Five months.

Today was a big day; Hanna Lu is five months old, I went back to work, and babe started day care. I’m surprised we’re gearing up to do it all over again tomorrow; we were pooped! What a FUN month it has been. I’m so super grateful to have had time with our baby as a baby baby, not just a glorified newborn. She has been so interactive and fun to do things with and I’ve been soaking it all in and am already looking forward to next summer when the weeks lay ahead of us.

Let’s think about some details, shall we?

How old: five months

Weight: somewhere around 15 pounds is my guess. I’ve been trying to get the child used to bottles during the day and so I can really {somewhat} control how much she takes in and I think it’s helped her pack on a few more ounces than she usually does in a month. Though I could be wrong, who knows, our scale can be inaccurate, etc. But, around 15 pounds!

Likes:

• Dolly Baby! HL loves to gnaw on Dolly’s satin ballet slipper clad feet. It grosses me out that she gets so soggy so I wash this thing several times a week.
• Frozen milk in a mesh/silicone feeder; this was a big hit!
• Watching mom and dad do anything, especially drink anything…child is so curious!
• Sitting in her new “highchair”; it’s a clamp on for our counter/table and the new vantage point is pleasant for Hanna Lu.
• Her binkies; some days more so than other but little bit is enjoying the paci. I put her down to sleep with one and while most nights it gets spat out soon after, sometimes it’s in there for quite a while. This is also handy in the car whereas she used to shriek, she’s pretty chill now, though we haven’t done much driving recently.
• Babbling and smiling and cooing and making her parents and dog fall in love with her.
• Being outside and seeing trees.
• Sleeping on her tummy; this was a scary one for us the first few nights. Now we know she’s “ok” with it but even though she can easily roll in both directions now, she doesn’t know it when she wakes up and isn’t thrilled to be “stuck” on her stomach.
• Her bath; this baby kicks and splashes each night…we soap her up only every other night since it’s not like she’s really rolling around in the dirt each day, we just really like the whole bath time routine.
• Scratching/feeling things; the couch, the mesh sides of her pack n’play, and our dog Guinness are the faves.
• “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” by Eric Carle…the kid goes nuts when we read her this book and it’s hilarious.
• Library story/song time…especially Miss Gillian at our local library.
• The crab on her “Neptune” themed exersaucer. He has little ribbon legs that she obsessively sucks on. Again, like with Miss Dolly, this grosses me out to no end but we can’t stop her, she loves it, and I can’t even throw this thing in the washer.
• Facetime on the phone; this baby goes NUTS on facetime…she loves her grandparents and great-grandmother and really lets them know it!

Dislikes:

• Eating, if she’s really tired. It’s like all she wants to do is sleep but her mama insists she have a good meal before going down.
• Being left for too long…sometimes we get absorbed in getting things done around the apartment and Hanna just wants some mama/daddy attention but we try to leave her on her playmat or in her exersaucer {thank you Craigslist!}…she loves these things but not if she’s ready for some people-time.

Milestones:

• Meeting some of our nearest and dearest friends at a wedding in Milwaukee.
• Starting daycare!
• This is a prediction of a milestone considering she just started daycare – baby will probably have her first little cold/bug soon…fun times ahead.
• Taking more bottles during the day.
• SLEEPING – we let Hanna Lu teach herself to self-soothe and fall asleep alone and she went from sleeping maybe two hours at a time to 10 to 12, with a snack or two thrown in. It took a few nights for this and then a few more after our trip to Wisconsin. Naps were much harder but just this past three or four days naps were the same deal…baby can go into her little “room” with her binky and her sound machine on {falling rain} awake and {as of a week ago or so} rolls right over to sleep. Sometimes she may fuss a bit if she’s overly tired or something but this is it. Some naps are short, but she’s guiding it and I’m OK with that as long as she goes down…though we had several days of three-hour-ers this past week – AMAZING. With the starting of daycare I’m predicting some regression with her sleeping but it is what it is and our daughter has impressed us so very much with her progress.

Sleep and eat:

• For sleep, see above!
• Hanna Lu can take a seven ounce bottle every three hours, though six ounces really seems to be her jam…mama pushes those last 30 mL. Up to today, I had been nursing in the middle of the night and in the morning, and maybe right before bed, with about three of those five-to-seven ounce bottles during the day. Now with daycare, daddy will probably give a bottle when baby wakes up while I pump/get ready for the day…and then I’d like to keep nursing her at bedtime and during the night.

Miscellaneous:

• We’re still loving our cloth diapers and I hope that with the busy-ness and craziness of school/work/life balance we can continue to do so. Daycare today seemed OK with them and had her little wet/dry bag full for us when we picked up baby so I’m grateful for that.
• Hanna Lu is wearing mostly three-to-six month clothes; she can fit in six month clothes. I can get her into some 0-three month clothes but they really look like capris and quarter-length sleeved outfits on her so, yeah, maybe those can be retired.
• Baby is wearing size two or three in disposable diapers; she’s not in the weight suggestions for size three diapers but in the size twos while we were traveling we had a “blow out” each and every day, sometimes several times a day, and I’ve read that a high occurrence of “incidents” indicates too-small diapers. In her cloth diapers, Hanna Lu has only one column of snaps exposed and they’re on the smallest “length”; this might make no sense at all to those who aren’t familiar with the “Bumgenius” brand of cloth diapers but at least I’ll remember!
• We’re looking forward to some rice cereal later this month followed by “baby-led-weaning” beginning in earnest at around six months…more on that later!
• Also, we are excited to meet a dear friend in the next month and have an impromptu visit with grandma and Zaide just this upcoming weekend!

Just for fun: these may not be the ones I've used for each monthly post but same difference...she doesn't look too much different from month two until now but oh my goodness how she has changed since then. I also love how in her first picture those legs were tucked in tight - they're constantly kicking now!

xoxo, natty ♥