holly b {4 months}

Stats

• After way too many blowouts, we finally upped you to size 2 diapers
• Slowly creeping into your 3-6 month stuff! You still mostly wear jammies, but most of your 0-3 month jammies are on their last few times of you fitting into them, so you've switched over to your one and only 3-6 month pair. Time to buy more! 
• 12.2 pounds (11%), 24.5 inches (50%)

Notable events

• You're living in a time of pandemics and quarantines! Which is pretty wild.
• We sleep trained you! And you did awesome. Night one was HARD for this mama, but you improved quickly and I'm loving not having to replace that dang binky all the time! Yay for long naps!

Tricks

• Tummy time champ. You basically just stay in it for forever.
• For a few days, you were practicing really hard rolling from back to tummy. Then, you finally did it! (You were about 15 weeks old.) And then, you were kinda like, "Okay, I did it, and now I'm done," so you stopped for two weeks. And then all of a sudden, literally today, you decided you wanted to roll over all day long. I put you down on your back, and you immediately roll over!

Favorite things

• You started laughing! And when you want to laugh, it's actually crazy EASY to get you to do so! Like I won't even be trying, and then you'll start laughing, so THEN I start trying and we have lots of fun. But if I do try to just get you to laugh, it usually doesn't work. But gosh, your little laugh is so dang cute!
• You open your mouth soooo wide sometimes. I'm still not quite sure if you're smiling or looking for more food 😂

Random tidbits

• At the beginning of the month, you found your fingers. And it was hilarious, because you didn't know how to limit yourself on eating them, so you kept gagging yourself! You seem to have figured that out, though. But you still love sucking on your hands!
• I thought we would call you "baby" a lot, because I feel like that's super common to call a baby "baby," or even "baby Holly." Turns out, we almost never say that. We either call you Holly, Holly B, or sister (if we're talking to Ada about you). "Sister" is definitely more common than I thought it would be!
• Your hair is falling out 😭 We used Tubby Todd all-over ointment to help with cradle cap (and it did amazing), but I guess your hair was just destined to fall out anyway. You still have a lot of hair, but it's soooo much thinner than it used to be! I see so much scalp under there! Plus a definite bald spot on the back.
• We borrowed a playmat from my bestie, and you've been loving the hanging toys! You hit them and kick them and you smile a lot when you play with it.
• At the beginning of the month, I was supplementing with quite a bit of formula, and then you also started to occasionally REFUSE the breast. Like, crazy thrashing away from me and endless screaming when I tried. I wasn't a fan of that, and I really wanted to get back to exclusive breastfeeding, so after consulting with a lactation educator, we went cold turkey off all supplementing. For a few days, I just fed you all the time basically. I'd feed you when you woke up, and I'd feed you in the middle of naps, and I'd feed you 2-4x/night . . . just lots of feeding! Which helped my milk supply increase, but it still seems to be barely enough and possibly not even enough. I've had to switch sides over and over again until you're finally content, and although we did only one nightfeed for weeks and weeks, we now alternate between one and two feeds per night. Age-appropriate, but I liked when I could pretty much count on one feed around 4am. Now it's different every night! Anything between 11pm&5:30am is a possibility. So after doing all the things, I eventually thought to up my water intake. As a general rule, I MAYBE drink 24oz/day, which is nowhere near the normal recommendation, let alone the breastfeeding recommendation. So the last couple days I've been drinking way more, and it seems to be doing the trick. I feel dumb for not realizing it earlier, but I'm happy to finally be producing more milk!
• Because you don't get quite as much food as you used to, you seem a little fussier now. Like I used to be able to put you down whenever and you'd just self-entertain. But now, almost every time I lay you down, you start fussing. Sometimes you can be distracted by a toy or a smiling face, but you just don't seem as content as you used to be! But again, in the last day or two since upping my water intake, you seem to be doing better again 🙌 
• Since we started sleep training you, you've been on a solid 4-nap schedule, but we'll be extending waketimes over the next few weeks to get you on a solid 3-nap schedule. You wake up anytime between 6 & 8am, and you have days where naps are all about an hour, and other days when you have multiple 2+ hour naps! (and the occasional unfortunate day where you take short naps all day long, which is why we're going to start extending waketimes.) Timing is not really consistent from day to day due to all of the variations.