Caroline has also learned to sit pretty well on her own this week. Previously, she could balance for a few seconds if I sat her up just right, but she usually fell over fairly quickly. But yesterday afternoon, while we were waiting for Anna's bus, I set her on a towel on the front lawn, and she sat really well for over a minute! She also sat on the living room floor last night for Daddy.
Since Caroline will be six months old tomorrow, we decided to go ahead and start some solids with her yesterday. I was originally going to start with avocado rather than cereal because it actually has some nutritional value (cereal is mostly empty calories), but the avocado I bought several days ago still felt a little firm, so we did some cereal mixed with breastmilk instead. Last night, she actually seemed to like it pretty well and ate about a tablespoon. Tonight when I tried it again, though, she made a disgusted face and refused to eat much. She might have swallowed a tiny bit, but most of it came right back out as soon as I put it in! Anna thinks it's hilarious when she spits her food out!
We've also had some great advances in sleeping over the last few weeks. Around the time I posted about all of our sleep issues, I came across some information about the "4 month sleep regression". According to what I've read, it's very common for babies to become terrible sleepers around the time they're 4 months old, and Caroline is apparently the poster child for this problem. Apparently, this can cause a real problem because many parents decide they have to "do something" about a baby's sleep habits around 4 months because that's the point at which sleep deprivation really starts to wear on you as well. Because of this, lots of parents and babies get really frustrated because the parents are trying to train the baby to sleep at exactly the time that the baby is developmentally programmed to start waking up every half hour or so. Supposedly, most babies are ready to fall back into some more agreeable sleep patterns around 5 months or so.
So just after Caroline turned 5 months old, we started some gentle sleep "training" with her. I'm not a big fan of sticking a baby in a room to cry for hours by him/herself, so for us, this meant that Jimmy started going in if she woke up right after I put her down, rather than me going in and nursing her back to sleep. The first night, she cried for a while, but he managed to calm her down and get her back to sleep. After a few nights, I guess she figured it wasn't worth waking up if she didn't get to nurse, and she started sleeping 5 hours or so before waking! Woo-hoo! She's also going to sleep now without having to be nursed into a coma first, and we've been able to stop swaddling her. She's actually taking naps in the co-sleeper next to our bed instead of the swing now, too. She does occasionally cry a bit after I put her down for a nap or bed, but she rarely cries more than 3-5 minutes, and it's usually more of a "winding down" sort of cry than an outright screaming fit. She's now sleeping at night from about 9-2 and then from about 2:30-5:30 or 6:00, which is a vast improvement over the constant waking from a month ago.
We have a doctor's appointment Monday morning for the official stats. According to my scale, she's weighing somewhere between 16.5-17 pounds, but I have no idea how tall she is these days. It's definitely getting harder and harder to carry her around in the carseat (which adds about 10 pounds on top of the baby weight!), so we do a lot of baby wearing because it's more comfortable. Caroline also seems to like to be up where the action is. Here's a picture of her "helping" Daddy grill burgers the other night.
She also loves to give and receive kisses. Anna managed to capture this one of Caroline kissing me the other day. I just love sweet baby kisses!
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