Brady, you turned 4 months old on February 20. Now that you’ve passed up the 4 month mark it seems like time is flying and your growing so quickly!  This past month has been a whirlwind. Once you hit 3 months, it seemed like things got a tiny bit easier and you were a lot of fun… then within a couple weeks things sorta went haywire. Your sleep patterns were all over the place, you’d have some really rough grumpy days that were exhausting, then you’d have 2-3 wonderful pleasant days where you’d sleep through the night just fine. We were a hot mess. I’m not sure if you were having an early growth spurt (most of the time it’s around 4 and 6 months, but this was several weeks early), however, we powered through!

We began noticing that you were completely intrigued with the TV. I mean, you are locked in when watching it… no matter what is on the TV. So, I started playing Baby Einstein or Yo Gabba Gabba a couple times so, at least I didn’t feel guilty about you watching TV… at least you’re “learning”, right?  We only do this every couple of days, as to limit your time at passive learning. But sometimes I just need 20 minutes to do stuff around the house… you do what you gotta do.  Once you’re able to really understand that you’re watching TV I’m going to have to really limit your time for sure.

You’ve really started using your feet to do everything. You’re more advanced with your feet than you are your hands most of the time! It’s pretty funny (and amazing how strong you are), except during diaper changes when you kick at my arm as I’m changing you. Such a little monkey!  You’ve also been putting your entire hand into your mouth to chew on, or occasionally just your pointer finger.

About once a day or every couple of days we’ll get the best laugh out of you. It’s a real multi-syllable laugh that is the BEST sound in the entire world. You can’t help but laugh along with you; it’s so contagious.  When you smile it takes over your whole body… you crinkle your core, shrug your shoulders, and your feet sometimes go up into the air.  Sometimes we call you Linus, because you love to hold a blanket up to your face. A lot of times that’s how you fall asleep during the day.

We entered into the wonderful world of cloth diapering at 13.5 weeks old. It wasn’t nearly as nerve-wracking or scary as I was anticipating. In fact, they’re better than disposable diapers. We’ve had way less blow outs! If you can commit to doing a few extra loads of laundry, then it’s great. We’ve saved probably $50 this month on a box of diapers that we didn’t have to purchase. The only negative I can really find is that you are so wiggly and you like to bring your feet towards your face that it’s almost impossible to get the cloth diaper on you during the first try.

As I mentioned before, you sometimes sleep 8 hours straight, but lately you’ve been waking up every couple of hours to be soothed. Sometimes you’ll immediately take your pacifier and fall back asleep (repeat 4x every 15 minutes). Sometimes I have to pick you up and hold you to get you back to sleep, then when I lay you down you cry again. That’s always fun at 2 am when I’m super delirious and can’t reason well… haha. But for the most part we give you a nice soothing bath around 8 pm and then wrap you in your Swaddleme wrap (which is amazing and practically shuts you down) and you fall asleep nursing and sleep until 4-5 am for your first morning feeding.

I’ve been operating between baby-led scheduling and clock-led scheduling lately and we’ve been all over the place. It was difficult for me to get anything done, because I never knew what to expect or when you’d wake up in the morning to start our day. I couldn’t make plans in advance and would often have to alter plans because your feeding schedule wouldn’t match up, etc… It’s times like this I’ll look back and laugh at just how “out of it” I was and how I couldn’t think straight and was operating off of pure “Mommy brain”, but someone reminded me of the Baby Wise book to help guide us into a better routine and schedule. DUH. I totally read this book when I was pregnant with you and forgot about it. So, in the midst of our crazy-all-over-the-place-rough-couple-of-weeks, I stayed up one night to read through it again and powered through a couple of days of guiding you onto a better routine that in affect helps everyone! We now get up at the same time each morning to start our day, followed by nursing, awake/play time, then 90 min after you’ve been awake you go down for a nap. Repeat this several times during the day, and that’s our schedule. You take about 3 naps that range from 20 min – 1 hour in length. You fought me SO hard the first couple of days when I’d lay you down for a nap in your crib, but eventually you went down without a fuss – I felt like I’d accomplished so much!! 🙂 Now I take this school of thought and mix it with my own flexibility and am still aware of your cues, but for the most part it’s really helped get us back on track.  Why didn’t anyone tell me to structure my day like this earlier?!

Since you were born your left eye has acted as if it has a clogged tear duct and doesn’t drain your tears well, and stays watery/goupy most of the day. It’s the worst when you wake up… all crusty and gross. Your pediatrician prescribed you some eye drops that helped for a week or two, but it was still yucky until the day after your 4 month check up when it cleared up on its own (you were technically 4 months and 1 week).  Praise the Lord!

4 MONTH CHECK UP:

Weight: 12.11 pounds (20%)

Height: 24.5 inches (45%)

Head Circumference: 17 1/8″ (80%) – haha all your groceries went to your head this month!

 

Here are some photos from recently:

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