5 months

I'm only a few weeks late with this post...July has been a crazy busy month! We were in Louisiana for a week, home for a week, then back to Louisiana for a long weekend to host a baby shower for my friend Betsy. Hopefully we'll be home for a while now so we can get back into our routines. It's amazing how exhausting it is traveling with a baby. I know what they mean now when they say 'I need a vacation from my vacation'!

In preparation for landing please make sure your
infant is in the full upright position.

Now that we're home we can keep working on the eating and sleeping routines. The last month has been 'challenging' in terms of her sleep habits. First there was the de-swaddling, then the transition to the big-girl crib, then a trip to Louisiana, then some teething pain, a few immunizations, and another trip to Louisiana...all of which spells no sleeping through the night. Each time we jumped one hurdle, and got one or two good nights in, the next obstacle appeared and we were back to square one. Hopefully the next month will be smoother!


She has developed a world-class oral fixation that would make Freud proud. Absolutely everything goes into her mouth. Washrags. Dog toys. Paper. If she can get her hands on it, it's going in her mouth. From a biology standpoint, this seems a bit confusing to me...seems like the caveman's babies wouldn't live very long if they were ingesting every poisonous shrub and mushroom they came across. Guess that's where the expression 'bit the dust' came from...some poor neanderthal infant shoved a fistful of arsenic dirt in his mouth and that was the end of him. Luckily we keep a pretty close eye on Caroline and nothing too terrible has been ingested. (Except for the small sampling of Daddy's beer. Apparently her Louisiana roots run deep.)

With all her interest in her mouth, I figured it was a good time to start introducing solid foods. We started with rice cereal. She seemed completely confused, but smiled at us because we were making idiots of ourselves trying to get her to open her mouth and swallow.

I decided perhaps the cardboard-like taste of the rice cereal was a deterrent to her swallowing, so this week I tried sweet potatoes. Again, not terribly successful. She just sits there with her mouth open and a big glob of food perched on her tongue, making darth vader noises.  Or else she sticks her fingers in her mouth and it ends up in her ears, eyes, hair, pretty much everywhere EXCEPT down her throat. This looks like it might be a long training process.

This should be fun to clean out of her fat rolls....

http://youtu.be/0eUbimesOoU

Her movement/motor skills are right on track though. She's rolling over like a champ, forward and backward. Any time I put her on the floor she rolls her way around the room toward something interesting. If she's laying on her tummy she waves her arms and flails her legs in preparation for crawling. As busy as she is, I think she's gonna be an early crawler. This poses a bit of a challenge in our 3-story house. We will need at least 4 baby gates, and I'm at a loss trying to figure out how to keep her off the stairs while still allowing Winnie to freely roam the house. 


She desperately wants to sit up and is trying her hardest to master this. She does sit ups/crunches whenever we lay her on her back on the couch, trying to tell us prefers to be upright. She can sit up with some assistance but not completely on her own yet.

And last but not least, the love/hate relationship between Winnie and Caroline continues. She LOVES him. He hates her. Well, maybe not hates....but definitely prefers to pretend that she doesn't exist. If I take her hand to pet him, he looks the other way. Whatever happened to pugs' reputation as being 'great with kids'?? Ha. Not this pug.