Even though I was given the ‘ok’ from the pediatrician to start my daughter on rice cereal at 4 months old, I didn’t start her on it until she was 5 1/2 months old. I didn’t want to rush things and I read a lot of information that said you should actually wait until they’re 6 months old. I knew she was ready because whenever I ate my own cereal in the morning she would stare me down and open & close her mouth like a fish. I’ve heard that the first time you try to give your baby solids, expect it to go bad, so I braced myself for the tight lips, the crying, and the pushing away. Surprisingly, she LOVED it. She gave me a big smile on the very first spoonful, and she ate the entire serving. Finally, something that went nice and easy for me. She’s definitely a good eater, just like her mama. Only instead of cheesecake, chocolate, and ice cream, she likes to dive into sweet potatoes, peas, even prunes. I still haven’t found anything she doesn’t like. Actually, I once tried to give her a spoonful of the jarred Beef & Broth, and she made the biggest grimace ever. I tasted the stuff and I didn’t blame her. It looked and tasted like cat food so I threw it out. She prefers my homemade Turkey Sloppy Joe’s anyway (I have a great recipe btw..if you ever want it just email/leave me a comment).

At the end of 5 months she finally started to roll over from belly to back, to the right. Other kids were rolling in both directions and their parents loved to tell me about it and ask about my daughter’s progress. As a first time mom, it really is hard not to compare your kids to other kids because you want to know what “normal” is, whatever that means, so I did my best to fight the urge. I think my favorite part about 5 months old was that she finally started to sleep longer stretches at night, and I only had to nurse her once through the night, usually around 2:00 a.m. This gave her a 5 hour stretch of sleeping since she usually went to bed at 9:00 p.m., and I’m told that 5 hours is considered “sleeping through the night” (STTN) for a baby. It is amazing what sleep can do for you when you haven’t had it in sooo long.

As for music, my husband and I constantly would make up songs for her. He would write his own songs and play them on the guitar for her, usually acoustic, and I would usually make up little jingles on the spot. She really loved to hear “her” songs, as in the songs we made up that have her name in the song. Whenever she would hear them she’d get really excited and if she was in her bouncy chair she’d start rocking it like crazy. She was now in a period where she was crying less so I didn’t have to resort to singing constantly to calm her, but I still did anyway. I tried out some Jeff Buckley on her for the first time, by starting with “Hallelujah” (of course). She got really quiet and stared at me during most of the song. Then I played “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” and sang along with it to her (Damn, I love this song). I actually got a smile out of her during it; can you blame her? Haha. Beautiful song. Ah, Jeff. R.I.P. Whenever I would drive anywhere with her I would carefully select a cd to play for her. I usually stuck with softer, “art rock,” but every now and then I’d throw in some Rage Against The Machine. She didn’t seem to react to that either way. I’m curious to see what her music preferences will be as a toddler and if she really will like alternative rock as much as nursery rhymes. I shall have to wait and see.

Around 4 1/2 months old, I really wanted to try to start my daughter on some sort of schedule. I mean she was already eating on a schedule because she wanted to nurse like every 2 hours, so I kept her on that, but she needed some sort of sleep/nap schedule. No one in the family got any sleep because she didn’t sleep. As with everything else, I turned to the Internet for some advice, or at least for some book recommendations. (I swear, what did new mothers do before the Internet?) There were a few books I was interested in, but my library only had one of them, so I got a copy of “The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems” by Tracy Hogg. One of my favorite sections of the book is the part about different temperaments/personalities that babies can have. THANK YOU. I felt reassured to know that I am NOT going crazy when I swear that my child is a Diva baby. My baby definitely is a mix between 2 of the personality types: spirited and grumpy. She is very excitable, but also has a strong temper. So you get strong emotions either way…no chilled out baby here. Her grumpy/spirited personality probably explains why she had colic issues to begin with since she’s very expressive and has something to say about every little issue that comes her way. Boy, you should have heard the screams she would do from having hiccups as a young infant. And even now, at 9 months old, if she misses a nap you better be close to home or she’ll make you regret going out in the first place. It seems my friends all have either Angel babies or Textbook ones, so that’s why they have no clue where I’m coming from when I try to explain a lot of the issues I have with my daughter. I liked reading the book because I felt I wasn’t alone in dealing with a difficult, fussy baby.

