G'n'R Out West

It is pretty fun at our house these days.  Adelle is so vocal now.  She is always telling me something.  It is pretty cute.  Today at aerobics I left her for a second to put away my floor mat.  I came back to a little crowd around her.  She was squealing and yelling at them.  It was very interesting.  I think that maybe she is listening to the sounds she is making and so is making more and seeing what happens.  She gets a pretty big reaction from any noise she makes, so it isn’t surprising that she keeps talking!

She loves her receiving blankets these days.  Today she was so enthralled with her receiving blanket that she didn’t even notice we had gone out in the cold (-25…-39 with the windchill!).  Her hat slipped down over her eyes and she couldn’t have cared less.

Today after playgroup I put Adelle in her carseat screaming and then took her out to the car.  As soon as I clipped her carseat in she shut her eyes and fell asleep.  I walked around to the other side of the car and she was still peacefully sleeping.  I was so confused by this that I went back to her and actually work her up to make sure she was ok.  Her sleeping like that in her carseat is such a strange site that I actually thought I might have somehow knocked her out!  Anyway, she woke up, gave me a dirty look and quickly fell back asleep. 

One of the woman from playgroup suggested that perhaps today was opposites day.  And I think she might have been right.

When we got home I put her in her swing, hoping to have a few baby free moments.  She rocked in her chair with big smiles, giggles, squeals and squawks.  She was delighted when I made eye contact with her, but seemed more than happy to swing on her own.

Later she got fussy and Greg picked her up out of her chair and put her to sleep.  She is now napping on her own in her bassinet.

Now, our girl isn’t a fussy baby by any means, but she sure is acting weird and enjoying things she doesn’t normally tolerate.  It is definitely opposites day. 

I can’t believe she is three months old.  Where has the time gone?

Sleep:
It seems like the sleeping thing has been all over the place this month.  At the start of the month she was waking just once to eat, but for a few weeks she was back up to two times a night.  Just when I was getting used to that, she had a few nights where she slept through the night (or almost slept through the night) without waking.  And then two nights ago she had a feeding frenzy.  So I am not sure what to think about the sleep situation.  

Napping still escapes me.  I can’t quite figure out when to put her down, or when to expect her to sleep for longer than 20 minutes.  It seems the norm is a few 20 min naps during the day, but ocasionally she shocks me with a 3 hour nap. Usually she needs to be tied to me, or lying on me or Greg to have a good sleep during the day.

Eating:
She is still a great eater.  The issues I was having early in the month with gas while she eats seem to have disappeared.  In the mornings she hardly eats at all.  Then she ramps up all day long and in the evenings she is just packing in the feedings as often as she can get them.  At night it is hard to say what is going on.  For the most part this month night time feedings have been serious but she only eats once or twice over night. 

Her night time feeding(s) are easy and, truth be told, I love our time together at night.  I must write about my two favorite parts of night time feeding.  The first is that she doesn’t actually open her eyes until well into the feed.  When I go to her in the night I find her with her eyes closed, grunting and frantically turning her head from side to side smacking her lips together in hopes that she can find her food with all that squirming.  It is the cutest sight.  I would take a video of it, but I think it is cruel to delay her feeding, when she so clearly wants it.  My other favorite part is when I notice she has stopped eating.  I look down to see what is going on and I see her smiling, loving, beautiful face looking up at me.  No matter how tired and grumpy I am before I see her face, my heart melts the second we lock eyes.  There is no way to describe how she makes me feel at that exact moment.  But it makes every night time feeding special for me.

Bottle feeding is still met with mixed reviews.   She certainly prefers to get her milk from the source.  But she will take a bottle, if she must!   

Hair:
Her hair still seems to be thinning and getting lighter.  She has developed a little bald spot on the back of her head from lying on her back while she sleeps (and from all the frantic searching she does for her food at night).  We still carry her around most of the day.  I can only imagine how big that bald spot would be if she would let us put her down a little more often!  With the hair thinning we have also noticed she has a tiny little birthmark on the back of her head just inside her hairline.  I think it is funny that it took us so long to notice it!

Eyes:
Still a greyish-blue…I have no clue if they will change.

