My baby is 5 months old!

5 days old

Wow! I cannot believe how fast time has gone. She was just a tiny puddle laying on my chest just yesterday and now she is so big sitting up on her own and interested in everything around her! This is the fastest she will ever grow in her life and it makes me sad. It is so hard to remember every detail because one day she is looking and acting completely different!

5 months old!

So this month has been great! It has gone by the fastest! Like I said she is sitting up on her own now. She can grab things that she wants, she found her feet and loves to play with them, and she found her voice again. She was really talkative a while back and then went through a pretty quiet phase. But the past 2 weeks she likes to talk to anyone and everyone. She is very curious about EVERYTHING. She always has her eyes on what Chris and I are doing. It is so fun to watch her learning things. I still think she is teething which means she probably isn't lol. I dont know... sometimes I think I can feel them and then other days I don't anymore. She likes to chew on frozen things anyways so I keep letting her. Today I froze my orange peels and she really loved gnawing on those!

We have been going through sleep training this month. She will be so tired but will fight taking naps or going to bed so we started putting her to bed or nap after nursing and singing to her and then letting her cry until she falls asleep. It has been so hard on me! It is really hard to hear your baby crying like that especially when they start crying harder and harder. But we have to be consistent. The only thing with that is that she isn't consistent. Usually she falls asleep while nursing and all i have to do is lay her down and we are good so I don't have very many opportunities to let her cry it out and learn that she needs to go to sleep. So she is still crying almost every time it happens. This past week however she has been fighting sleep more and more. So we have been having a crying session at least once a day and they are getting shorter each time. Like tonight she cried 5 minutes then fell asleep : )

Another icky part of the napping situation is that we live in a studio so it is hard to keep a quiet house while she is falling asleep which can make it harder since she can hear us talking or moving around. But hopefully we will be moving soon and that will be changing. Part of me wants to make it silent for her but then I think about people before us or the millions now who live in one room homes do it. There is no way they were silent for hours everyday just to let the baby sleep. The baby would just get used to sleeping with noise. And so will Sammy. She can sleep through noise pretty well already; its just the falling asleep when she wants to be involved that's not settling well with her at the moment.

ECing is still going great. I am not sure if I have said this before but it is just part of our life. I don't think about it any more than I think of any of her other needs and we don't spend gobs of time doing it. I think about the same way other parents think about changing their babes. She loves being dry and I love her being dry and so that is what we aim for but sometimes we have misses and we clean her up give her a new diaper and move on. Easy Peasy!

Actually I have noticed this past month that we are getting better at our catch rate. We only have a 1 or 2 misses on an average day and have been dry most nights since coming back from kids camp! I am at the point where I need to wash our diapers because they can't sit that long without being washed not because I am running out. This last time our stash of diapers lasted us 2 and 1/2 weeks and we had a couple extra misses due to traveling mishaps. Those diapers really needed to be washed at that point!!!

I really want to become more dependent on training pants instead of diapers but i only have 4 and for some reason Sammy really likes to pee in them. It may just be coincidence but she pees in them pretty quickly after I put them on and since i have 4 I usually do diapers after that. So I am hoping to find some time to make some homemade ones so that she can get used to them. They are so stinking cute in her little bum!!!

Chris' new job required us to go to the bay area last week which was awesome!!! Our first mini trip as a family. We stayed in a hotel within walking distance to the ocean! Woo hoo! Saw a beautiful sunset and got to find some neat geocaches.

Oh and not sure if I ever followed up with my back wrapping issue but we finally figured it out. Just needed a good wrap! A very kind lady from the Sacramento Baby Wearers group is letting me borrow one of hers until I can buy one of my own and once I had that I got it down. We have been LOVING the back wrap since!

Here are the 5 month shots...so cute!