As for the schedule/routine-making part of the book, I took what I could from that section, but I didn’t agree with all of it. For instance she says that a young breastfed baby can nurse at almost the same frequency as a formula-fed baby. I disagree- I believe in nursing a young baby on demand, and that breast milk is no where near as filling as formula. Also, she explains how to get your baby to take longer naps and how each nap should be about 2 hours. Well, I tried and tried, but my daughter would only take 30 min naps. So her suggested schedules were hard for me to follow since my daughter’s nursing times and nap times were way off the author’s suggested ones. However, I still felt like I gained a lot from reading the book, and I did follow it loosely. Even though my daughter’s naps were really short, at least she was taking them at certain times of the day, and in her own crib. And the best tip I got from the book was about doing a night routine so your baby knows it’s time for bed. Every night my routine became giving her a bath, then nursing, then bed. Because she has eczema/cradle cap pretty bad I didn’t always use soap, but I went through the motions just so she could know what to expect. It really made a difference. She went down for bed soo much easier. This part of motherhood, the schedule-making, actually felt like real work. Like a project that I had to study for, plan, and then try to execute. I actually kept lists of times for each thing. I wish I could have just gone with the flow, but since my baby’s personality isn’t “laid back,” it wouldn’t work with her. That was another valuable tip from the book: try to work WITH your baby’s personality type and not around it because otherwise you’ll have total chaos and many meltdowns. Deal with the hand you’ve been given, so to speak.

My baby had been sleeping in the Pack-N-Play bassinet in our bedroom since she was born. When she hit 4 months old, I figured it was time to let her use the nice crib in her own room. As with most new parents, the idea of having her so far away from me at night (meaning the next room over) terrified me since I was still paranoid about listening to make sure she was breathing. I did have an audio monitor, but you can’t use that for breathing, so that wasn’t reassuring. Plus, my daughter’s cry is LOUD, so I didn’t even need the monitor. You can honestly hear her cry if you’re in the shower, with the bathroom door closed, and she’s in a room all the way down the hall with her door closed. On the first night that I tried to put her in her crib at night by herself, I had first prepared myself by reading some tips online from people to make it work. A lot of people suggested the timed “cry it out” method, where you go in every 5, 10, 15 minutes to reassure the baby that you didn’t abandon them. This is a sleep-training method invented by Dr. Ferber. Well, we tried it. As with Colic, breastfeeding, and teething, it broke my heart hearing her scream, and we both were in tears. BUT, I have to say, she did fall asleep at the 20-minute interval. (So that was a total of 50 minutes.) We continued to use this method the next day for naps. On the 2nd night for bedtime she fell asleep at the 15 minute interval. By the 5th day she was asleep at the 10 minute interval and that was good enough for me. Two weeks later she barely cried for 2 minutes and then she’d fall asleep. We did use the pacifier so every now and then I’d have to run in her room to put it back in her mouth, but I could deal with that. I know that a lot of people don’t agree with the cry it out (CIO) method, but it was the right choice for me- at least the progressive time one. I would never let her cry more than 20 minutes straight.

A fun development that happened at 4 months was she started to blow “raspberries.” I was hoping that she’d do it because I know that not all babies do every particular milestone. I mean I was already getting comments from my mom on how her friends’ grandchildren were rolling over already, and shouldn’t my daughter? No she wasn’t rolling yet. Who cares! I don’t know what’s more annoying: getting unsolicited baby advice from people when you’re pregnant -OR- getting comments from people comparing your baby to other babies. I tried to tune people out when they made the comparison comments, since they were usually said in a negative, concerning matter, and who asked them anyway. As the books say, every baby is different. My baby wasn’t rolling yet, but she was making raspberries. Plus, she showed preferences for certain modern rock songs that I liked. So there. :)  Her favorite that month seemed to be Radiohead. She would quiet down during “No Surprises” or “Fake Plastic Trees.” During the day when she would hear more upbeat music, she would start to rock herself in her bouncy seat, especially when my husband would play guitar for her. I don’t mean she’d gently rock herself in her chair. Instead, she looked like she was trying to win a rocking race, and she’d kick her legs like crazy with this super serious look on her face like it was her JOB to move like that when the music was playing. We have it on video and it’s pretty funny.

As for her size, she was still huge- 95th percentile in height & weight at 17.5 lbs and 25.75 inches. But I loved every chubby inch of her. Actually she didn’t really look chubby; she just weighed a lot. Oh, and this was another thing that dear ole’ mom had to get her say in about. “Should she be this big? Maybe you’re feeding her too much.”  Okay, first she didn’t like me breastfeeding because she thought I wasn’t feeding her enough since she couldn’t measure how much milk the baby got; and now she doesn’t like me breastfeeding because she thinks I’m feeding her too much. Ah, mothers. Oh wait, I’m one now. I mean, ah…mothers from a different generation who don’t want to get up on the times.

