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 :-)