6 1/2 Months

Quincy has grown so much in the last two months!  She weighs around 18 lbs and she is 26 inches long. She has tripled her birth weight. Her two bottom teeth came in a few weeks ago and a part of a third one has popped through. 

Her favorite toy is still water bottles of all kinds. 

She also likes anything that will make noise. She started flapping her arms up and down like a bird a few weeks ago, and now she does it whenever she is excited, or if she's holding a toy that makes noise. She has these toy chains that she loves to shake and sometimes she has red marks on her head at the end of the day from hitting herself during her vigorous arm flapping while holding the chain. She likes to sit in front of her basket of toys and pull them all out. She gets kind of bored with her toys so inside her basket there are random things like crumpled up paper and water bottles. 

She eats baby food every night. She likes most kinds except bananas. She likes apple but she can't eat it because it upsets her tummy and keeps her up at night. She likes peas but I don't buy them for her because for some reason puréed peas smell like fart. I'm going to start making our own this week anyways because the stuff you buy is so watered down and over priced. I did buy some of the puréed meat food like chicken but they smell so bad. I bought "ham with gravy" but I am terrified to even open the jar for fear of how it might smell. Ugh. Also, I don't know why but no matter what food I give her, she always makes a horrified face when she has the first bite. Then she usually gobbles down a whole jar but it's like she doesn't understand what I'm putting in her mouth at first even though she has had it every day. 

We took Quinn camping at Flathead Lake in Montana last week for 8 days. I was pretty nervous that I would undo all of the progress we had made as far as her sleep habits go. We slept in a tent, but my parents have a trailer so we got to give her a bath in it every night. The first day we got there, she took a nap in her pack n play, and she fell asleep on her own. She started out sleeping well that night too. I thought that I had worried for nothing. But then it got cold in the middle of the night. And her pack n play was at a slant because there was no flat ground so she ended up sleeping with me on a cot. So the rest of the week wasn't that great. Actually, at first, I was like oh my gosh I love snuggling her all night! But then neither of us slept great squished together on a cot and she kept crying when I put her in the pack n play so I just kept her with me so she wouldn't wake up other campers. She pretty much woke up every hour and a half and I had to nurse her back to sleep. By the end of the week, she had started throwing her binki off of the cot so I had to search for it in the cold dark tent a bunch of times and I was getting pretty irritated. Then we came home and she is sleeping better then she was when we left. She wakes up twice at night still, which is not awesome but a hundred times better than where we used to be. And she consistently takes 90 minute naps. So she is happy and I am happy. She loved camping though! The lake water was pretty cold since it is glacier fed, so she took awhile to get used to it. I would just carry her in and let the waves hit her feet. She would gasp and try to climb up me and hold onto me really tight. The second time I took her in she was a little more brave and kept leaning towards the water, wanting to touch it. She would go back and forth between me and the water but pretty soon she just wanted to be held parallel to it so that she could splash her hands in it. She kept splashing water on her face. I wish I had pictures of that but I don't. She also would suck the water off of her hands. The second half of our week there the weather was super cold and rainy so then we spent the next few days in my parents trailer, wishing it was warm. All in all, I would do it again. Camping with a six month old isn't too hard. We just had to bring a lot more stuff. 

Quinn is not crawling, when she wants something that is out of her reach she just kinda rolls back and forth from tummy to back and wiggles towards it until she can reach it. I remember before she was really rolling, she hated tummy time and she would get really mad before finally rolling out of it. But then I would go in her room and she would be playing after her nap on her crib and she would be on her stomach and moving around. Then one day she rolled all the way across our living room floor. So I am pretty sure that she practices stuff when she's alone in her crib and we can't watch her. It's like she doesn't want to do stuff just because we want her to do it. I won't be surprised if she just starts crawling one day. 

She has mastered the art of putting her binki in her mouth the right way. One night, she kept crying even though I knew she wasn't hungry, so I went in to give her her binki because she usually goes to sleep if I let her cry for a few minutes and then go in and do that. Well, she was crying with her binki in her mouth. What was I supposed to do with that? That was when I realized apples upset her tummy. She also started sucking her index finger last week. Speaking of fingers, I remember when she was a newborn and her hands and feet seemed so big and her fingers were so long and skinny compared to the rest of her. Now her fingers are shaped more like bugles. And she has small feet, she's not even into size 2 yet, although she wears 9 month clothes. 