Baby Training

This can be a pretty controversial topic but I am now a firm believer in training our children from infancy. We started Ecing our daughter from birth. Whenever I noticed her peeing or pooping I would say "psst" to get her to associate the word with the action. At 5 days old we started placing her on her potty and saying "psst" to tell her to go potty and she went for the very first time at our command. At the time it could have just been timing or coincidence but as time went on she learned the association of "psst" and time to go potty. Now it is very evident that it isn't just about timing and it definitely isn't coincidence but rather we have trained her to go potty at our command. Obviously if you have ever read my blog before we don't catch everything yet but she is still trained according to many. (There is a debate among some circles about what potty trained actually means, ex. one is trained when they have zero accidents anymore or when one has an understanding of when and where to potty and occasionally may have accidents. I tend to lean more toward the allowance for accidents since most pregnant women have had an accident before and no one would say they are no longer potty trained) Now some people still find my family very odd for "potty training" my daughter so early. And there sure are a lot of critics of EC out there, but let me assure you my daughter is trained to a pretty far extent.

Now if you understand that she is potty trained-ish, then you should understand that any baby can be trained for other things as well. One of my favorite parenting websites/ministry is No greater Joy. Please visit their website or even better read their books To Train up a child and No Greater Joy Volumes 1,2,&3 for more information on what I am talking about in a broader sense. But for now, this is what has been going on with training my daughter.

I really dislike getting my hair pulled as I am sure most would agree. And little baby hands are notorious for hair pulling or getting at your jewelry or eyeglasses. And I just really don't want to have to always wear my hair up, never wear jewelry, or be forced to start wearing contacts again. So I wanted to train my daughter to not touch those things on me or anyone else. I started maybe around 2 months or so. She was able to hold her head up and her arms were starting to squirm around much more and would grab anything they came in contact with including hair. Developmentally she didn't know what she was grabbing and I don't think was able to distinguish between hair or anything else she would grab so I didn't want to just say "no" to her grabbing and prevent her from grabbing at everything. So at first we began teaching her to let go. When she would grab hair or any other undesirable thing we would say "let go" two times while tapping her hand  and then I would flick her hands until she let go. When she did I would smile and say "good girl!!!" which is also what I usually say when she potties in the toilet.

There weren't too many opportunities at first to train her but as she has gotten older more and more have arisen. Especially this last month. Her motor skills have improved drastically. At first she started reaching in the general direction for something she wanted to touch hoping to be able to grab it. Now she is getting pretty skilled at grabbing exactly what she wants. This whole time I have been training her to let go and this last couple of weeks she has shown HUGE improvement. She understands me now. It usually takes me 2 times saying "let go" and tapping her hand for her to let go. Occasionally I have to still flick her hand but she is definitely understanding what I am telling her. It is so neat to watch her little mind growing!

So now that she is able to grab at what she wants, we are starting to train her to not touch specific things. And now we are using the word "no". I usually give a flick the first time she touches anything because I want to quickly associate the word no with that object and then after she understands "no" I will just tell her once and if she continues to touch or touches again I will flick her hand until she stops touching. Since she already understands to let go when getting flicked it doesn't take her long to let go of something but if she still wants it she will keep grabbing at it a few more times. But has eventually always stopped. Its amazing! Once we can get her to understand the meaning of "no" our life will become much easier with an older baby! So stay tuned to hear more results!!!


 In regards to getting back on track with EC...

So big! She is starting to sit on her potty on her own!

Yesterday went GREAT! I caught every pee overnight which is the very first time!!! Very exciting!!! Part of it was me waking up obviously but another was she was holding longer waiting for me to wake up because I knew I was getting up right away. And then during the day we only had 2 very small misses. One was in the morning after she woke up. She usually has a couple of small pees after she wakes up and it can be hard to catch them all when they are close together. I missed while I was taking a shower. The other one was when I was out shopping. She fell asleep in my wrap and then we went to my mom's house where I didn't pee her right away and since it had been a while she just couldn't hold it. But only 2 misses all day and night is an awesome record!!!!

Last night wasn't too great... we only missed 2 but I like not missing any : ) And this morning has been all catches except for one when she was playing on her belly.