15 lbs 4 oz- in the 72nd percentile
17 inch head- 91st percentile
24 inches long-27th percentile
Emily is already 1/3 of the way through her first year! She has grown so much this past month. She is officially screaming and squealing with delight. She smiles SO big and has given her daddy a few giggles! Her smile melts our hearts and I LOVE being able to make her smile. When we go in to get her from her naps, she sees us and smiles huge and we turn into puddles. She has really found her hands and feet! She reaches for toys on her mat and the toy bar on her carseat. I love watching her learn and discover new things every day. Her favorite time of day is bath time….she is definitely a water baby! She is now sitting in the bumbo and playing in her jumperoo, though she hasn’t quite figured out the jumping part…she will soon though! She loves all of her light up toys and rattles. Her hair is coming back in blonde and her eyes are still blue but turning green! She is gorgeous and we are going to have our hands full ;)
Every month is getting better in regards to her fussyness. Thanksgiving was a bit of an overstimulating mess, but Christmas was MUCH better. She is finally calming down a bit. She will never be a calm baby, but it is getting better.
For the past 10 days, she has only had a tiny spec of blood in one diaper, so we are praying this is the end of the blood. Even though I was forced to consider formula, I knew in my heart continuing to breastfeed her was the best thing for her. If I switched, I knew I would always regret it and think that there was something else I could have cut out in my diet to help her. I have been dairy free now for 2 months. I have also nursed through some pretty crappy stuff. I had a milk blister, that turned into a plugged duct, that turned into mastitis, that turned into intra-ductal yeast. I fought this for two months and I’m excited to say it’s over! Finallyyyyy.
She is eating every 2.5-3 hours during the day. There was a stretch where she was pushing it out to every 4-5, but I figured out it was because she was too interested in everything else going on to eat. Therefore, she would wake up at night frequently to eat. So we fixed that and have her back eating at every 2.5-3.
We are waiting for solids until she reaches 6 months. We are also skipping rice cereal. To be honest, it does nothing for breastfed babies except constipate them, and it has almost no nutritional value. Emily has a very sensitive tummy, so we will be avoiding anything that upsets it even more. Her first foods will be avacado, bananas, and sweet potatoes :) Some have different opinions about solids/cereal and we have certainly heard all about them. The awesome thing about having babies, is you get to do what you feel is best for them and make your own decisions. :) I will know at the end of the day that I did everything I wanted to do for Emily (natural birth, breastfeed, cloth diapering, etc). I will also know she is the healthiest I could possibly make her!
For the past 6 weeks, she has been waking up every 1-2 hours at night to eat. Finally, just this past week, I figured out that it is because she has a nursing association with sleep. Once she goes through a sleep cycle and wakes up, she needs me to put her back to sleep. This has caused her (and me) to be extremely overtired, and she would only be able to stay up for 45 minutes-1hour during the day before she had to be rocked back to sleep for her staple 30 minute nap. That was my day for the past 6 weeks and it has been exhausting to say the least. Right when she turned 4 months old, she started taking longer naps during the day of about 1-1.5 hours. I seriously feel like I have some of my life back AND she is so much happier with a longer nap! To tackle the nighttime sleep issue, we have started sleep training. We have a bedtime routine, and the goal is to put her down drowsy but awake so she can learn how to put herself back to sleep. Emily is a very intense baby, so this does involve some crying. We go in every 5 minutes and pick her up, calm her down, and put her right back down. This is incredibly hard to listen to and exhausting, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is what is working for our family. I wish we could have done a no-cry solution, but because Emily is a post-colic baby, normal soothing techniques don’t work for her. She was never diagnosed with colic because she did not cry for 3+ hours in a row…..but it was definitely more than 3 hours a day combined. No one knows or understands the pure exhaustion of having a colicky baby unless you have one. It takes away the precious first months of bonding and turns them into survival mode. It’s extremely upsetting and I know Danny and I feel robbed of that perfect bonding time with Emily that we thought we would have. A friend said this about colic “I actually think that colic and post-colic sleep hell makes us better parents. We learn more patience, we are more creative, we learn to love our children in the most difficult of times. We withdraw from our friends, we suffer mentally, emotionally, physically, but it just makes us that much better parents for it. This is the worst it is gonna be. It might still take some time to improve, but it will get better.”
If we can just tackle this sleep issue, we will be golden! I’ll leave you with the cutest smile ever:
She also did great with Santa!!
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