Throughout my entire pregnancy I used Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Stretch Mark Cream to try to prevent stretch marks. It worked, because to this day I still don’t really know what one looks like. The closest I’ve come to seeing one is on my husband’s bicep. Weird right? He has them right where the bicep meets the armpit. Anyway, after my daughter was born I was psyched and thought I would still be able to wear a bikini since I had no stretch marks and since the C-section scar was too low for anyone to see. I was wrong. Little did I know that even 3 months after she was born I still had that dark vertical line (linea negra) going from above my belly button all the way down to my pelvic area. That line didn’t even show up until I was like 8 months pregnant. (Even now, almost 9 mths after she was born, I still have traces of that line.)  Another pregnancy battle scar I have is from my navel piercing. I had it since I was 18, and from months 7-9 of my pregnancy I wore a maternity piercing that I got at maternitypiercings.com that was really pretty. But during month 10 of my pregnancy I was getting so many ultrasounds that I just took it out because I had to keep removing it anyway. Well, once the baby was born I pretty much forgot to put the belly button ring back in. (I was forgetting to eat, so there was no way I’d remember about my accessories.) Even though I had that piercing for 13 years, it closed up after 3 months. But I didn’t realize it closed at first because it LOOKED like it was still open, with a hole above my navel. So one day when I remembered to finally put the ring in, I tried and realized that it had closed inside and underneath. So now I have a scar there that looks like I have a hole - an ugly brownish hole since the pregnancy also made it turn brown, along with that line. Gross! All that work I put into preventing stretch marks and I got other marks instead. Not cool. I guess I’ll have to wear a Tankini next year.

Around 3-4 months old, my daughter’s colic FINALLY started to chill out a bit. Like I’ve said in earlier posts, without the swing and the 5 S’s I would have collapsed, so they helped a lot with the crying when it would start up, but I was thrilled that it was happening less and less. She was now letting her true personality show though, and it was pretty apparent that she really was a Diva. She has a nasty temper and is very vocal when you take away something she wants or if you don’t meet her immediate need (and she isn’t even in the Terrible 2’s yet!). She still does the banshee scream at the top of her lungs that turns a crowded room silent. But the positive side of this personality is that she’s really excitable, so when she’s happy that same crowded room will also know it. She literally squeals with delight. And she has the machine-gun/dolphin laugh that babies have, and it cracks me up. To sum up her personality, she’s either insanely upset and screaming OR  ridiculously happy.

Right when the colic started to end, she began having early teething symptoms:  drooling, gumming her hands, and crying a lot. Since she’s a really fussy baby, there was no question that she’d be one of those babies who doesn’t handle teething well. The one upside of having a colicky baby is that I was already used to all the crying, so it wasn’t really different for me. I didn’t want to use medications on her yet since she was only 3 months old, so we just stuck it out.

Another issue that was going on simultaneously was naps, or lack thereof. I began to try a very loose schedule with her of when I could expect her to nap in her bouncy seat, but it didn’t really work. She was pretty predictable of when she would get tired, but no matter how tired she was, she’d only nap 30 minutes. Oh, and at night she still was up to eat like every 2 hours. Fun times. Thirty minute naps meant that I had no free time whatsoever, so I still barely had time to cook, eat, or shower. I ran around the house like a mad woman the second she fell asleep, trying to get little things done here and there. According to Dr. Harvey Karp, the author of The Happiest Baby On The Block and founder of the 5 S’s, babies have a “4th trimester” which is actually their first 3 months of life. Now that my daughter was past the 4th trimester, I hoped that the eating, sleeping, & crying thing would work itself out.

I think I finally started to enjoy being a mom, at least a little bit, when my daughter was about 1 month old. Before then, I confess it was the most stressed I’ve ever been in my life. She cried non-stop from colic, I was severely sleep deprived, and I actually weighed less than I did before I was pregnant because I didn’t have any time to eat.  But once she was 1 month old I finally was rewarded with that first “real” smile, you know, the non-gas kind, which made it seem worth it. She has two huge dimples and a really wide face so she truly looked like a Gerber baby; a cherub. Where that cherub was from remains a question because she definitely wasn’t an angel baby. Haha.

