Abigail: 6 Months Old – Trav and Erin + 3

Abigail turned 6 months old on February 16th. She may be half a year old, but in some ways it feels like she’s been part of our family for a lot longer than that. She’s a little doll!

We don’t go for her 6 month checkup until March 12th, but I stepped on the scale with her a couple of weeks ago, and I think she’s around 12 pounds or so. I’ll update with her official stats when we get them. She is STILL in size 1 diapers (haha!), but we are almost out of them, so we’ll bump her up to size 2s soon. I never thought we’d use up all the size 1s we had (so many boxes!), but we actually will. Pretty crazy! She is also still wearing 0-3 month and 3 month sized clothes, but she’s almost getting too long for some of them, so I’ll probably pull out the 3-6 month stuff soon. Since she’s so small for her age, it’s actually worked out really well in that she’s wearing the same sized clothes in the same seasons that Brooklyn and Savannah did. We are definitely getting a lot of use out of these baby girl clothes!

Abigail is nursing about every 3-4 hours, which translates into about 6 times/day. She is still doing great with it and seems to get choked a lot less often these days. I’ve noticed that she has started getting easily distracted while she’s eating; if she hears something loud, she’ll stop and look around. Sometimes she’ll stop eating and just look up and grin at me. She spits up pretty frequently, so we are doing a lot of laundry these days :) We haven’t tried any solids yet; I am thinking I’ll wait until she’s closer to 6 months out from her due date (which would be in early April), but I’m going to talk to Dr. Dudley about it and see what she recommends. Abigail doesn’t really seem interested in what we’re eating yet, and I’m not in a big hurry to start solids because it will just add something else to our busy days ;) But, it probably won’t be too much longer either way before we try it at least!

I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that Abigail is STILL sleeping in the rock n’ play at night. I just can’t work up the courage to put her in her crib at night because I don’t want to ruin MY sleep ;) She still has her nights where she is waking up between 1 and 3 AM, but it’s usually pretty easy to just put her paci back in and she’ll sleep for a while longer. My goal is to wait to feed her until at least 4 AM, and a couple of nights recently she has slept solidly from 10 or 10:30 PM to 7 AM without waking up at all! I know she can do it….she’s just not very consistent yet. But, I’ll take any improvement over waking up multiple times a night ;) We are trying to use the crib for naps, and it’s kind of hit or miss. She may just not be a good napper in general, but she never seems to sleep much longer than 45 minutes in the crib. The best way to get a solid nap out of her is to put her in the swing. She didn’t like the swing at all for the first several months of her life, but I tried it again a few weeks ago and discovered that she really likes it now most of the time. It’s nice to have that option when we need it at least.

Abigail is close to being able to roll from her back to her tummy, but not quite there yet. She can roll onto her side from her back but just can’t get all the way over. She is rolling from her tummy to her back more often these days, so it’s hard to get her to do tummy time for very long ;) One day, I noticed that she did a 180 circle in her crib while lying on her back. When I went in there a little while after I put her down, her head was where her feet had been! She tried out the doorway jumper for the first time last week and tolerates it okay. She has a hard time balancing her body in it because she’s so small, so I usually have to stick a blanket behind her to help prop her up. She will jump a little bit in it, but she’s usually content to let Brooklyn and Savannah bounce her up and down. That’s what big sisters are for, right? We’ve also tried letting Abigail sit in the Bumbo seat with toys in front of her on the tray. She can sit pretty well in it, but doesn’t seem very close to sitting up on her own yet. It may be a couple more months before that happens!

As far as a medical update, she has been to the eye doctor and had a second hearing test done in the last month. Her eye appointment was with a pediatric ophthalmologist, and it went well. We learned that Abigail is far-sighted, but apparently that is normal in babies her age. We will go back in October for another check to see if it has improved. Everything else with her eyes looked great! Abigail has had 2 hearing tests done since early December (the NICU recommends the testing for all premature babies, I think), and so far she hasn’t passed either one. The first test was done right after she had RSV, so we chalked it up to fluid behind her ears from being sick. The second test was done in late January, and one of her ears had improved, but the other was still non-reactive. So, now we have an appointment with an ENT scheduled for a few weeks from now. She may still have fluid behind her ears. Hopefully it’s something that can be easily fixed. We’ll see what they say! We are still battling the cradle cap; some days, it looks better than others. And, on top of that, she has started scratching her head like crazy and making it bleed. I trim and file her nails almost every other day, so I don’t know what else to do. She needs some hair to cover up all the scratches and flakes, that’s for sure ;) Daddy calls her Crusty Head…haha! Poor thing…hopefully it will get better soon :)

Abigail is such a happy baby most of the time. She smiles all the time and seems to really enjoy being around people. She frequently starts crying in the evenings right after we get Brooklyn and Savannah in bed, and Travis and I will joke that she’s just in need of some one-on-one attention :) I think she would be totally content to just be held all day, but she also doesn’t mind lying on the activity mat or sitting in the bouncer seat if we’re busy with something else. We haven’t gotten on a very good napping schedule because it seems like we’re on-the-go too much, but thankfully she’s pretty flexible and easygoing as long as she gets food and sleep here and there :)