Hellobee

This update is just a tad late (ok ok, it’s almost 2 weeks late!). I’ve had it written for a while, but I needed some recent pictures to post! So here we go.

Lil Miss Wagon

Oh, my sweet baby girl. LMW is still growing like crazy and her personality is coming out more and more. She is generally a really chill baby and mostly seems content, smiling and laughing and cooing at us every day. She loves to do this scream-gurgle thing when she thinks something is funny. Kind of like a high-pitched Chewbacca. Due to teething she does get a little sleep-deprived sometimes, and this leads to total screaming meltdowns when we enter public places and she gets scared of all the noises. This has been really difficult because it’s tough to calm her down, so we’ve really limited the places we take her.

4 MONTH STATS
Weight:  19.45 lbs (99%)
Length: 26.6 in (99%)
Head Circumference: 17.5 in (99%)

Yeah, so my girl’s wicked big. I’m not that surprised at the weight stats since Wagon Jr. was a fat baby as well (and didn’t thin out until he started walking!), but I have no idea where the height is coming from! LMW’s head control is getting better and better, so we’ve pulled out the exersaucer, to the delight of Wagon Jr. He loved helping Daddy put it together and choose which toy went where. LMW is still a little too young to really enjoy it, but it’s nice to have an option of where to put her for playtime. She still enjoys tummy time, and has rolled from tummy to back a few times. She has been able to roll since 2 weeks old, but she stopped for a while because she got really big and heavy!

Eating

LMW has always been a good eater and continues to be. She has between 4-5 daytime feeding of 3-5 ounces each. She will usually fall asleep drinking her bottle and she’ll nap after. Her bedtime bottle is between 5-6.5 ounces and her one night feeding is 6.5 ounces. I’m still exclusively pumping and it’s working great for us, especially since I’m now back to work 4 days a week. It’s been a little tough juggling work, pumping, and taking care of the kids, but I think I finally have a good system down.  I pump first thing when I wake up (usually 6am), before lunch (around 11am), before leaving work (3:30pm), and before bed (10pm). I average around 9 ounces each session or around 35 ounces a day. I’m usually able to add a 6 oz bag to my freezer stash each day, depending on how much LMW has eaten that day. Right now I’m up to 50 bags in my stash.

Sleeping
Sleep has been a little tough because LMW is teething. (Her first tooth broke through last week!) Despite all the teething remedies we try on her, she usually still struggles to fall and stay asleep. After drinking a bottle she almost always falls asleep quickly, but after we put her down in her crib, she wakes crying after 5 minutes of being completely asleep and alone. We usually have to go back in and rock her back to sleep at least twice. Then sometimes she’ll wake crying at the 30 minute mark as well, and the 1 hour mark. We’re usually able to rock her back to sleep, and every now and then she’s able to fall back asleep on her own. For bedtime, she’s usually down for good by 8:30pm (even though we start her bedtime process at 5:45pm!) and she’ll wake for one night feeding any time between midnight and 4am, after which she usually falls asleep very easily (not awake for more than 45 minutes total). She has slept through the night a couple of times, but I’m not going to count it as anything other than flukes until she’s regularly sleeping through the night! But she has slept for 10+ hours a handful of times, so hopefully sleeping through the night is right around the corner.

On a good day, this is what her schedule looks like:

6:30am – wake up, play, 5 oz bottle
8:00am – 1st nap (2 hrs), 3 oz bottle
12:00pm – 2nd nap (1.5 hr), 3 oz bottle
3:30pm – 3rd nap (1 hr), 4 oz bottle
5:30pm – bath and 6.5 oz bedtime bottle
6:30pm – bedtime
7:30pm – down for good
Any time between 12:30am and 5:00am – 6.5 oz night feeding bottle

LMW is on and off with the pacifier, and right now we’re at a weird point where sometimes a pacifier will make her fall asleep, sometimes the projection mobile will be enough for her to fall asleep, and sometimes nothing but good old fashioned rocking and patting will put her to sleep. She’s still not finding her fingers well enough to soothe herself at night, so she’s still in the Woombie. Pretty soon we will be forced to swaddle-wean and sleep train, and I am not looking forward to it!!

