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!