Six Months!

I love this pic I took of Jude and Jono yesterday. Jude is six months old today. Can you believe it? He's like, a real baby now.

Here's an update on his latest habits and activities.

First off, he has graduated from the 30-minute nap and is taking longer daytime snoozes now. Like, over an hour, and sometimes two. I'm getting so much done, it's obscene. I used to struggle weekly to log my 10 hours of paid labor, but now it's a real cinch. Thanks Jude. Mama loves you.

He also knows how to whine now. It's kind of a grating, sustained grunt/squeal, and he uses it to tell us he is not pleased with whatever we're doing. Like anything that involves touching him for a practical purpose, such as strapping him into the car seat, putting his hoodie on, etc.

He makes a range of noises, and when he discovers a new one he makes that same noise obsessively for days until the novelty wears off. He also responds to humor, but our funniness eventually gets old to him and we have to think of something else. Like last week he laughed his butt off every time I put my face close to his and sang "Strangers in the Night" in a sultry baritone voice.

Dooby-dooby dooooo (strangers in the night)... exchanging glances, lovers in the night...

It worked about five times and after that he was completely straight-faced and looked at me like, "Not funny anymore. Move on."

AND...he's eating solids. We made it to six months exclusively on breast milk! He gets two solid meals a day now: rice cereal in the morning and oat cereal at night, with nursing in between. In a week or two we'll start him on pureed veggies, and next month we'll introduce fruit. At his first feeding (well, really his second, but it had been a long time since that 4.5 month attempt) he learned pretty quickly what was on the spoon we were pointing at him, and he lifted his head and opened his mouth for each bit like a baby bird. Now that it's been a few days he's less passive about it and grabs for the spoon or his bib and sucks the spilled cereal off of it. He loves the stuff.

Jude has a bedtime routine now. It goes like this:

Oat cereal
Warm bath (soap occasionally)
Put on night-time diaper and PJs
Read books
Nurse
Sing/rock
Sleep

I was thinking that solids might help him sleep better at night, because most of the people I talked to about it said it had helped their babies. But the first few nights he was still waking three to five times on average, sometimes to eat, but just as often I think because he's trying to poo or what have you. Maybe he's a little cold sometimes in our drafty old house; I don't know. The past two nights he has only woken twice (to eat), so that's progress. The prospect of just one 2 am feeding makes me giddy. Someday...

My friend Lori made me feel better when she told me that her babies didn't sleep very well at night until 8 or 9 months. She also wondered if mothers have some sort of hormone going through us during this time in our lives that keeps up functioning despite the lack of sleep. She pointed out that now that her kids are out of that stage, she's back to being a zombie if she gets anything less than 8 hours a night. She has a point. Most days I feel great and operate just fine despite everything. There are some days I may even fall in the category of "high-functioning". Whatever it is, it's a miracle.

Every kid is different and how you feel about the habits of yours on any given day is highly relative. I'm so used to Jude's waking patterns that it usually doesn't bother me much, but then you hear from some chick whose four-month-old is waking only once a night and you start to feel a little jealous. I was on a mom's Q & A website recently and some silly woman posted the following:

"My baby is four months old and is STILL waking up for a 2 am feeding every night. Help!!"

Yeah lady, we all feel bad for you. (Someone needs to slap her.) Honestly if Jude had been sleeping through the night already at that age I'd be worried he was getting enough to eat. The gazillion comments to this woman's post were quite amusing. Most of them were along the lines of "Are you kidding me? Get over it!" Hee hee.

I need to commend Jude for something that I think he is doing great with. A few weeks ago we decided to see if he could learn to go down for naps and bedtime on his own. (Normally I would nurse or rock him to sleep.) He fussed a bit the first few days, but now I can put him in his crib drowsy but wide awake and he doesn't make a peep. When I go back to check on him a few minutes later he is sound asleep. He'll also wake up in the morning and play by himself in his crib for 20 minutes or so, and I get to sleep a while longer. Wunderkind I tell you.

So that's the latest on Doobers, as Jono called him the other night (I think it's because we've been singing "Dooby Dooby Doo...").