My husband and I would sing to her almost daily, everything from nursery songs to Stone Temple Pilots. One morning I was singing to her and she just started babbling back. But it wasn’t her normal babbling that she did throughout the day. This was a specific babble that she does while being sung to, like a trill almost, and she would go up and down the scale. It’s really funny to watch because she’d belt out an off-key note and hold it while her eyebrows came together, like she’s REALLY concentrating on the note, or maybe she was just trying to poop, who knows. She would always “sing” whenever my husband or I would sing to her. But she also would babble a lot throughout the day, like she was talking to you about everyday stuff. Some of my friends’ babies weren’t really babbling much yet, so this was one area which she seemed to do early.

As a parent of a baby, my newest interest became baby poop. The amount, the frequency, the consistency, the color, etc. When they send you home from the hospital with your baby they want you to pay attention to poop, and I don’t think you ever stop paying attention to it!  If you were to put two very new mothers together, especially breastfeeding mothers, the conversation would quickly turn to this subject. Her poop was mostly the standard watery, yellow, mustard-seed poop that breastfed babies produce. But every now and then she’d have dark green, mucousy poop, and there would be tiny (and I do mean tiny) streaks of blood in it. It scared me to death! The doctor said that babies sometimes can have a little tearing from pooping so frequently, or that it could be a sensitivity to something I was eating. They said that dairy is usually the culprit, so I cut back on my dairy intake again. It seemed to help.

Unfortunately, she still didn’t sleep. She was sleeping a little at night, but naps were pretty much non-existent. I didn’t know about schedules or anything at the time, so I wasn’t aware about trying to put her on one. She fell asleep in her bouncy seat when she was tired during the day, and when she did sleep it was only for maybe 20-30 minutes. I always thought that the only thing young babies did mostly was sleep, at least that’s what everybody told me and what was portrayed on some episodes of the TV show Bringing Home Baby, but not my daughter. She never slept. That’s why I never had time to eat, cook, clean, or do anything else. This was another area where I tended to get a little jealous of my friends’ “easy” babies, versus my little diva.

I was still successfully breastfeeding, which I was really proud about considering how hard it was for me. I think it paid off because when she went to her 1st month check-up at the doctor, she was in the 95th percentile in height/weight at 11 lbs and 23 inches. I didn’t realize how big she was until the doctor laughed and said that she’s considered a huge baby, but not to worry about her being an Amazon Woman when she’s older because they can’t tell that until children are about 2 years old. That didn’t  reassure me much, but at least she wasn’t overly small. I’d rather her be a big baby than an overly small baby. The only issue that her height/weight presented to me was clothing. It killed me inside that she was only able to wear some items once, or not at all, because she quickly outgrew everything. This child had gorgeous outfits that people had given her, but she couldn’t wear a lot of them. I’m dealing with the mental torture of that by holding onto them and hoping that if I ever have another child that it will be a girl. This way I’ll feel like the clothing was used more. 

My daughter’s colic was driving us crazy, so my husband and I would frantically run around the house to do the few things that would help calm her, if only for a few moments. The first thing we found that helped was rocking her while she was in her bouncy seat. We would bounce the seat with our foot constantly (she didn’t like the vibration option of the seat). The minute we stopped or walked away from the chair the wailing would begin, so we’d take turns. The other thing that would help a lot was me singing to her. Not just any song, though. It had to be “Meet Me In The Tower” by the band Ours. Is it a coincidence that this was the song I would always play to her using earbuds while she was still in my belly? Who knows, but this song made her stop crying instantly. Maybe it’s the high pitch “head voice” I would use while singing it, or the sound of the scale, but I like to think it was the song itself because my girl has an ear for talent. haha. She would sometimes quiet down from hearing the song “Dizzy,” also by Ours, but Tower was definitely the favorite for her. The problem with both of these “colic-solving” methods is that I would constantly have to rock or sing, otherwise she would keep crying. And I didn’t have any time on my hands as it was.

It was then that I discovered my favorite baby invention EVER: The cradle swing. I’ve heard people say what a great product it was and how I HAD to register for it while pregnant, so I got one at my shower. Even though most people don’t seem to use it until the baby is a little older, I was ready at 3 weeks. It was like instant heaven and I would happily put tons of money into D batteries if it continued to work as well as it did. We used the side-to-side cradle option of the swing, which she seemed to like best. This was the Fisher Price Ocean Wonders Aquarium Swing and it gave me the silence that I longed for. When she had to get the 1st round of immunizations at 1 month old, once we got home she cried worse than she has ever cried before. My husband and I were really upset and scared and didn’t know what to do, so he put her in the swing as a last resort. She instantly quieted down and fell asleep. The only issue with the swing was that it wasn’t a permanant solution since we couldn’t pack up the swing and bring it to a store or anywhere else because it wasn’t really portable.