22 Weeks

Audra seems to have bounced back well from her ear infection. In fact, she liked her medicine for it so much that I suspect she'll be a little disappointed tonight since she just finished her last dose this morning :) I would just give her a little taste at first so she could be prepared, and then she would grab onto the syringe and try to jam it in her mouth herself, and then would cry when it was all done. It was less than useful to have all her baby fingers in the way of the plunger too, but I'll take this over having to fight to get her to take her medicine!

Audra seemed much more playful this week - I'm pretty sure she was intentionally lifting her legs up so I could pat her bum the other day, and she has also been playing a little game when I'm trying to nurse her where she latches on and then immediately pops off to look up at me. She did this a bunch of times over the weekend, and it was just the cutest thing to see her little face expectantly looking up at me until I looked back at her, then her breaking into a huge smile. Less cute is her insistence on trying to nurse with her thumb in her mouth too. Ok,  it is super cute, but it also did some damage to me, and reminded me again that pumping during the week probably helps a lot with nursing since it gives me time to recover from any damage Audra does when I'm nursing full-time over the weekends.

Besides that, Audra and Josie seem to be enjoying each other more and making each other laugh more. Audra tends to cry when Ryan first sets down her car seat after coming home in the evenings, and we were a little startled to see her cut off mid-cry - and even start to smile - when Josie ran up and grabbed her foot.

We've been rather impressed with Audra's determination to get at her toys. She still really likes tummy time, and she very deliberately - and painstakingly - maneuvers herself all over the place now in pursuit of her toys. She is also super thrilled with Mirror Baby, Mirror Mommy, and Book Babies, as she kicks and flails for all of them :) We also started to hear Audra do some belly laughs this week, and one of the times was at Josie, who (as far as I could tell) was just talking gibberish. But Audra liked it :)

And although Audra's eyes started out blue-ish before getting more murky, they've been clearing up more lately and looking decidedly more brown!

[3 weeks]

[21 weeks]

Audra's sleep continues to be all over the place, ranging from two wakeups a night (although I guess technically it was just one, since she didn't go back to sleep after the second one) to ... many. We'll put it that way. We had a rather disastrous first attempt at weaning her from her swaddler too. This is something we probably should have done a month ago once she started rolling over, but I was hoping she'd figure out her thumb soon to have that to help resettle her once she had her arms free at night. But I wasn't sure how much longer to wait since she hasn't worked out thumb-sucking yet (and hasn't accepted a pacifier lately), so I decided to just go ahead and try anyway, and put the front back on her crib (it had been sidecarred up to that point, with her mattress flush with ours - so much more convenient, but not as good at containing rolling babies!). I left one arm unswaddled at first, but after she woke up twice within minutes of each time I moved her to her crib and just seemed uncomfortable, I tried taking the swaddle off entirely, and she actually slept... for an hour. As she was moving into her next sleep cycle, she woke up fully and was none too pleased about it, so I ended up just moving her back to bed for the rest of the night and haven't felt up to trying again since. She has actually been a bit more interested in her thumb since then, so fingers crossed that she figures that out soon, and I imagine we'll just keep trying over the coming weeks until hopefully she's able to sleep at least tolerably well unswaddled.

Miscellaneous cuteness:

[Loungin']

[Bound and determined to eat the countertop]