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!

The Good, The Bad, and the Not so Pretty...

Her 2 month picture!!!

Sammy is now 2 months!!! I can't believe it. Technically she will be 10 weeks tomorrow! She is growing so stinking fast! Her little personality is blooming a little more each day and I love watching it.

The Good...
Sammy's bladder is getting bigger. She isn't going pee nearly as much anymore which is lovely since I am Infant Potty Training! I didn't realize how often she went until she slowed down! She is also not having poop farts like she up until a few weeks ago. Almost every time I would check her diaper she would have little skid marks from farting. But now she is better able to control her sphincter so poop only comes out when she lets it. And she is getting so good at cuing and holding it until i can get her on the potty! A couple of times she has even stopped mid-stream when I say "stop, wait!!!" and will finish once I get her on the potty. She definitely knows that pee and poop go in the potty. I don't even really cue her anymore to go unless we are out in public and on a toilet that isn't normal for her. She just knows to go by the position she is in I guess. All this is good news for me and our laundry bill! When I am home all day with her, we usually can use the same diaper the whole day!

It's still hard when we go out. We started using G-diapers for going out because they wick away the moisture so she isn't sitting in urine! Usually you don't want this when potty training because you want the baby or child to feel the uncomfortableness of being wet. But when we go out I am not always able to potty or change her right away when she needs it and I would hate for her to get a rash because of it. Unfortunately, Samantha is growing so fast the G-diapers just aren't really fitting anymore and we don't have the next size up.But thanks to her growing bladder she may not need the G-diapers soon anyways.

My goal is to have her out of diapers by 9 months and into trainers. A lot of babes that are EC'd full time can be. Actually I have heard that it makes it easier because you can't depend on the diapers anymore. So we shall see where we are at at that point, but that is where we are heading.

Finally got her in the back carry in our woven wrap.

This isn't about EC, but recently I have been learning how to put her in a back wrap. I usually wear her at least once a day while I do chores around the house or go walking but until now I have been wearing her in the front. This makes some chores somewhat difficult since she can be in my way. I have been afraid to try to carry her on my back but I finally tried it out. It was very frustrating at first! I almost quit a couple of times but I have succeeded a few times as well which gives me confidence to keep trying. If you baby wear I highly recommend getting or making a woven wrap and/or a mei tai. I have a Moby which is awesome as well but it gets so hot that I can't keep her in too long. Also, stretchy wraps can only be worn until the baby is big enough to wiggle around a lot because at that point they could flip themselves out. Woven wraps are much stronger for older children and are cooler. I'm not sure how long you can wear with a Mei Tai but they are even cooler than the woven wrap. I will try to take a picture of her in the Mei Tai. I actually made it from the instructions on http://www.grumblesandgrunts.com/2010/10/how-to-sew-mei-tai-baby-carrier.html.

The Bad...
We still are missing almost every time at night. I am just not waking up fast enough either by accident or on purpose. What can I say I really like to sleep! And when I hear her start to wake up I know if I shush her back to sleep I can get at least another half hour before she really wakes up. But then that means I miss her pees! Its actually pretty silly that I do that because if I just got up right away and peed her she would have a dry diaper so I wouldn't have to try and fumble my way through changing out the prefold. And I could then feed her and get back to sleep. But instead I chose to sort of wake up, shush her, kind of sleep for another half hour then have to get up anyways, really wake up to change out the prefold, then feed and go back to sleep. But try knocking some sense into my half conscious self! So I keep trying!!!

The not so pretty....         Warning*** if you don't want to see breast fed baby poop don't scroll down!***



Now that Sammy is getting older she isn't pooping everyday anymore. So every other day I am waiting for a poop bomb to arrive and hoping to catch it! But the first couple of times I missed! This is one of the reasons i am potty training her! Because I really really really did not like cleaning this off her! Blah! The first time it happened she was sitting in her Bumbo while I was sewing the Mei Tai. She gave a cue but I was concentrating and didn't react right away. OOPS! Then i heard deployment...Yuck! I quickly pulled her out in hoped that I could catch some of it but this is what I found!!!

I was so shocked and didn't know what to do! Then she wiggled her feet and hands into it! I wiped her hands then ran to the bath, and sprayed her down! You would have thought that was the end of the poop for the day but it wasn't! Later we went to my brother-in-law's softball game and she had another blow out! All over her pajamas!!! That was a nightmare to clean up because I couldn't just throw her in the bath that time! Needless to say I am trying much harder to listen for the poo cue because I really hate wiping poo out of all those cracks and crevices she has!!! It is music to my ears to hear the sound of those poop bombs going off in the potty! Never thought I'd be so excited about someone pooping in the potty!