Lydia had her six-month doctor’s visit this week. Nothing too eventful there. We’re doing the normal vaccine schedule, and it’s been working really well to have her in the wrap for her shots. That way she’s right up next to me and she can nurse right afterwards.
Here are some stats:
The scale said 7.56 kg, which is 16.7 lbs.
She was measured at 27.5 in (though I never trust these measurements to be all that accurate).
That puts her just above the 50th percentile for weight, and closer to the 90th for height. We didn’t measure head size.
And I think Lydia is actually one of the smallest babies of the eight in our birth class! (And they’re pretty much all exclusively breastfed (plus solids in the case of the older ones) too.)
Overall mood this week has been good. We had one or two days where she was on the fussier end, but I think it had to do with interrupted naps. She seems happy these days.
Sleep
For now, the moving around at night has faded into the background of my awareness. I hadn’t consciously thought about it much until I reviewed last week’s summary.
Lydia still does seem to be progressing in the direction of two naps, assuming she gets to have long, uninterrupted ones. However, it’s pretty common for her naps to be cut short for one reason or the other. Maybe she naps in the car, we have to get out, and she’ll wake up when I transfer her to the wrap. Maybe she’ll fall asleep and be woken up by someone coming home or me making a noise.
When she does have two long naps, Lydia is pretty much ready to go to sleep on the earlier side, which for her would be before nine.
Recently, the morning nap has been a bit of an issue. Typically, I get up with Lydia (often around 8am these days), and go downstairs with her while Will sleeps in. Often, she’s ready to take a nap before he’s awake, so I’ll hold her on the couch or chair downstairs. I like to have her right there, so I can soothe her during transition times. But Lydia is more and more aware of the world, and increasingly likely to be disturbed by the comings and going of my roommates. Writing this out, I do see that wrapping her up and taking her on a walk would be a solution, though my own preference is to sit and do work over heading out. Will will likely be leaving the house earlier for work within a few weeks though, so this particular issue isn’t likely to last very long.
One pretty cool thing happened this week with sleep! I decided to go dancing Friday night with some friends. We’d gotten one ticket to a Bicycle Day event, and hadn’t decided in advance which one of us would go and which one would stay with Lydia. Due to lack of planning on my part, I only had about 2oz of pumped milk, but Will wasn’t in the mood, so we decided to try me going and him staying with her. No one else had ever put Lydia to bed at night, so we weren’t sure what would happen, but I agreed to come home if it seemed like a good idea.
Lydia fell asleep on Will in the evening, was up for a bit, then fell asleep with the bottle. He said that she drank the 2oz pretty quickly, then chewed on the bottle until she drifted off. Not bad!
I now feel much more motivated to build up a freezer stash of milk.
I’m on a pretty early schedule anyway, so I was home by midnight, and I fed her pretty soon after that.
Nursing
Not much to report. Lydia is still getting almost all her calories from breast milk, and she still does it pretty often. She can go a few hours between feedings, but usually she doesn’t.
Solids
Lydia was less interested in food this week, even as she’s getting better at handling it. Meat still seems to be her preferred food. She’s managed to get little (maybe ~one cubic cm) pieces into her mouth just fine using a palmar grip, but intentionally putting the piece way to the side of her hand. I did also see her do a pincer grip once, though it wasn’t for very long. It doesn’t seem to be part of her regular repertoire, but I gave her a pea, looked over, and saw her holding it between her thumb and index finger.
But she hasn’t been very interested in being in the high chair and playing with food. She’d rather be on my lap. That’s fine with me, though it definitely makes it harder for me to eat. I suppose I’ve moved away from pure baby-led weaning, since I’ve put food in and near her mouth a few times, particularly when she’s on my lap.
Tonight, she was initially not at all into the high chair idea until she saw and smelled steak! Then she calmed right down and happily stayed there a while, maybe half an hour? She sucked on the steak quite a bit. If iron and zinc are really what she needs right now, this preference makes perfect sense to me.
She’s pretty clear about what she’s okay with though, which is one reason I feel comfortable doing so. Sometimes, she’ll push my hand away and want to hold it herself. Sometimes she’ll taste what I have to offer and open up more. I mostly do this in situations where the mess of letting her do her thing would be particularly inconvenient.
She’s tried many more tastes, since I still give her bits of what I’m eating, but I’m fairly sure she ingested fewer calories than last week, which wasn’t very many either.
