River is 4 months old.
-He weighs about 15.5lbs according to our digital scale when he's naked.
-He is about 27 inches long.
-His hair is quite blonde and his eyes are blue.
-His bottom two teeth are playing peekaboo and causing him (and us) lots of grief.
-He is always mouthing things and chews and sucks on his hands a lot. He also licks the floor a lot.
-He’s even worse at taking a soother now. He just chews on it and can’t keep it in his mouth at all.
-He’s still kind of a terrible nurser. His latch is good, and my supply is perfect (plenty but not too much), but he just doesn’t seem to like to eat. During the day it’s hard to get him to nurse every two hours. If he does, it’s for 1-2 minutes and then he’s cranky and fussy and won’t nurse for a long time, usually not until he wakes up from a nap and it’s been several hours since he last nursed. He has some good days, but overall it’s pretty frustrating.
-Getting him to sleep at night is still a long process. Getting him to nurse before bed usually involves me nursing him while bouncing on the exercise ball next to loud white noise. He still won’t nurse in the rocking chair. It’s very annoying. Then I bounce him on the ball until he’s actually sleeping. Then I transfer to the rocking chair for awhile before I lay him in bed.
-He used to always wake up and I’d have to put him back to sleep once or twice at the beginning of the night, but that rarely happens anymore.
-At night he sleeps anywhere from 1-3 hours at a time. We hit the 4 month sleep regression a week before he turned 4 months. For two weeks he was waking up and nursing every 1-1.5 hours. That lasted two weeks and now the past three nights he’s waking up every 2-3 hours. That’s a lot, but much better than every 1-1.5 hours.
-He typically sleeps 11-12 hours at night (waking up to nurse many times).
-He is a tummy sleeper and has been since about 2 weeks old.
-Just days before he turned 4 months he’s stopped screaming in the bath. He still doesn’t love it but he doesn’t scream and cry anymore.
-We babywear for every nap, with blaring white noise. I have laid him down in bed for some naps, but they are ALWAYS short if I do that.
-Just after he turned 4 months he seems to be down to
3 naps. One or two of them are usually long, and the others are short. 3 naps works a lot better when two of them are long, and sometimes he still has four naps. Four naps are hard to fit in the day, though.
-His awake periods are an hour and 45 minutes to 2 hours.
-He still doesn’t love being worn. On Halloween when we were trick or treating he was in and out of the Tula frequently.
-He really enjoys everyone in our immediate family. He has giant smiles for all of us and small smiles for other people.
-We try to make sure he has lots of time with Justin when he’s home, so he really likes him now.
-He still really likes his doorway jumper for about 10-15 minutes as long as we’re sitting there with him.
-He started rolling back to front at 14 weeks and does it automatically if you lay him on his back. His play at has become kind of useless because of that. He doesn’t roll from front to back yet.
-He still loves diaper changes.
-He rarely ever poops, which makes him painfully gassy and sharty, which gives him a rash from constantly having a tiny bit of poop in his bum crack. He usually only goes once a week. He recently went 15 days!
-He wears Flip diaper covers with various prefolds, flats, and inserts. I prefer prefolds because it makes diaper laundry faster, but when he’s sharting a lot I use zinc cream on his bum and when I do that I use Birdseye cotton flats.
-At night he wears a sloomb medium OBF with a Geffen Quick absorber on the outside and a Disana wool cover.
-He is adorably talkative and shrieky and smiley.
-We don’t need to blare loud music in the evenings to stop him from crying anymore! Sometimes we have to play music to stop fussing but it’s less necessary than it used to be.
Things are SO MUCH BETTER this month than they were at 3 months. He likes his dad, so I don’t have to juggle him by myself at all times anymore. We have some more peaceful evenings. He is much less fussy during the day. And when he IS fussy, it’s now typically for a reason (tired, hungry, gassy - he has a lot of painful gas because of his infrequent pooping).
Just before 4 months I went through a really rough time. I was very depressed. I was kind of hating what I had done by having another baby. I was always feeling tired of my life, tired of everything being hard, and tired of River. And I was feeling really guilty about it.
It got to the point where I felt I needed to go on medication. Feeling angry at my baby wasn’t okay. And then I realized I can’t make it to a doctors appointment because of River’s unpredictable “schedule”. And I’ve been through worse before. Last summer when my baby died and then I almost died, I was in deep depression and managed to pull myself out. So I was determined to do it again.
I started meditating and reading positive quotes. I decided to pretend that every time my kid was fussy or crying that he was really suffering (instead of fussing and crying for no reason, like how he screamed constantly for no reason during colic).
I’ve had a lot of healing to do from colic. I have some ptsd from it, and I had a lot of resentful feelings toward River. But writing this paragraph now (at 4.5 months) I’m feeling so much better. It still takes effort sometimes, but it’s a lot better.
Overall River is a pretty happy baby now. He’s not exactly “easy,” but he’s so much better than he used to be and we all really enjoy him. I’m really glad he’s part of our family!
