Our little baby is growing up seriously too quickly! It's insane that I have a 5 month old baby, with little opinions and desires and abilities all to her self!
Talia has grown so much this month, although not a whole lot weight-wise! She has a ton of new skills and her personality just keeps getting bigger and bigger!
She is giggling, albeit only for me! But oh is it the sweetest most joyful sound I have ever heard! She loves having her ribs nibbled on, and zerberts are the bees knees. She smiles for just about everyone she meets these days. She babbles constantly, especially on the changing table and in the car. She fake coughs, and it is adorable!
She is so so close to rolling over from back to front! She's forgotten how to roll from front to back! She can grab anything she zeros in on (watch your hair!). Everything goes into the mouth.
She is just starting to sit up for a few seconds at a time. She usually gets distracted by her feet and topples over!
She loves sitting in her high chair at the table with us, and usually lets us eat dinner without incident. She expressing interest in food, but we are going to wait until Christmas to start solids.
Her sleep patterns are a little tough. She usually sleeps well at night, though she has stopped sleeping for 10+ hours straight - which is good, more on that in a bit! The last couple weeks she has gone down some nights without a fight, and others she screams for a couple hours. There appears to be no rhyme or reason. Sometimes she wakes and nurses and settles down right away, and others she screams again for a couple hours. The exception is if I just let her sleep on my chest. Then she's great, but I can't sleep! But generally she goes to sleep at 7:30, wakes up one or two times, and gets up for the day around 7:30.
Naps are basically crap. She will not go down drowsy anymore, she has to be rocked into oblivion, or else she screams. She then generally only sleeps 20-30 minutes. Ugh. Sometimes I can rock her back to sleep for a bit more, but she usually is pretty perky and ready to go! It makes for a pretty long day for me and I can't get much done around the house. We are still trying to always put her down drowsy but it's just not working this month!
Then there's eating. Oh Lordy, how many tears have I shed, how many tight hugs I've needed from Kevin, and how tired I am of trying to make this breastfeeding relationship into some magical, easy, and mutually satisfying thing.
Talia has always been small, and has dropped in her growth curve at each visit to the pediatrician. We thought perhaps she's just petite with a high metabolism, but I've never felt too confident that she was getting enough.
She was sleeping solidly through the night, 10-12 hours at a time. I would get up and pump, putting away milk in the freezer for our stash, because everyone says that babies will make up the calories during the day when they start sleeping longer. Well not Tali!
We borrowed a friend's baby scale a few weeks after her 4 month check up, and learned she hadn't gained a single ounce in 3 weeks! Not good! We then measured my 24 hour output by weighing her before and after each feeding, and learned I was producing exactly 1 ounce per hour. So when I was stashing 6-8 ounces of milk at night, she was getting far less than she needed each day to grow! I have felt like the worst mother, knowing I was not giving her what she needed! :/. She's so tricky, because she is super happy, never signals that she hungry, and seemed like she was just thriving, but small.
Long story shorter, we saw another lactation consultant, as well as her pediatrician, and I am now on a rigorous nursing and pumping routine to increase my supply, and always giving her a bottle of anything I pump in the night or day. I'm also eating lots of milk boosting foods, and taking an herbal supplement called fenugreek to help.
Today we measured all but her last nursing of the day, and my output is up at least 3 ounces, probably closer to 4. So it is working! We also took a naked weight, and she's about 12 lbs 6 oz today. So she's gaining weight! A half pound in the last 2 weeks.
We are still unsure if that is good enough. Our ped would like her to be higher still, and doesn't want me burning out with this crazy amount of pumping. She's given me prescriptions for a couple drugs good for boosting supply, but Kevin and I are both wary of side effects for both me and Tali. She has also encouraged supplementing with formula. Which gives me the worst anxiety, and I know it's irrational! So I've been working really hard, and will continue on this route at least one more week before we make any further changes.
This post feels very disjointed! I've been writing it off and on for 3 days now, so all my thoughts are jumbled up! Bottom line, Talia is a super awesome tiny baby, and I can't wait to see what adventures this month will bring! We are just hours from her first plane ride and arriving in California, her 4th state to visit! :)
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