Personality:
She is a joy to be around.  The smiles come in all day long now.  It is pretty fun.  I still think she is very emotional.  She gives us so many smiles when she is happy, but is very quick to freak out when she is unhappy with anything.  Luckily for us, we know what makes her happy, so we can usually calm her down in a few minutes, and often in just a few seconds. For the most part her meltdowns are saved for car rides. She still hates the car and more often than not and spends the better part of the ride in tears. I am not sure what to do about it, butI hope she figures it out soon.

She has started to coo, which is too cute.  She is also quite chatty now and we spend lots of time talking with her during the day.  She is a big hand sucker.  The other day I actually watched her notice her hands.   She was sucking away, and then got a very concerned look on her face.  She took her hands out of her mouth, had a good look at them and then promplty put them back in her mouth and relaxed.  It was pretty cute.  I love to watch her learn.

We are starting to wonder a bit about how we should respond to her.  It is the topic of debate in our household at the moment.  If she gets upset when we are sitting down all we have to do is lean forward and she starts to calm down.  Often she really would just prefer if we were walking or bouncing around the house with her.  Greg has also tested her when he was sitting.  She starts to cry and then stops after a few minutes when he hasn’t moved.  We aren’t sure if we should be responding to her every desire or not.  I wonder if she is just bored out of her mind sitting and that is why she starts crying.  If that is the case, who are we to deny her the stimulation and change in scenery by standing up?  After all she can’t really do much to keep herself entertained yet!!

Stuff that happened this month:
- she started to squeal and giggle…I thought smiling was fun, well this is fun on a whole new level!
- she discovered that she can touch the things she looks at (but so far is only showing interest in 3 toys).  Her favorite thing to play with is receiving blankets, I think she likes them so much because they are so easy to pick up and they feel so much different than her fingers on her tongue.
- she went swimming for the first time – I’m not sure if she liked it, but at the least she was indifferent to it (bath time is still a nightmare!)
- she had her first immunizations (shots were a non issue, stripping to get weighed might have permanently scarred her!)

Adelle is growing up:

Hours after birth
 

One Month Old
 

Two Months Old
 

Three months old (and the outfit no longer fits)

I love that hair so much
 

Last night’s sleeping started off rough.  She was up 2x in the first half hour and I got nervous.  She was up 7 more times after that last night.  It was pretty brutal.  Good thing I was so well rested from the previous few nights of sleep, otherwise I’d be a mess today. 

Part of the sleep thing was my fault anyway.  I was starting to get convinced that she didn’t need to eat during the night.  This is partly because I’ve been getting some pressure: apparently when babies are over 12 lbs they are ready to wean during the night (or so goes the theory).  In addition to that pressure I’ve noticed that when she does wake during the night she isn’t eating much.  I was starting to think about testing her night wakings by just rocking her, and not feeding her.  Threeof the times she woke last night Greg went in and so she didn’t get fed.  Her feedback on that strategy was NOT positive! 

For whatever reason, last night she was starving!  Greg did manage to get her back to sleep when he went in…but not for long.   Last night she was an eating machine.  She ate 4x.  That shows me for thinking she was done with night time feedings! 

Thank you Adelle, I got the message!

I will go back to my regular night time feeding routine.  Maybe in another while we’ll try again.

Regardless of the night time stirrings Adelle seemed to sleep well, as per usual she woke up very happy:

Last night she went from 10:30pm until 5:30 am and then was up for an hour and then back down until 9:30.  I’m getting too used to this sleep stuff.  It is glorious!  We put her to bed about an hour ago and she has been up twice already.  I’m a bit nervous for the rest of the night! 

Tonight we had our friends Jamie and Heidi over for dinner with thier 3 kids.  Our house was crazy loud and it was really fun.  Adelle didn’t do her usual evening napping with all the kids around.  So she might be a little over stimulated, and perhaps that is why she is having some problems getting to sleep.  Poor little girl!

I put our baby to bed last night at 10:30pm.  It is currently 8 am and she is still sleeping.  This is insane.  I actually went and had a peak at her when I got up this morning because I missed her cute little face.  I am so tempted to wake her up because I miss her so much.  But if she is sleeping then I suppose she needs the sleep! 

