit on someone’s lap by halfway through the meal. We brought the high chair in, reasoning that she’d feel more included if she were on the same level as everyone else, and it’s a big hit. The high chair has also proved useful when I need to do kitchen stuff during the day like cooking and baking: I put her in it and narrate everything I’m doing. I did a whole cooking show for her this week, and taught her how to make oatmeal. It’s a bit exhausting, being that animated while doing something so mundane, but it worked.

She was a terribly adorable Dark Knight for Halloween, as seen in this blog post.

We use the mei tei mostly when going to the boy’s bus stop in the mornings and afternoons; she either falls asleep with her head against my chest or is perky and awake, and when she’s awake she loves watching the cars that go by. I finally took a photo of the mei tei in action, so here you go:

The cloth diapering is going well. We don’t have big all-in-one diapers that absorb a lot; we have light cotton flannel ones, and she soaks through them very quickly, so the washing of them is something that’s on my mind a lot. Something that’s mildly frustrating is figuring out what detergent to use. You can’t use just any detergent; most leave a deposit that can irritate the baby’s skin or reduce the diapers’ absorbency. Depending on your machine and your water, some detergents that are safe for cleaning them work really well and others don’t. I started off with Seventh Generation, which is a safe detergent for cloth diapers, but when the diapers got wet they had a very faint ammonia smell that I didn’t like, even when I used the trick of adding a bit of vinegar to the first rinse. So I stopped using it and tried Bio-Vert, which so far has left the diapers super-soft and very clean, with no odour sneaking in once they’re wet. You use only a tiny spoonful of detergent to wash cloth diapers (so it lasts for ages), which means I’ve got a jug of Seventh Generation that is now lined up to wash our regular clothes.

Sleeping is just about the same. Sometimes we can put her down in her basket to nap, but it’s tricky; we have to hit just the right moment where she’s not too asleep but not too awake, or she’ll be crying within ten minutes. Generally she’s still sleeping on or next to someone, but the naps are longer and more like real naps instead of dozing.

Feeding is going well, too. She’s still eating every hour and a half to two hours both day and night, which is tiring for me, but she’s more focused about it. In fact, it’s going so well now that we stopped giving her the two-ounce supplement of expressed milk two or three times a day because she was full from nursing. And evidently it’s all going even better than I expected, because at three months old, Miss Owlet weighs ten pounds and thirteen ounces. That’s a gain of just over a pound and a half in four weeks, oh yes indeed. The doctor is thrilled, and we are officially off the watch list.

Seriously. Eleven.

I think Owlet gained a pound overnight on Tuesday. Suddenly she’s super heavy, and has filled out. I swear she wasn’t like that on Monday. (No idea what her actual weight is, but I’m willing to bet it’s about a half-pound more than her last weigh-in two weeks ago.) And she’s fitting her 0-3 mos sleepers perfectly, from shoulders to toes, no extra room. It’s obviously time to start sorting through the 3-6 mos box.

It’s like someone flipped a switch this past week. Daytime sleep is starting to settle down. I can get at least two naps of varying length out of her per day, either in the mei tei (which reminds me, we still don’t have a picture of that in action) or the swing, or, if I am very lucky, the basket in her crib. Her nursing has suddenly changed and become much more efficient, thank goodness. She’s better at being on her own in the swing for a bit, or in her basket looking up at the new pompom bug mobile we made for her, while I make bread or switch laundry. We put her in a bounce chair with dangly toys for the first time this week, and it was a great success. And oh, the smiles we’re getting! Dinner is such a social time for her; sometimes we can get away with putting her in the swing next to the table while we eat like we used to, but increasingly she wants to be up at the table in someone’s lap to watch everyone eat.

Owlet’s beginning to converse — not just random noise, but trading dialogue. It’s fun, especially when she smiles. What’s freaky is that she’s got this one “awl!” sound she makes. She did it on the changing table one day a couple of weeks ago, under her owl mobile, and I said, “Yes, owls,” and went on chatting to her. She makes it mostly while looking at that mobile, and it’s either coincidence or random repetition of the sounds we make when we point them out to her, but it really sound like she’s saying “owl” and it amuses us. She said “awl” to HRH last week, so he carried her into her room and put her on the changing table. She made a pleased little squawk and lay quite happily there for about ten minutes, watching the owls on the mobile move in the air. Spooky.

Sidebar: Why did we make our two mobiles? Well, I am less than thrilled with about 99% of commercial mobiles. They’re outlandishly expensive, not very attractive, have music that drive me nuts, and worst of all, most of them have dangly things designed to be looked at from the parents’ point of view. All the baby sees are bottoms or tummies of the critters. We’ve threaded the bugs upside down and the owls on an angle, so the baby sees the tops and faces. (I won’t say no if we find our missing simple-quiet-and-charming, no-longer-obtainable Peter Rabbit mobile, though.) And on top of all that, it involved the family in doing something creative to share with her. Not that anyone in this family needs help coming up with creative, crafty things!

Also noted: Everyone talks to babies when you’re out shopping. Everyone.

This past weekend Sparky and I were off at cello and HRH had Owlet alone, who was rapidly losing patience in the last half-hour before we got back. She saw a photo of me on the fridge and involuntarily lifted her arms towards it. HRH held her there for a bit while she stared at it, then tried to carry her off to look at other things but she fussed, so he took her back. I think we’ll print out large photos of her family members and put them in a binder or something for her to look at.

Finally, the poor girl is starting her first cold. Lots of sneezes, and snuffly noises when she nurses at night. They can’t grow up in bubbles, after all.

Pictures!

Happy baby:

And here’s another carseat/handknits picture for comparison: