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.