Lately she has been the best little sleeper.  She had been waking 2x to feed for a while.  But a few days ago she went to just once a night…and last night…no food…interesting.  I have also started to put her to sleep awake and she seems to do great with it.  Normally she falls asleep nursing, but a few days ago that changed and so I just give her a cuddle and a song and then put her down.  Two nights ago I tried to give her a cuddle and a song but she started crying.  So just for an experiment I put her in her crib, and she immediately relaxed and soon fell asleep.  I think I am the luckiest mum who ever lived.  The more we get to know Adelle the more scared I get to have more kids.  She is super easy.  I am scared we are going to think being parents of a baby is super easy.  And then we’ll have a baby who needs a little more then Adelle needs….and we’ll have a toddler! 

Anyway, I keep getting told that once you figure your baby out she changes.  So I don’t know if she will always sleep so well, or if she is going to start to sleep through the night regularly.  Whatever, all I know is last night  I had a great sleep and lately it seems like taking care of Adelle is a dream.  I am thankful for that, and I’ll store up my energy for when she needs a little more from me!   

Today I decided to get serious and get my butt to aerobics class.  At the rec centre near our house they teach a strollersize class to get the mom’s back in shape.  Unlike yoga we move fast, there is fun music and you are able to make faces at your baby the entire time.  Adelle thought it was pretty fun and stayed in her stroller for the whole class.  Much more successful than yoga…and my muscles are really tired which is a feeling I’ve really been craving.

The other great part about theclass is that we met another really nice mom, Alicia, who lives close by.  We ended up joining her and her son Nolan for a swim after the aerobics class.  It was Adelle’s first time in the pool.  And she was moderatly happy for 45 minutes.  I was impressed.  She still hates her bath, so I was pleasantly surprised at her reaction to the pool.  She mostly just wanted me to hold her close and cruise around the pool, so that is what we did.  We’ll be going back for sure, hopefully next time Greg will be able to come with us.

Adelle’s first dip in the pool (as you can tell from her face, she wasn’t immediately sold on the idea of swimming)

Today Adelle figured out a little bit more about the world.

She was hanging out in her bouncy chair and we noticed she was touching the teddy bear toy while looking at it.  Now, she has looked at the teddy bear before, and she has touched the teddy bear before, but she has never touched the teddy bear while looking at it.  She touched it, then she just watched it.  Then she touched it again.  Soon both her hands were in on the toy touching action.  It was all very exciting.  Well, at least it was for a few minutes, before she politely requested we take her out of her seat. 

This is a whole new level of fun for us.

We had a really exciting weekend.  Saturday night some friends were visiting from out of town so a bunch of ex cold lakers got together for a big night.  Greg and I were up until 2 am….some kind of record.  I was a bit worried we’d be paying heavily today for the late night.  But our little girl decided to sleep until 9:30 this morning.  Well, to be honest I am not sure what time she got up at.  I went into her room at 9:30 and she was just hanging out and enjoying her mobile.  Today our friends Ahren and Katherine came over for brunch.  Adelle had a million smiles for them and Ahren was even there to witness her toy awareness. 

Baby Adelle with no lips (she LOVES to suck her lips)

Baby Adelle with big lips (her lips and mouth are a constant source of entertainment for us)

We had our first appointment at the Health Unit today.  Adelle got weighted and measured (12 lbs 10 oz, and 23 in).  She has slowed in her weight gain and is now about average for her age.  The health unit nurse was very happy with her weight. 

I was pretty stressed about taking her in to get her shots as I figured it probably isn’t that fun for a baby.  Well, I was surprised by the experience.  When I stripped her down to get weighed and measure she freaked out.  That girl does not like having a bare bum!  After she was weighed I dressed her as quickly as I could, but it was too late.  She was in full swing by then.  It took me the better part of 10 minutes to stop the screaming (at least we know she has a great set of lungs!).  After that she just whimpered often enough to remind me she was not impressed. 

The funny part is that getting the needles didn’t appear to phase her.  She wimpered a bit…but she was whimpering before she got them…so I’m not even convinced that they really bothered her. 

Anyway, so far she isn’t bothered by the shots.  I’m crossing my fingers that tonight will go smoothly.

I thought I’d give you all a little insight into the inner workings of a walk with our daughter

Stage one: ok, this isn’t going to be so bad (check out the new shades!)

Stage two: She looses it and gets picked up

Stage three: she passes out

Stage four: I expertly put her back down in her stroller..unfortunatly I’ve carried her for the better part of an hour but it makes for a better work out, and I get to cuddle, so all in all it isn’t a bad deal