21 Weeks of Lydia

Lydia will be five months this Sunday, and I’ve started telling people she’s “almost five months” instead of “four and a half months”.

Sleep

I don’t think she’s woken up in the middle of the night this week and stayed up for a while. I skipped swaddling more times this week, so those nights were less restful for me, with more squirming and waking on her part. But nothing particularly memorable happened here.

Eating

She seems bigger again this week, though I haven’t really noticed any difference in nursing patterns. 

Elimination Communication

I haven’t noticed that same pattern from last week of Lydia not peeing when I asked Will to take her. Maybe we all just forgot about it? This has been going pretty smoothly, though I notice that I haven’t been using the mini potty as much, for no particular reason that I’m aware of. At this point, it’s normal for her to go all or almost all of the night without needing to be pottied. But if she’s particularly squirmy in the early morning and doesn’t seem to relax when I feed her, I will sometimes potty her.

Babywearing

I’d say the wrap hasn’t been helping as much when Lydia is fussy these days. She does seem to perk up at new stimuli though, so walks can be helpful. Everything is basically going smoothly in this department, but she spends proportionally more of her time on the floor these days.

Motor Skills

She still can’t crawl, but there’s more going on here. She’s gotten visibly stronger. She can sit indefinitely, and sometimes moves from sitting to crawling position. I haven’t noticed her get from crawling to sitting all on her own, so whatever happened last week was a fluke. On her tummy, she’ll very quickly move to being up on her hands and balls of her toes. Sometimes she’ll switch back and forth between one knee and one toe and the other one. It doesn’t seem all that hard for her to do this. She can also consistently squirm forward when she wants something, but it’s slow.

In the fine motor department, I remembered that I told the pediatrician last week that I thought she could pass things from hand to hand, so I looked out for that. I don’t know how intentionally she’s doing that, but she’s definitely started out with things in one hand and ended up with them in the other hand. She’s pretty good at manipulating Sophie the giraffe these days, and turning her around to gum on different parts of her.

Personality/Other

I think it’s getting easier every week to make Lydia laugh, but this past week has been a pretty fussy one. My personal theory is that it’s related to teething. I noticed that Lydia was getting very frustrated and impatient with toys that she couldn’t get in her mouth in satisfying ways, so for the time being I’ve removed all of her toys except a few favorites that she likes to gum. She’s been enjoying frozen damp washcloths, though they don’t really satisfy her for all that long.

The not being able to crawl thing still seems frustrating, but my own comfort level with her frustration has increased. Partly because I’ve checked in with some more parents and people experienced with babies and had them watch her. They’ve so far seemed to agree that she doesn’t necessarily want my involvement.

It was for me to see my summary for last week where I said she’d been pretty chill, since this week she really wasn’t. The one thing that seems to reliably cheer her up is novelty. I think I should probably get out of the house more than I have been, especially if I can do so without putting her in the car. She’s often fine in the carseat these days, but less so this week, and we had a pretty awful time today. I was only taking a ~15min trip, but I ended up pulling over in the middle because she was crying so much, and it took quite a while for me to calm her down. Poor thing :-(. I do feel guilty about the car seat from time to time, even though that’s been better overall lately.

Me

Good life news unrelated to the baby this week, so it’s been a quite positive week. I think I’ve been sleeping a bit less than usual though, which is probably not great. I’d say I’ve been getting a bit less done, though I now have a computer that I don’t have an ugh field around, which is awesome. I no longer feel any resistance to opening up my computer and typing things. We’re going on a family camping trip this weekend, so that’ll be a big break from our usual stuff, and I’ll try to get more back in the swing of things after that. Should be fun to see how Lydia does on that, but I think she’ll like it. She’ll have lots of new sights and smells, and we’ll be carrying her constantly. She likes these things!