How in the freaking heck is my baby a half year old?! I feel like she was just born. And I also feel like I have never lived without her. It's weird.
The pictures we took this month are easily some of my favorite pictures of her ever. Why is she so pretty? Why do I want to eat her face?
This has been another awesome and challenging month. She's getting more and more fun, and also harder and harder to keep in one place. Gone are the days when she slept half the day. Gone are the days when she would lay on her play mat for 2 hours. But holy crap, she's so fun!
She has progressed SO MUCH this month, it's crazy. She can sit up for short periods of time, but likes to fall backwards and forget to catch herself. We're working on that. After month and months of almost rolling over from back to belly, she finally did it one afternoon while we were in Arizona. Now she loves to do it!! It caused some problems for a little while. Home girl can't sleep on her stomach, but when she first learned to roll over, she would roll over every time we put her down to sleep, and then scream because she was on her stomach! I'd roll her back over, and she'd do the same thing 30 seconds later, haha. She has since seemed to learn that rolling over in bed isn't fun, and it's not really a problem anymore.
Her sleep schedule has been a little up and down. Most of the month has been awesome with her sleeping until 6 or 7, eating, and going back down until 9. I love that. But when she started rolling over in her sleep, some nights got wacky and she would wake up a few times. Since I didn't want her to get into the habit of waking up, we made her cry it out. She has now learned how to
YELL. And she likes to do that when we make her cry it out at 3am. It worked though! She is back to her normal sleeping. She has developed a new habit in the last week or so that is kinda cute, kinda annoying. She wakes up around 4am, and just talks. She doesn't cry, she doesn't fuss. She just quietly talks to herself for 30 minutes, then falls back asleep. It's pretty funny.
She is finally on a napping schedule and has a consistent bed time. She has always been such a good sleeper, that we just kinda put her to bed whenever, but now that she has a set bedtime, her nap times are set too and that's nice. (I'm sure it will all go out the window considering we will be on two vacations in April). She is a really good napper, and takes 2-3 hour naps. There are some days she randomly decides she only needs one nap. It amazes me on some days when she won't nap well, but she is still so happy. She's always been an alert baby, ever since she was born. She doesn't seem to require as much sleep as some kids. Which is weird to me because all I ever want to do is sleep.
I flew alone with her for the first time and she was an angel! On the way there, she made friends with the lady next to us, and then napped. On the way home, she slept the whole dang time! She's so good, we really are so lucky. And yes it's luck, because it's not anything I am doing. She just is very easy. When she does get fussy, she's easy to distract. I hope it stays that way.
She loves singing, dancing, and clapping. She has just started to kind of "sing" along when we sing to her. It's really cute. Singing is a surefire way to get her to stop being grumpy. She loves bath time and loves being able to sit up and be a part of the action. She HATES laying down, even being inclined, so her bouncer is not quite the magic fix it used to be. She loves Lady and could watch her all day. She reaches out and grabs her so we are already trying to teach "soft" so that our poor cat doesn't go bald from hair pulling. She still thinks high-pitched noises are funny, and she loves when we gasp. She is getting even more interested in toys, but really she wants things she shouldn't have. Like phones and remotes and computer cords.
She is still a little wary of strangers, but warms up pretty quickly. Like with the lady on the plane. She was grabbing her face after just a few minutes. And she loved visiting family in Arizona. She was all smiles for my mom and sister, and she thought her uncle Marshall was hilarious. She still loves being passed around in Young Women's and never cries. Although she is pretty serious with them. For some reason, it takes forever for the girls to get smiles out of her! They try so hard, haha.
She is still in our room at night, but we will be making the transition when we get home from our trip for my nephew's blessing. I feel much more ready now. She naps in her own room every day and I know she feels more comfortable in there. Plus, it will be nice on those nights she decides to wake up at 4am that I can just turn the volume on the monitor down, haha/
She has shown little to no interest in solid food until just this past week. We have been trying rice cereal for 2 months now and she had maybe swallowed 2 spoonfuls. Then, all of the sudden, this week she has eaten really well! We only do it before bed, but will maybe move to more meals a day. I have also tried to start baby-led weaning, where we give her baby safe portions of whatever we are eating and she feeds herself, and she has little interest. The most success we have had was a french fry from chick-fil-a. When we gave her an apple slice to suck on, she acted like we were trying to kill her, haha. Nathan did also give her a tiny bite of his ice cream one time and she was obsessed. Oops! We will keep trying with the cereal and hopefully get her interested in more foods, but I am not too worried about it. I do love nursing her, but sometimes it's hard because she's so curious now, she constantly wants to be looking around. And she's always reaching up and grabbing my face and hair or hitting my chest. I think it's pretty funny though.
She is so funny these days. Everything we do makes her laugh or smile. I love that freaking gummy smile. She is interacting so much more with the world and I love watching her learn. She sits in the front of her stroller now and is so amazed by everything she sees. We go on walks every day and she loves it. She loves to play with wrappers from string cheese and granola bars. She has also learned that her hands work together and she passes things from hand-to-hand or turns them over and over. She does just as much exploring with her feet and loves to feel things with her toes or rub her feet all over your face. She also loves to stick her feet right in her mouth. Or my mouth. She is always grabbing people's faces. I think it's so cute. It's a sign that she likes you.
She is becoming more and more affectionate and it's so sweet! After she gets up from a nap or after she eats, we have "face smashing time," where she smashes her face up against mine and will usually grab the sides of my head. She also puts her mouth on my face and gives me wet, baby kisses. She loves to be kissed too, and will sit patiently while we smother her face with kisses. She has started to reach for me when she wants me, and does this kind of panicked cry when she wants to be picked up. If it were up to her, she would be held all day. I will miss that when she gets more mobile!
Speaking of getting mobile, she is definitely on the move. Rolling over helps her get places, but she is also learning to drag and scoot herself around. She can really only do it backwards, but she can really get places! Especially when she gets to the wood floor. She just slides all around. She gets up on her knees and rocks aback and forth and looks really close to crawling. I'd be okay with a couple more months of her not being able to do that. She gets really frustrated that she can't move though. She so badly wants to crawl all around our apartment. Especially so she can chase Lady.
She is chunking up and last time we weighed her, she was 16 pounds. She's long though and so she has little chicken legs. Her head is still giant and I love it. Especially her double-chin. We think she looks more and more like me every day. It must be the double chin. She is still exclusively breastfed and I think we'll keep it that way until she makes the transition to cow's milk.
She can hold and grab things perfectly now and never drops them or misses. She does love to throw things, however, and loves to bang her hands against surfaces. She still loves to talk and yell and I love hearing her voice all day long. She does less of the high pitched, scream noises and that makes me kinda sad. They were so cute! She has learned how to blow air and thinks it's super funny. She does it now when she is done nursing. She will just lay there and blow air while still latched.
I can say that I 100% feel back to normal and completely adjusted to this new life with Sadie. It was a million times easier after the first couple months, but now everything seems very second nature to me and I just love being this girl's mom!
