Five months old

Maren turned five months old on Friday.

There is so much to say about her at this age! She smiles all the time, and continues to be very interested in people. She loves to be worn in a carrier face out so that she can smile at all the people she meets. She is sleeping very well at night – goes to bed around 7 PM, has a "dream feed" (where I feed her but she does not wake up) around 9:45 PM, and then usually wakes us up one time to be fed before getting up for good around 6 AM (although this seems to vary, and she has gotten up as early as 5 AM and as late as 7 AM). She is having some trouble with naps, and the last few days have been particularly difficult. She doesn't typically sleep more than about thirty minutes per nap, and our usual strategies for getting her to sleep haven't been so effective, though she has been very tired. She is also startling herself awake a lot (even though we swaddle her arms to help with this), so sometimes I have had to stay next to her the whole time that she is napping to try to calm her back to sleep quickly. None of these problems seem to exist for nighttime sleeping, so I am thinking this trouble with daytime naps is probably a phase that she will grow out of.

Maren's motor development has really taken off over the past month. She now happily has extended bouts of tummy time, and can hold herself up very high, almost getting her hips off the ground. She can pivot herself around in a circle in either direction, and has started sometimes pushing herself backwards (although this seems like an accident). Today I saw her move forward just a tiny bit (probably about 1 cm), and I think she noticed that it happened but did not know how to replicate it. She appeared to spend some time today trying to will herself forward toward a toy, and getting very frustrated that it was not working. I think she will probably start crawling relatively early, though she still has a ways to go.

In the past week, she has started reaching and grabbing purposefully, and Jeff is loving it. This is what he studies, so he has a unique perspective on this particular area of development. It is fun to watch Maren reaching and grabbing, and it is almost as much fun to watch Jeff reacting to it :-) One of the great things about this development is that she can be entertained with toys in a way that she could not before. She has a little rattle that I have spent a lot of time shaking for her, and suddenly she is able to shake it herself, which is awesome!

She continues to be happy, easy to sooth, and generally a pretty incredible baby :-)

Palm Springs

Last week we took a vacation to Palm Springs. It was our winter "reading week," which is just a winter break week. Winter is long here, and a lot of people take vacations to warm places. This was a relatively last-minute (for us) decision to go, but we decided that we needed to get out of the cold briefly.

This was our first time traveling anywhere with Maren. It was her first flight,

and she did very well. There were other babies who cried much more than she did, so we felt lucky to have a good little traveler. What she did not like was long car rides in the rental car. Anything over a few minutes long, or after about 2:30 PM, was not to her liking. We tried lots of things, including having me ride in the back with her, but it was mostly futile. She cried and cried during many car rides. One thing that did help was singing a specific song called "if I had the wings of an aeroplane" which I learned at camp when I was quite young. For some reason this song and no other had the capacity to calm her down, at least temporarily.

Despite the difficulties with driving, we did lots of fun things during our visit. We took an aerial tram to the top of Mount San Jacinto,

visited Joshua Tree National Park,

went to the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens,

went swimming in our hotel's outdoor pool, and generally enjoyed the warm weather (which was unusually warm with highs in the eighties and nineties).

Overall it was a lovely vacation. We learned some things about traveling with Maren, and until things change, we will probably avoid long car rides with her :-) But it was wonderful to leave winter behind even if it was only for a few days.

They grow up way too fast

Earlier this week Maren decided she wanted to skip right over "girl" and go straight from baby to woman:

In all seriousness, I have been having my first bit of sadness over how fast Maren is growing up. I know that she is only four and a half months old, but in the last couple of days I have started feeling like she doesn't need me as much as she used to. Obviously she still needs me very much, and I am realizing that this is the very beginning of what will probably be a constant source of a little bit of sadness for the next eighteen years or more. It seems kind of ridiculous at this point, but she really is so grown up compared to what she was a couple of months ago.