Quinn is such a happy baby. She is social now, I always see her trying to get people's attention when we go to church and there are people right behind us. She is very smiley. When she's not being social, she is usually very focused on a certain task. She is quite determined and sometimes it can be hard to get her attention if she's right in the middle of working on something. She yells a lot though. Especially when it is quiet. She talks the most when she is in her crib or in her car seat. And then she flat out yells when she is mad no matter where she is. She is wonderful. I can't believe how amazing she is. I love watching her grow and learn. I am so lucky to be able to be with her all day every day. 

Sitting with grandpa :) 

Uncle Hayden being weird with his awkward mustache 

I would highly recommend bringing one of these if you camp with a baby. 

Notice the water bottle close by. 

Getting sleepy! She pretty much yawned all day every day while we were there since she didn't exactly get quality sleep. 

The beautiful lake the morning after a storm. 

She got really excited when we put these life jackets on her before our trip. These are the smallest ones they make that I am aware of. I guess life jacket makers probably think that most babies don't need life jackets. They are rated for under 30 pounds though, so I guess it's safe!! 

Crying and sleeping and mostly crying

Last Sunday I was at church, standing in the hallway waiting for Sunday school to be over so I could go to relief society. I had skipped Sunday school because Quinn desperately needed a nap so I took her into the mothers room and nursed her to sleep. Like clockwork, she woke up after 30 minutes. The longest nap I could get her to take was 45 minutes, but that was a rare occurrence. I would even wait inside her room, on the floor next to the crib, and I would put her binki back in her mouth as soon as she started to stir. It didn't work. She couldn't go back to sleep. I tried nursing, even though I wanted to break the nursing to sleep association. It didn't  work either. That particular Sunday morning, Quinn woke up early and so I tried to get her to nap before church, so that I could maybe stay almost the whole three hours. We ended up being 20 minutes late and no nap was taken. 

So there I was, standing with my overtired baby in the hall. A lady I had talked to a couple of times came and stood by me. Her one year old started to play with Quinn and we started talking. I told her how Quinn would never nap. I told her that I've read so many sleep books and they aren't helping. I did not want to let her cry it out, that is bad! I had had a headache for over a month. It was a tension headache, and I was super tense in my upper back and neck. I had been sleeping on a camping pad in her room, when she would wake up and I was too tired to rock her back to sleep, I would just sleep next to her. But it wasn't helping anymore. I told her that Quinn would just roll around in the middle of the night, like she couldn't get comfortable. And I would resort to nursing, but that stopped working after awhile. I was practically crying while I told her all these things. I hated everyone who was sleeping at night, and who got to take naps whenever they wanted. I hated that my baby was grumpy all day from being tired, and that I seemed to spend all day every day rocking her to sleep for her to nap only 30 minutes, and that I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to give her what she needed. I don't think it was safe for me to be driving at all. I read somewhere that if you get less than six hours of sleep for so many nights in a row it was like driving drunk. Well, I had gotten less than six for like 200 nights in a row, and I could definitely feel it. It was hard to react to things while I was driving, things like red lights. I didn't run any, that I know of, but I definitely had some close calls over the last few months. I cried so many times after laying her down, just to have her wake up again. And people would say super helpful things like, why don't you sleep when she sleeps?! Oh, why didn't I think of that? Wait, I did. And I tried all the time. How am I supposed to fall asleep when I am this overtired, with that 30 minute clock ticking in the back of my mind?! Yeah, I was not that fun to hang out with. Maybe I'm still not, I don't know. 

Anyways, she listened and she knew exactly what I was talking about. Sometimes I would try to talk to people about her sleep habits and they would be like, oh "she is teething/growing." And I'd be like "yeah, she has been teething/growing since the day she left my belly. Thanks for your useless tip." I can't blame them though, I think most babies sleep pretty well. Or maybe their moms just don't talk about it, because they feel like if they tell people they can't get their baby to sleep, maybe they will think she is a bad mom. That's how I felt at least. Quinn was not the greatest newborn, but when she was about eight weeks old, she started sleeping in a four hour stretch at night. I felt awesome. I remember telling myself that I had this whole mom thing figured out. Other moms just weren't as intuitive as I was, or else their baby would be happy, too. Right?! WRONG!!! That lasted a few short weeks and then for almost three months it was awful. Neither of us were happy because neither of us could sleep. 

