More Milestones

Mira just keeps hitting those milestones! She cut her second tooth a few days ago so now she has that super cute 2-bottom-teeth-baby-grin. Love it! It was rough again the few days leading up to the tooth coming through. She was short-tempered and oh boy, if she was tired or hungry and you didn't get to her soon enough, she screamed as loudly and as high-pitched as she could! I don't know where she learned how to do this but a few months ago she figured out how to cry with a pitch about the equivalent of a teenage girl on a roller coaster. I hoped she would forget how to do that... ha ha. She reserves that scream for when she's at the end of her rope. Which, when she's teething, takes no time at all.

The other annoying thing about teething (you mean there's only a couple annoying things about teething?) is the disruption in her sleep pattern. Once she got to be maybe 2 1/2 or 3 months old she was consistently sleeping through the night but the last week or two she's been waking up at least once or twice at night and it's harder to get her to fall asleep and stay asleep, for naps and bedtime. That's frustrating since we were on such a good schedule before and to regress is rough! She seems to go in phases. The past few days every time I put her down she would immediately jerk awake and cry to be picked up and be wide awake. She only got maybe 30 minutes of nap time the last couple days. (At least she was good-natured.) But then the next day she'll nap for hours - a few days ago I put her down for a nap at 1:30 and I had to wake her up at 5:00! I'm really hoping she'll get back to sleeping through the night soon.

The other thing that might be disruptive for her is we finally got her crib put together and moved her into her own room. That only took 5 months - how's that for procrastinating? It's not like we were in denial or anything. (If you want to hear about denial and procrastination - I didn't pack my overnight bag for the hospital until I was 39 weeks and having hard contractions every 5 minutes.) We've been keeping her in a bassinet by our bed or - someone out there is going to start a lecture on the inappropriateness of this - in bed with me. Made it easier when she decided she needed a snack at 3 AM, you know. I personally would have been fine to keep her with me for awhile longer but Mark had had enough so last weekend he got the crib put together and she graduated to her own room. This is another one of those cases when I want to cry about how fast she's growing up and Mark gets excited that she's growing up but if I'm going to be honest with myself, it is nice to have her in her own room. It just sucks that she's gone back to waking up so often and I have to haul my butt out of bed and down the hall to her room to get her back to sleep. But as I like to say, this too shall pass. Eventually. Hopefully.

Well, on to the fun stuff. Mira is eating like a champ! She still loves rice cereal and her menu has increased to include carrots, sweet potatoes, apples, bananas and pears and she LOVES all of them! She'll inhale an entire jar of food in one sitting and sometimes she'll still be hungry even after all that. I need to start buying larger jars of baby food. Or I could try making my own baby food, since I have a Baby Mill, but since she's only eating a few foods I haven't gone there yet. But I just can't believe how much she loves food. The only thing I've tried giving her that she doesn't like so far is avocado - which surprises me because Mark and I think one of mankind's greatest achievements is the discovery of avocado, but she just doesn't like it. But it can take several (12+) exposures to a food before a baby decides if they like it so we'll keep trying. I didn't expect her to like carrots so much because for me, carrots are just okay, but Mark reminded me that he loves carrots in all forms so now it makes sense that Mira likes them so much.

Here's a video of Mira enjoying food. I didn't realize it would be so entertaining to introduce solids. Entertaining if you don't consider the increased volume of laundry it produces, anyway. :)

Learning to feed herself.

I let Mira have the spoon to "practice" after she's eaten everything.

Of course the cat has to get in on the action.

The best part of eating (besides the food) is the washcloth!

This of course is what a spoon is actually for...

So despite the extra work for me with the laundry and preparing food and 2 or 3 baths in a day, it's been nice to not have to have her attached to me (literally) all the time. We're down to nursing 4 or 5 times a day now, which is SO much better than what we had been at before starting solids (probably at least double). It was so hard to get anything done having to feed her every 2 hours still, and she's a slow eater so it really only gave me an hour in between feedings, and as far as traveling to any location, forget about it. It didn't matter if I'd JUST finished feeding her and then immediately tossed her in the carseat and bolted out the door - she'd get hungry again as soon as we got to wherever we were going. Super frustrating. Now, even just giving her solids twice a day, it holds her over for hours. What's this new thing called "independence?" I kinda like it! :) I'll still pump once or twice a day so I can build up a supply in the freezer but in some ways pumping is faster and easier than nursing. I set a goal for myself to nurse for a minimum of 6 months (which is just a couple more weeks - AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH she's growing up!!!) and to shoot for a year if I can. Of course she might decide to wean herself but I'll still pump if that's the case. Antibodies and passive immunity, that sort of thing.

What a big strong girl!

She's close to being able to sit up on her own. She can "tripod" for a few minutes, and if she's reclining she can get herself to a sitting position, but she's still really wobbly and unstable and it all usually ends in a face plant. Not too much longer though. She's still not doing a whole lot with the rolling over business but I'm not too concerned, as long as she's hitting other milestones I figure it's okay for her to miss the rolling over stuff. She'll get it eventually.

I'm hoping by the time I get around to my next post I'll have more professional photos to share. Yesterday we had another session with Ashley Schoenfeld, who did our newborn pictures. If you're looking for a good professional photographer for fairly cheap, you need to check out her work (www.milesofmemoriesphoto.com). She's amazing and I'm so excited to see how everything turned out!