Little Miss Savannah is 1/3 of a year old today! Pretty unbelievable! I had an interesting time trying to take her pictures this morning. She wasn’t too interested in smiling, and she drooled so much that the sticker disintegrated before I could get any really good pictures. Ha! Oh well…we did the best we could :)
Savannah doesn’t go for her 4 month checkup until September 17th (she’ll be closer to 5 months old by then!), but I measured her on our scale this morning at 14.5 pounds. We will see what she officially weighs in a few weeks from now. **UPDATE: At 4 months + 19 days, she weighed exactly 15 lbs (55th percentile) and was 26 3/4 inches long (above 98th percentile!!). Her legs have definitely fattened up this month, but she still doesn’t have much of a belly at all. Nursing has gone well this month overall. Savannah has nursed at the beach, by the pool, in a restaurant, at the mall, in the car (while it was parked!), and probably some other places that I’m forgetting. Yay for flexibility! She eats about every 3-3.5 hours in a 24 hour period, which translates to about 6 times a day. I think her latch has improved since we got her tongue tie clipped last month, so I’m glad we went ahead and did it instead of waiting. When bottle fed, she will take about 3.5-4 oz at at time. I’m so thankful that she has done great with the bottle on the days I’ve worked so far!
We’ve had a lot of ups and downs in the sleeping department over the last month. I think it’s a combination of several things. One of those is that we’ve recently had to wean her from being swaddled while she sleeps because she has started rolling over, and you’re not supposed to swaddle after they can roll. BUT, she still has a pretty strong startle reflex (more on that later), so I think sometimes she gets woken up when her arms move in her sleep. We’ve been putting her in something called a Zipadeezip, which is a wearable blanket that supposedly helps the transition from swaddling. I think she’s finally getting used to wearing it. Yay! I think we also got Savannah into a bad habit of using the paci to go to sleep while we were at the beach for a week. Since we were all sharing a room, I didn’t want her to disturb Brooklyn while she slept, so we gave her a paci for naps and at night whenever she woke up. She didn’t sleep great for several nights once we got back home, but she’s done a little better (knock on wood) the past few nights lately. She’s just very unpredictable when it comes to how long she’ll sleep at night. Lately we’ve been putting her to bed around 8 or 8:30, and on a good night she’ll sleep until 3-5 AM without waking up to eat. But, that doesn’t always happen! We just never know what she’ll do :) After I feed her in the early A.M., she will usually go back to sleep until around 6:30-7:30 AM. Then, she’s up for the day!
Naps are all over the place these days too. They are mostly short little cat naps, although occasionally she will sleep for an hour or two straight. I just cannot figure out how to consistently get her to nap longer than about 30-45 minutes at a time. She wakes up crying from her cat naps like she is still tired, but most of the time she won’t go back to sleep if I put the paci in. I can’t hold her while she sleeps since Big Sis is SO LOUD, although I will hold her for a nap while Brooklyn is napping sometimes. And she won’t fall asleep in the swing—I think she’s slept in it maybe one time ever. She will sometimes fall asleep in the car while we’re out, but very rarely stays asleep once we get where we’re going. So, naps are pretty challenging! I guess we’re making do for now, and hopefully she will nap better in the months to come.
Even though I didn’t get any good smiley pictures this month, Savannah loves to smile these days! The best way to get her to smile is by talking or singing to her. She eats that attention up! She is laughing more often these days, and the past two days Brooklyn has even gotten her to giggle. I need to get that on video soon…it’s very sweet! Savannah also loves to talk to you when you start talking to her. That cooing and squealing never gets old. She is also sticking out her tongue so much more since we got her tongue tie clipped. She wouldn’t be her daddy’s daughter if she couldn’t stick that tongue out! ;)
Savannah has been working on a lot of new tricks this month. She can roll over both ways (as of a little over a week ago), although she is much better at rolling from her back to her tummy than the other way. She has only rolled from her tummy to her back a couple of times. So, she’s been doing A LOT of tummy time lately because she almost automatically flips to her belly when you lay her down on her back, and then she either can’t or won’t roll back. In fact, she’s sleeping on her belly most of the time now. She can prop up on her arms when she’s on her belly and hold her head up so well these days. She has gotten so much stronger than she was at 3 months old. I felt like her head was still pretty wobbly at 3 months, but she’s really come a long way in how well she holds her head up. She is also batting at the toys on her activity mat and trying to grab them with her hands. She gets frustrated because she’s not very good at grabbing them yet, but I’m sure before long she’ll be a pro!
We are still dealing with reflux issues, unfortunately. Some days I’ll think it’s getting better, and then she’ll spit up 3 or 4 times after one feeding. I guess I’ll mention it to Dr. Dudley when we go for her check up and see what she says. We did go ahead and lower her crib all the way flat because she did fine in the pack and play at the beach, and it was flat on the ground. When her crib was angled, she would move around and get turned sideways and wake up. This is probably TMI, but she’s also having the same liquid poop problems that Brooklyn had around 4 months old. We took Brooklyn to the doctor about it and even saw a specialist, and he told us it could be a milk protein allergy. I never changed my diet though :) She finally grew out of that problem when she started eating solids at 6 months old. I’m not as worried about it with Savannah since we’ve dealt with it once before. I guess I’ll mention it to Dr. Dudley, but hopefully it’s just a laundry issue and nothing more. Those diaper blowouts are the WORST! It’s gotten all over her car seat 2 Saturdays in a row :(
We’ve decided that Savannah looks a lot like her daddy! What do you think? Just looking at his baby pictures next to hers, they look very similar. I will have to post a comparison collage sometime for you to see for yourself. Her face is more slender than Brooklyn’s, and so is her nose. I think the shape of her eyes may be more like mine (definitely not the color though!), but I think she’s more like her daddy in the rest of her face! It will be interesting to see how she changes as she grows. Right now, she is still in size 2 diapers (even if we moved up, I don’t think it would help with the blowouts unfortunately). She is so long that she is wearing mostly 6 month and some 6-9 month stuff, but they are pretty loose on her because of her slim figure ;) I think she will totally outgrow 3-6 month clothes pretty soon because they’ll be too short.
Likes: making eye contact with you and smiling/talking, lying on her activity mat, swinging in her swing (she has started to be okay with swinging SOMETIMES!), taking baths, and trying to eat her hands or whatever toy she can put in her mouth
Dislikes: getting out of the bath tub and getting lotion put on, riding in the car too long, loud noises (she is very sensitive to loud noises like sneezing or coughing—she has burst into tears over a loud cough or sneeze at church several times before), and being on her tummy for a long time
We love you, little Savannah Leigh! Can’t wait to see how you change over the coming months!