So, back to me and my friend in the hallway, she tells me that her baby was the same, and that I need to go rent a good movie, put her to bed, and let her cry it out. I did not want to do that. I told her I couldn't. What if Quinn hated me after that? What if she just felt abandoned and she just gave up on life? What if it went on and on and didn't work? She told me that her baby was around six months old (same as Quinn) and it took her an hour. Then she slept through the night and started napping better right away. Then, her baby was way happier.

 Now, I had talked to other people who had tried crying it out and heard horror stories. One lady told me that she did it with her eight month old, and she cried for three hours and never have up and she didn't sleep well until she was over a year old. Another lady told me that she did it with her 18 month old, because she was pregnant an could no longer gently set him in his crib after he fell asleep. She let him cry and after an hour and a half, he threw up from it. She said it was a six month process. So, these stories made me feel like if I was going to do it, I had to do it now. We were planning on going camping three weeks from that day and I couldn't wait another month to start it. I had to do it. 

I cried off and on that whole day. I did not want to do it. But I was at my wit's end. I could not take any more. The constant headache and the dangerous driving... Yikes. I had tried the no cry sleep training methods and they helped a little, but it had been two months of that with no success. I called my mom and cried. I cried when Kelly came home and I told him what I was going to do. He told me that he'd been trying to get me to do it forever and he asked "why now?" I have him my reasons and told him that I was going to sit outside after I put her to bed and he said he would stay inside with her. I went and got the camp chair out of the garage and I was ready. I just didn't want to hear the crying. So, that night I fe her baby food with rice cereal, gave her her bath, read a story, then she nursed. And she went right to sleep. I went downstairs prepared to leave when she woke up after 45 minutes or whatever. She woke up once after 30 minutes and I gave her her binki. But then I told Kelly, I'm not going in there again. I won't go back in her room until 11:00-12:00 to feed her because she will be hungry. (I wasn't trying to wean her from night feedings, I don't mind getting up to feed her if she goes right back to sleep). After that, she slept like a champ! She didn't wake up until 12:30. I fed her and she went back to sleep. She woke up at 2:00 and cried for a minute and went back to sleep. She woke up at 4:00 and cried for a long time, when she started to get out of control after 25 minutes I went in and gave her her binki and she went back to sleep until 6:30. I went in her room and she was just laying there, awake. I felt awful. Maybe she didn't cry because she felt like no one would hear her! But once I got her up and fed her, she seemed happier. Her naps were better than before that day, two short 45 minute naps in the morning and then she took a longer one that afternoon. That's a huge step up from 5-6 30 minute naps a day. It got better each day. She is still inconsistent. I decided to feed her when she wakes up around 4 in the morning because she cried one time for an hour and a half, she was hungry. I don't want my baby to go hungry, and even though the books day she doesn't need to eat more than once a night, I don't care. Some nights she only wakes up once. One night, she slept until 5 in the morning, then she ate and went back to sleep. I slept almost seven hours straight for the first time since she had been born! It was awesome. I wanted to keep sleeping. Her naps are still inconsistent, but they are always at least 45 minutes. A lot of the time I can lay her in the crib without rocking her and she will roll over and go to sleep. Yesterday, she napper for more than two hours and so did I. I feel so good. We are both so much happier. When she wakes up at night, and it hasn't been more than four hours since she last ate, I let her cry for a minute or two and then she goes back to sleep on her own most of the time. Maybe she would have done this all along if I hadn't rushed in there at every little noise she made. I was just always afraid that if I didn't get her back to sleep right away, then she wouldn't go back to sleep. I also think that the methods I used from Elizabeth Pantley's book helped her be more prepared to fall asleep on her own. Now she knows that she can do it, and she does it most of the time. She wakes up between 7 and 8:00 most mornings, and it is so nice to have a baby that's a little bit predictable. I feel like I have a little more control over my life again. She has had two teeth pop through in the last few days, so that has made nap time a little harder, but it is still way better than it was! Looking back, I wouldn't have done it much earlier than I did. I still believe that letting your baby cry it out is wrong when they are teeny tiny. Apparently people say that 6 months is the age where it's ok. It was okay for us at five and a half months. She seems to have developed so much more since I started doing this, she doesn't get frustrated as easily and she is learning so fast! Also, she doesn't hate me. :) 

This morning: