Five Month Update

Dear Lana,

Writing your five month update has given me a little trouble, not because I don’t know what to say, but because there is so very much to say. You are growing up faster than I ever believed possible and every day is filled with new adventures and revelations. To organize my thoughts, I jotted down a quick list of things that I need to cover this month. Here’s how it turned out:

1. Sleeping (well!)
2. Eating (bored w/breastmilk)
3. Sitting Up (trying so hard!)
4. Shrieking (very frequent, very loud)
5. Being Completely and Ridiculously Adorable (see accompanying photos)

It’s a long list, so let me jump right in. On the sleeping front, we moved you out of the bassinet in our bedroom and into the crib in your room this month. I feared that this might be a difficult transition, but in the end your father just swaddled you, rocked you to sleep, and laid you down in your crib. You slept peacefully through the night, so the next evening John had the audacity to swaddle you and lay you down in the crib while you were still awake. You calmly conversed with your mobile for about ten minutes before growing quiet. I walked into your room and was stunned to find you sound asleep. I held my breath and waited for you to throw open your eyes and yell, “Gotcha!”, but you continued sleeping like an angel and have done so every night since.

When it comes to eating, you have grown so very weary of bottles and so very ready to sink your teeth into a cookie, piece of pizza, or whatever else your father and I may be eating. Unfortunately for you, you have no teeth to sink into anything and will have to be content with bottles and baby cereal for a little while longer. We will also have to abandon our practice of holding you while eating our meals, since it’s starting to feel more like a mugging than like dinner.

While I’m on the topic of things that frustrate you, let’s talk about sitting up. You are making valiant attempts to sit up every day now, but you refuse to use anything other than the sheer strength of your abs to pull you up. I will admit that you have some seriously strong abs – you can probably out-crunch seasoned professionals like that annoying woman from my Abs of Steel workout video – but I think that you may need to enlist some help from other body parts like, let’s say arms, in order to make it all the way up. Since you like to lie with your legs up in the air, I tried to show you once how to drop them down and use the forward momentum to roll up to a sitting position. Something about the rolling motion made you unleash a horrendous series of stinky farts, so I won’t be repeating that exercise again. Perhaps your father will practice with you, especially if I forget to warn him about the farting.

Finally, I can’t complete a recap of this month without mentioning the screaming. You have discovered a talent and love for screaming, and will frequently do it out of the blue to get attention or just crack yourself up. If I’m paying attention, I can actually see you ramp up to a big shriek. You’ll take a deep breath, clench your fists, and open your eyes wide just before unleashing a loud scream. My favorite part is the way you react to your own screams – the way you appear surprised, amused, and then incredibly proud of the noise you just made. After a big scream you often look up at me with a big, gummy smile and wait for me to scream back. We’ve had some very long screamersations, but you always have to have the last scream and will grow hoarse if I don’t throw in the towel first. I’m afraid this doesn’t bode well for your teenage years, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Thanks for another amazing month, my beautiful baby girl.

Love,
Mom