Wagon Jr. 

Just one month away from 3 years old… it’s very difficult to believe that my first baby is definitely not a baby anymore. He is getting better and better at using his words, which has been a bit of a challenge, especially since he is currently the youngest in his class at daycare (he’s been in the Young 3’s class since September, and he turns 3 next month!). He can actually tell us what he did at school that day on the way home (one day they made cornbread, and he ate a lot of it, according to him), which is oh so fun.

He has finally started loving on stuffed animals other than his lovey, so every night he takes Banky (his lion blankie lovey), Bear (an old Precious Moments bear that used to belong to Wagon Sr.) Bunny Friend (a stuffed Velveteen Rabbit he got as a baby from our friends Amy and Brian), and Floffy (my old stuffed dog) to bed with him. He’s still in his crib and scatters them about, and when he wakes crying, he’ll gather his friends into one corner, dive facefirst into them and fall back asleep.

Potty Training
Wagon Jr. hasn’t had any potty accidents in a long time (knock on wood!) so I am very very happy to say that we have successfully potty trained before turning 3! He is also fighting naps at daycare, probably because during rest time none of his other classmates take a nap anymore since they are all slightly older than him. We’ve been working with the teachers to get him to nap, since on the days he doesn’t nap he comes home and really has a hard time during dinner and bedtime. I’m talking full-out red-zone meltdowns. And those are especially tough to deal with when you’ve got a teething 4 month old trying to fall and stay asleep upstairs. Thankfully his wonderful teachers have been doing everything in their power to get him to sleep (we sent in a sleep sack, one of his bedtime books, and instructed them to rub his head) and he’s taken quite a few naps these past two weeks… phew.

Eating
I think Wagon Jr. is finally exiting his picky phase because he is actually willing to try new foods now. Most of the time he’ll spit it out and say “I don’t like it” if it’s something with a new taste or texture (i.e. chopped onions in fried rice), but the fact that he’ll put it in his mouth is pretty huge for us. Because my mom has been here and cooking for us, we’ve been able to get him to try a few new things, and as long as it’s something yummy and warm and doesn’t have crunchy vegetables in it, he’ll usually eat it. He tried kalbi jjim (a rich, sweet, stewed beef rib dish with potatoes and carrots… think pot roast) and he absolutely loved it! He also demolished a pile of white rice during our last meal out, which is the first time he’s ever eaten plain rice. Very exciting. During the week we’re just rushing to get him fed and to bed after we all get home, so we haven’t had much time to work on new foods and vegetables. We’re hoping to get more of that done during the weekends, but lately everyone is just so tired from LMW’s teething shenanigans that we’ve defaulted to chicken nuggets and cold pasta most nights. And never underestimate the power of cold cuts rolled up around cheese sticks.

Sibling Love
As for the two together, LMW is definitely enamored with her older brother. She stares at him when he’s near, and whenever he does funny/goofy things (which is often!) she usually breaks out into a smile or laugh. Wagon Jr. absolutely loves having her around, and when she’s not around he always asks “where Baby Jodie go?” He mentions her all the time in conversation and in the songs he makes up. Sometimes he gets upset that she’s not around (usually because she’s in her room sleeping) and goes over to her chair or swing and demands that we “put him in there.” (He keeps referring to all people as “him” and “he” no matter how many times I correct him!) When she wakes from a nap and we’re going to go get her from her crib, he insists on coming with us, drags in a step stool from the bathroom, and climbs up onto it so he can look at her lying in her crib and play with her.

Life with two has been pretty crazy and absolutely exhausting. We’re going to bed earlier and earlier every night and weekends are even more crazy than weekdays. I know that once LMW is through the initial painful teething and sleeping through the night, our lives will settle down a bit, and I can’t wait. But it’s really hard to complain with two adorable faces smiling at me every day.