I think part of what is spurring these feelings is the fact that she has started sleeping long stretches (over the past couple of days, and I am fully aware that this could change tomorrow). Two nights ago she slept for seven and a half hours without needing to nurse. Unfortunately, I woke up after four hours, and could not get back to sleep. I think part of it was that I was waiting for her to wake up and need me, and then morning came without that ever happening. It should have been a fabulous night of sleep but instead it was one of the worst I've had in a while. Last night was similar – she slept for five hours, then another three or so, but I couldn't get back to sleep after her 3 AM wake up. I feel like I am squandering a wonderful gift I have been given, because a couple of weeks ago I was only dreaming of this kind of sleep opportunity. I am hoping that tonight is another good night of sleep for Maren, and that I am able to take advantage :-)

One gift I have taken full advantage of is Maren's developing laughter and sense of humor. For my birthday, which was last Wednesday, Maren gave me this:

She laughed pretty much continuously for what felt like forever, but Jeff tells me it was probably about fifteen minutes. She was really tired, and this may have contributed to everything seeming funny, but she has had some wonderful shorter bouts of laughter, I think every day since then. I can't express how amazing it feels to hear that laughter – there may be a bit of sadness as she grows up, but it is far outweighed by the excitement, joy, and pride I feel :-)

Sleep

I am happy to say that we have seen an improvement in sleep. Things haven't been perfectly consistent (Maren is a baby after all), but they are consistently better this week than they were last week.

We have implemented a number of changes, and we have been writing down when Maren is sleeping and when she wakes up so that we can see if there is any kind of pattern. Our biggest change has been to our sleeping configuration – Maren in the crib sidecarred next to the bed, and instead of me sleeping next to her, Jeff sleeps next to her. It does appear that moving the milk a few feet to the right has changed Maren's nighttime behavior, so that she is not asking for milk more than three times a night, and sometimes it has been only one or two. This is a major improvement over five or seven or even nine times a night in the previous two weeks.

The second big change is the introduction of earplugs. Maren stirs approximately every half hour when she is completing a sleep cycle. While she doesn't usually wake up, all that wiggling and noisemaking was waking me up. So I started wearing earplugs when we traded places in bed, because Jeff would be the one to notice when she was asking for milk, and wake me up. After a few nights, it became clear to Jeff that he would hear her through earplugs when she wanted to nurse, but that it would help him get back to sleep more quickly if he also was wearing earplugs (in no small part because I snore). So for the past several nights we have both been wearing earplugs, and it has been fine – it is not necessary for Maren to get to the point of crying before Jeff notices that she needs to nurse. So that has been a great change as well.

We are also keeping track of her naps, because all of the sleep books tell us that a nap of less than an hour doesn't really count, and that babies this age usually need three naps per day. Well, Maren's naps are typically twenty-eight minutes long, and she needs 3 to 4 naps per day. The length does vary somewhat, but we have been struck by how many of her naps are exactly 28 minutes long. So as one of our books states, Maren "hasn't read the books," and so is not aware of the fact that she is supposed to nap for at least an hour at the time.

We have implemented a 7 PM bedtime, not because it was convenient for us, but because Maren has insisted. There have been days when she has wanted to go to sleep even earlier than this. But the good news is that she is generally able to sleep in her crib by herself from 7 PM until we come to bed around 9:30 PM, so I have been able to use this time to get some things done (like this blog post!), and we even watched a movie together for the first time since Maren was born.

So all in all, things regarding sleep have improved substantially. I am hoping that we have more nights of one or two wake ups and fewer nights of three or more, but even if we consistently have three, I think I can manage it!

Maren at four months

Maren turned 4 months old last Tuesday. She is growing steadily and is now 25 inches long (around the 80th percentile) and 13lbs 11oz (around the 40th percentile). In the past month she has developed a lot. She can roll over, laugh, and bats at toys that are put in front of her. She smiles all the time (except when we try to catch it on camera), and is generally a very happy baby.

Our biggest struggle currently is sleep. At 3 months old she would wake me up 1 or 2 or 3 times in the night. In the past couple of weeks she more often wakes me up 5 times in the night, and sometimes it has been as much as 7 or 9 times. I have read and heard of a 4 month sleep "regression," though I prefer the term "change." It can't be a regression because she never slept this badly before :) To be fair, it is really my sleep that has gotten worse, as she still doesn't really wake up fully anytime during the night. But she rouses partially, and I have to nurse her to get her back to sleep. I have gotten to a bit of a breaking point, and so we are going to try some new things this week. I hope that eventually things improve, and I think they will.

Despite all of the sleep problems, I still think she is the sweetest baby in the whole universe :) She has grown so much, and is starting to look like a big baby instead of a little baby. We have been taking pictures on each of her month birthdays, and here they all are: