She weighed 12 pounds! She's getting big! She's big and sturdy enough now too that we can hold her flying and her daddy can engage in rough play and make Mama worried.
Most parents stop swaddling their babies around this time in order to prepare for the rolling stage. Not us. All of a sudden she started wanting to sleep in her bed at night, but couldn't seem to get comfortable for more than a few moments before hitting herself in the face. So we started swaddling her. She started sleeping 7-9 hours every other night, and after a few weeks, slept through the night nearly every night (Hallelujah!), with a brief regression when she finally figured out rolling. It came as such a surprise! I wasn't expecting it to happen for a long time. I am still very grateful for it. She even takes her naps in bed and more or less settled into a napping schedule - one late morning, one late afternoon, and a short one in the evening to carry her through until her bedtime. She started out falling asleep around midnight or so, but has slowly been working her way backwards to a 10-11pm bedtime.
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| Napping at my church office |
She is so much more interested in the world now. When she is eating, she is easily distracted by things going on around her. Once Roman was talking to me when I was feeding her, and I spoke back with a loud tone after being quiet for a long time. She pulled away, surprised and then, I swear it, gave me a dirty look for interrupting her. Most of the time she stops eating just to smile at me and look around.
She really enjoys her playmat and we are starting to experiment with the jumperoo, though she's a bit too small. She much prefers this to her two chairs, one of which we had to retire since she refused to sit in it anymore. No big surprise, since she always wants to be standing. Her absolute favorite toy is a flat blue elephant with crinkly paper in it. She's getting good at controlling her hands and putting things in her mouth. She can hold her own bottle. She reaches up and holds onto my face sometimes when we're looking at each other - it's very sweet. We've noticed this month in general that her hands are mostly open instead of mostly in fists and she is losing her cross-eyed focus. She reaches for her toes but doesn't really seem to know they are hers yet.
I do still wear in her my stretchy wrap, but it's getting a little too warm for it. It's impossible to wear her now at church now while I play with the band but we nearly always can find a willing volunteer to hold her for a few moments.
I usually assume that she is probably delayed in her development - maybe because she is so small (still in 0-3 month clothes), or maybe to compensate for my fear of having unreasonable expectations of her. I happened to see a checklist of five-month milestones and was surprised to see that she had hit them all, including recognizing her name, which I hadn't even noticed had happened. (It probably helps that I sing her name to her all day long.)
When she turned four months old, I also went back to work at Gordon, my 20-hour office job. This means I now have a base of 40 hours of work plus my free-lancing each week. It felt great to get back to work on the one hand, but it is tricky to figure out the new patterns. I also never really wanted my two part-time jobs to equal a full-time job, so that is something I now need to figure out. Roman is mostly working evenings these days, though, so we don't have to get a baby-sitter terribly often. They love going grocery shopping together - she gets lots of attention from all the people there and usually gets really excited.
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| Visiting me at work! |
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| At Papi's Graduation! |
We love you, Luciana.
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