Lots of New Stuff

Last night, I was feeding Caroline dinner and I turned to Chris and said, "I can't belive how much she has changed. She's not a baby anymore." And he replied, "No, she's a little person now." And it's so true. Her personality just keeps developing more and more every day and her physical abilities have changed dramatically over the past month.

No sooner than she mastered crawling, she started pulling up. The first time was about 2 weeks ago. She started by trying to hold onto her Bebe Pod chair and pull herself up with ther arms. Then, she would pull up on one of us if we were laying in the floor or on the storage box filled with clothes she has outgrown. Now, she can pull up and stand with arm support on just about anything-- the couch, her basket of toys, the ottoman, the glass door. Once she gets up, she can support herself with just one arm and use the other to play with something. Sometimes she stands with her feet really wide apart, almost in a split. When she loses her balance, she falls to the floor but holds on for dear life with one hand to whatever she was using to balance on.

The only problem with her pulling up is when she does it in her crib. When she wakes up, her first instinct is to pull up now-- but she can't get herself back down. The other night, she had been asleep for an hour or so and we heard her crying over the monitor. We generally let her go for 10 minutes now before we check on her, but the crying intensified to the point that we were concerned. So, Chris went up, and there she was, standing up in her crib holding the side rail and screaming because she was stuck.

Just in the past 2 days (since I started working on this post), she has learned to get herself back down to the floor from standing. And we assume she has learned to lay down in her crib now, because the past 2 nights, she has woken up crying (the same hard cry like before) but put herself back to sleep without us having to go in. Good Girl!

Other new stuff:
She loves to get in the baby swing at the park. She kicks her legs and bounces and talks while she's swinging. The park is only a 5 minute walk from our house, so we go at least once a day.

We went to the Tennessee Aquarium a few weeks ago with a few friends and their children. Caroline loved the butterfly room. It's a big room where butterflies just fly freely all around you. She really loved watching them.

Food: Solids are going well. She eating oatmeal cereal, apples, bananas, pears, prunes, carrots, sweet potatoes, butternut squash and peas. She really didn't like the sqaush too much. She tolerated it when I mixed a bit of apples into it though. She hated the peas, even when I tried to mix in carrots. We are doing solids 2x/day every day and working toward adding in breakfast. We do lunch around noon or 12:30 and dinner at 5:30. Still nursing 4-5x/day. Sometimes it's hard to fit a meal of solids in before her morning nap, depending on whnat time she nurses in the early a.m.

Her mobility is really great now. She can really motor with crawling and she follows me down the hallway from the TV room into the laundry room. This morning, I put Caroline down in the bedroom floor with some of her toys to play while I made the bed. Chris was in the shower. Caroline heard the water running and took off toward the bathroom. It's probably 25 feet or so for her to crawl to the bathroom and she made it in about 15 seconds.

Sleeping: Bedtime is 6:45 to 7:00 and she generally sleeps until between 4 and 5 am. She does sometimes awaken during the night and will cry but goes back to sleep in 5 or 10 minutes. After the 4-5 am feeding, it's a crapshoot. For the most part, she falls asleep nursing, but the amount of time she sleeps is random. Sometimes she wakes up at 5 and will play and talk for a while in her crib until she cries and I go in and put her back to sleep. She may be up until 6 or 6:30 and then go back to sleep until 7:30-7:45. Other mornings, she sleeps straight through from the 4 am feeding until 6 to 6:30. As for naps, I have really pushed her to go to a 2 nap a day schedule and I think we are finally adjusted. She naps in the morning around 9:00 or 9:30 and in the afternoon around 2:00 ish. The morning nap varies from 35 minutes to 2 hours and the afternoon nap is usually an hour to an hour and a half. The morning nap varies in length based on her wake-up time.

There are a million other things I could write about-- I'll have to get to the rest later.