I had hoped she’d like egg yolk, but so far she doesn’t seem into it. I’ll keep offering.
I’ve also been offering her water more, and actually holding the cup for her. I can’t tell what she thinks of it. It pretty much always dribbles down her chin, but she sometimes seems happy to have me do it repeatedly. I’ve seen her hold the cup by the hands and do the drinking motion with it, but never with water actually inside. With water inside, she just knocks it over and paws at the water for now. (I’ve only ever given it to her with a small amount of water.)
Elimination Communication
Not much to report here. She’s been pretty clear lately about when she does NOT want to go to the potty, but I get the impression that she does this when she actually doesn’t have to go, as evidenced by not going for a while afterwards.
Since she’s grown out of most of her diaper covers, I’ve been thinking about what to get her next. We’ve never really done diaper free time, but I’m toying with the idea of starting it, and maybe getting some trainer pants or something. Not sure it seems worth it though.
Babywearing
I still do it. It’s still comfortable. I use the woven wrap most of the time. I nurse in it frequently when we’re out.
We used the wrap again for the vaccines, and it worked really well. I would highly recommend the method, and our pediatrician said that she actually used it with her own daughter after she saw us do it.
Motor Skills
I don’t think there’s much I can specifically point to in this category. She does the same things as last week, just better. The moments of teetering as she lets go of what she’s pulled up on are a hair longer.
I guess the one exception is the pincer grip I saw. Oh, and she got a knee up on the bed! When we hang out in the bedroom, she spends most of her time pulling up on the bed (mattress on the floor) and, I think, trying to climb up onto it, even though she doesn’t seem at all close to being able to do it. But Will saw her get a knee up for a moment!
She’s a bit more adventurous about where she’ll try crawling to, and routinely attempts longer distances, but she spends considerably more time pulling up over and over again than she does crawling around. She’s not the type to be happy with what she’s already figured out. She wants to move on to the next thing!
She currently doesn’t do much of what I’d call cruising, but maybe a bit.
I finally got to see lots of baby pictures of Will this week, and it is cool to see him doing some of the same things she does. She gets the crazy thighs from him, and some of the same sitting positions, I think.
It’s going to be crazy once she’s walking around, and I can already imagine it!
Personality/Other
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Lydia is quite independent, and will often play for pretty long stretches requiring only minimal intervention from me. She likes playing with toys, and practicing physical skills over and over again. Quite convenient!
One new phenomenon is that she now cares when we take things away from her, and sometimes gets upset even before we actually do, if she can tell we are going to do it. I try not to do it to much and give her warning, but it still comes up sometimes. For example, she was upset that I wouldn’t let her grab all of another baby’s toys that he was happily playing with.
At one point, she was banging very loudly on the floor with a toy as we were having a Skype call, and without thinking too much, Will took it away, since a week ago she would have taken it in stride. She flipped! So we gave it back :-).
I think she’s also experiencing more separation anxiety, or something like it. There’s a particular cry she makes that I think of as the “you’re abandoning me” cry. She’s done it when I left her with a friend as I went upstairs to put diapers away, once when I left her a play area and walked a few feet away to talk with other moms, and another time she kept doing it as I tried to leave her in the carseat and go into the front seat to drive us home.
The only time that posed a problem was the carseat time, and I basically didn’t have much of a solution. I went back and forth a bunch of times, but she’d wail as soon as I got to the front seat, then smile as soon as she saw my face. Previously, when she was upset with the carseat I’d have to pick her up to calm her down, which was a clue that something different was going on. Eventually she just fell asleep, at which point I drove home.
I think I am seeing more and more comprehension on her part. She definitely reacts when I say and sign “all done”, and she’ll have increasingly many reactions further and further ahead of time. Examples would be calming down as soon as the babysitter at Zumba walks to get me, before seeing me, and getting upset when I enter the bathroom, before I actually try to potty her when she doesn’t want to go. And the thing about getting upset if she can tell I’m maybe going to take her thing.
Me
I’ve been doing fine this week. Nothing in particular stands out. I’m inching in the direction of getting more writing done, but I’m not there yet. Lydia is more and more fun.
A friend of mine commented that now that she’s six months, the hardest part is behind me! I know I’ve heard a bunch of different perspectives on this, but I think there’s at least some truth in what she’s saying. It does feel like a major longterm investment is finally paying off.
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