Molly - 5 Months!

This month was pretty smooth sailing.  We seem to have gotten past the 4-month development stuff and we've come out the other side with a very happy, personable baby.  Molly's little personality is really starting to shine and we're enjoying that so much!  She's very social and loves to interact.  She'll do anything she can to catch people's attention.  She's constantly chattering away and loves to experiment with her voice.

Very recently, maybe in the last 2 weeks or so, she has started to show signs of separation anxiety.  It seems a touch early, but I'm pretty sure that's what it is.  She loves to interact with other people as long as she's doing so while being held by daddy or me.  We've had several instances now where people have held her (not total strangers, people she knows, but who aren't around all the time like us) and after a minute or two she realizes she can no longer see me and starts crying.  REAL crying, with tears and all.  It's really sad because she hardly ever cries to begin with so it's obviously pretty upsetting to her.  I'm sure it's just a phase!

Molly is doing lots of playing now.  She likes her play mat still and loooves her Jumperoo.  I know exactly when she wants to get in it because she starts trying to jump while I'm holding her.  She still enjoys hanging out in her bouncy seat and watching what's going on in the kitchen.  She just sits and plays with her rings and whatever other toy we have hooked to her seat and watches what's going on.  Everything goes right in her mouth!  Her favorite toys right now seem to be her rings/links, a monkey that has a bunch of different textures and fun things to chew on, and a little pink stuffed bunny that's a good size for her to play with.

Molly's chub.  Oh goodness is her baby chub adorable!  I just love it!  Right now it seems like every day she wakes up a little bit fluffier.

Chubby baby legs and arms in a romper.  Nothing cuter!

And speaking of baby chub, she has pretty much outgrown the Moby wrap.  It's still technically usable, but as she's getting heavier it's just not supportive enough, which means less comfortable for me, so this month we introduced a woven wrap.  There is quite a learning curve associated with using a woven, but we're slowly getting the hang of it.  She seems to enjoy riding along in the woven just as much though.

This month brought Molly's first cold.  We all had a chest cold for about a week and she caught it too.  Luckily it was just some congestion and coughing, but it's so sad when babies are sick!  She handled it just fine though and was feeling better just as quickly as the rest of us.

I can do it myself!

Right now, Molly is working hard on learning to sit up.  She seems much sturdier at this age than Jack and I think maybe having a little bit heavier base to work with probably helps to steady her!  She's doing pretty well and can sit unassisted for very short periods of time.  She has the strength and is pretty good about balance, but she still topples very easily.  I'm thinking by next month she'll have it mastered!

Leaned a little too far forward... what's that?

Oh, yeah.  My foot!  I'll just grab this.

Whoops!

She also seems to be working on rolling back-to-front.  She rolls over to her side now, but doesn't really seem interested in taking it much further than that.  Plus her arm is in the way and she doesn't seem to have any desire to figure out how to move it so she can actually roll to her tummy.

Her drooliness seems to be abating a little bit, thank goodness!  This likely means that her swallow reflex is kicking in, which means solid foods are on the horizon.  More importantly to me, this means she isn't sporting a bib of drool on the front of her shirts!

Also on a positive note, Molly's blocked tear duct seems to be correcting itself.  I can't remember if I touched on this before, but Molly was born with blocked tear ducts (totally common, it's something that babies usually outgrow.  As they get bigger the ducts open on their own.  Sometimes it has to be corrected with a simple procedure.).  It made her eyes kind of goopy when she was really young, but one corrected itself pretty quickly.  The other stayed blocked, but we think only partially.

What this meant was that one of her eyes was king of watery most of the time.  This can result in eye infections, but luckily for us that never happened, just watery eye.  This can cause problems with the development of the eye though since it causes blurred vision.  The doctors really like to see the duct cleared up by 6 months.  If it's not, they like you to check in with an eye specialist to make sure everything is developing properly.  If it is, they give it another 6 months and hope that everything has corrected itself by a year.  If not, they do a little procedure to open it up.

As we approached that 6 month deadline I was becoming slightly worried that it wasn't going to correct itself.  I didn't want to get into having to worry about the pros/cons of forcing it open with the procedure.  Luckily, this month has brought vast improvement with the blocked duct.  Suddenly, her eye is rarely watery anymore so it seems that the duct is probably opening up.  I don't know if it's 100% open yet, but considering the amount of improvement we've seen I think it's going to be just fine.

Sleeping is going well.  Molly is napping 2-3 times per day.  She doesn't have a schedule per se, but she's definitely into a routine.  In the last week or two she has started waking to eat around 5-6am.  I guess this is a regression for her because that was her overnight eating time for quite a while.  Anyway, she wakes, eats, and then goes back to sleep for a short bit.  This usually has her waking for the day around 7am.  She's ready for her first nap around 9am and sleeps for about an hour.  She takes her next nap around 1pm and sleeps for an hour or so.  Then, a good number of days she takes a shorter nap (usually around 30 mins) about 5pm.  She usually goes to bed for the night between 7 and 7.30pm.  That's probably an average schedule for her, but basically her nap schedule adheres more to the routine of morning wake up, ready for nap ~2 hours later, wake up, ready for afternoon nap ~3 hours later, wake up, cat nap ~3 hours later.  We still feed and sleep on demand, but she has settled naturally into a pretty typical routine for her age.  She's still  okay with napping on the go, which I'm happy about!

As far as eating goes it's the same as last month.  She usually takes 8oz in her first bottle in the morning.  Her other bottles are usually 4-5oz, and then sometimes she takes 6oz before bedtime, especially if she's been awake a longer stretch.

On to month 6!