Wednesday, September 17, 2014

28 Weeks

Audra went in for her 6-month well baby appointment last week, where she was happy as could be and didn't even cry for her shots :) She measured in at 22lbs, 29" long, with a head circumference of 16 3/4" (so off the charts for weight and length still, and 50-75th percentile for her head). Her doctor seemed impressed with Audra's fine and gross motor skills... and that was even before Audra's latest progress :) So she's technically done with doctors and shots for 3 months (we only got half of her 6-mo shots this week, but her doctor said it was fine to just get the rest at her 9-mo appointment rather than making a separate appointment in a couple of weeks), but we will probably have to bring her in sooner than that anyway for her flu shot. She did great after this round of shots too, with just some warmth and swelling at the injection site for a couple of days.

Audra is doing the "classic" crawl more now, although she tends to drop down to her belly to army crawl when she gets close to her target. There is still lots of rocking back and forth, which was fairly terrifying when she did it towards me, inches from my face, with her mouth wide open to grab my nose ;)
After lots of frankly confusing moves on her part, she has also started to push herself up to sitting too! Although, up until this morning, she wasn't too great at staying upright once she got there. But daycare sent me this picture this morning, so it looks like Audra has figured things out now ;)
But before that, she was doing lots of downward-facing dog moves (for those of you who don't do yoga, basically her knees were off the ground and her bum was in the air). She is pretty happy most of the time when we set her down on the floor - she usually heads right for her favorite things (lately, Josie or the doorstop), and she's super excited about things in general.
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I'm still restricting my diet for probably a few more months, although I'm cautiously starting to test some foods out again. After several times of testing it, I've sadly come to the conclusion that I still can't eat peanut butter yet, but I did try tomatoes several times this week and it appears that those are ok now, which is helpful (tomatoes are in a lot of things, as it turns out). Although I normally tell if a food is ok for me to eat based on how Audra sleeps that night (if she's up a lot with gas, that's a bad sign), but it was sort of hard to tell since she slept so horrendously this week anyway. But I did have tomatoes twice yesterday and she actually did relatively well last night, so I'm considering that my confirmation that tomatoes are fine again ;)

Audra is coming down with a cold again, but I don't even feel like I can really blame that for her sleep. I'm finally admitting to myself that her waking every 1-2 hours most (if not all) of the night is not a phase that's going to be short-lived, unfortunately. She did have an over 4-hour stretch last night (which was then followed by a couple of hours of nursing off and on before she finally settled back into some good sleep somewhere around 4am), but beyond that, it's been a pretty rough week. I am still functioning better than I think I have any right to with this long of a stretch of interrupted sleep, but my patience is not really at the level that I'd like it to be. The silver linings for this week are that Audra woke for the day between 5:30 and 6:30am each morning (much better than 4:30!), and she fell back asleep on her own a few times, including a couple of times on her belly. I wasn't going to push belly sleeping until she was ready due to the SIDS risk, but she rolled herself over last week and fell asleep, so I let her be. I had been hoping that that would help her sleep longer, as it can sometimes do for other babies, but alas. Not our baby ;) She also slept on her side facing me once, which she doesn't normally do, and although I couldn't get back to sleep before the alarm, I did at least get to enjoy about 20 minutes of watching her sleep with her sweet little hands resting on my face.

We'll have to see if this pattern persists too, but Audra possibly skipped right over the 2-nap stage that I vaguely remember lasting from about age 6 months to one year, since she only took one nap a day over the weekend and actually seemed pretty ok with it. She had been doing a morning nap around 8 or 9am and then an afternoon nap around 1pm, with an occasion catnap around 4pm. But this weekend, she fought going to sleep at the usual times and instead just took a nap starting around 10am, and then was only moderately fussy in the afternoons (but did take a couple catnaps Sunday afternoon).

Audra is pretty into this whole solid foods thing. Giving her some rice has proven to be an effective form of entertainment for her while we're out to eat, and while she mainly just pushed that around and inspected it rather than eating it, she did actually ingest some food yesterday! We gave her some beef and peppers, and everything went immediately into her mouth this time for her to suck on, gum, spit out, then gum on it some more.
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Nursing is still going fine for the most part, since while I'm pretty relaxed about feeding her in general (she still nurses on demand on the weekends, and I'm not worrying about how much she's taking in or how frequently), I am more stressed about my supply. She is still taking in about 16oz at daycare, and now with her nursing so frequently overnight, I'm cutting it much closer with how much I'm able to pump during the day, and I'm no longer able to freeze the 10oz or so every week that I was able to before. In fact, I've only been able to freeze less than 5oz total in the last month and a half, which isn't great, especially since I had to thaw some a couple of times when I didn't pump enough during the day and I've had to replenish the frozen stash at daycare a few times.

I'm still pumping every two hours at work to try to keep up with Audra, but it does make me pretty nervous to be cutting it this close, and I worry that my freezer stash is going to be depleted before she's a year old. It's at about 100oz right now, which is pretty low compared to the 400oz I had frozen for Josie at this age, although the intention for Josie was to be able to work through the frozen stash after I weaned. With Audra, I'm just trying to get through her first year until she can start on cow's milk instead, but the frozen stash will be less important then since I'm not really planning on fully weaning her too soon after that point. I also just realized that I may have hurt my supply inadvertently, though - due to how frequently Audra wakes overnight, I've just been nursing her on the same side for half the night and then switching to the other side for the second half of the night so it was less disruptive to us both.... which I just realized looks suspiciously like block feeding, which is a method to slow milk production. So now I'm trying to switch sides more often, so hopefully things will start picking up again over the next week or two.

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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[I forgot to pack a spare set of clothes for her in the diaper bag, so this is how she looks in size 4T ;)]
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