four months and lots of milk

My sweet little squawky girl is 4 months old. Four months! Can you believe it? We had her well-baby visit yesterday and she weighs a whopping 15 pounds, 2 and a half ounces. This adequately explains the rolls on the legs and the triple chins she is sporting under those delicious cheeks. And delicious she is, these days. I finally decided to stop posting about the screaming she was doing, because in the end I worry it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I mean, if all I talk about is how fussy she is and how much more she cries than her brother did, then inevitably I feel she will continue to cry and be fussy. Now when people ask if she is a good baby, I say yes definitely, because she is a good and sweet and wonderful baby. She is also exceedingly high-maintenance for such a pint-sized little squirt, but that's okay, we still love her to death.

Like everyone, she has her good and bad days, but on the whole things are much much better. She doesn't have screaming fits anymore, although she has developed a high-pitched shriek that she will use if she is disatisfied with us in any way. For example, I tried a pair of sunglasses on her and she did not appreciate it, so she shrieked like a cat whose legs were being torn off slowly. I quickly took the sunglasses off her because everyone in the store was looking in our direction to see where the random dying cat was located. As I went to place the sunglasses back on the rack, they passed through her line of vision and she immediately began the shrieking again. She was shrieking just from the THREAT of those sunglasses coming near her face. I didn't even know a baby could do that at 3 months.

The same thing happens if you approach her with a pacifier or a bottle. She is all about the totally-natural nipples- no substitutions. That is another post for another day, of course, because I will have to get it down in writing that I have been unable to leave her side for longer than about an hour and a half in the last 4 months. I'd just like to remember so I can remind her when she is a teenager. I am also going to record the yowling dying cat sound so I can play it for her future boyfriends as a warning to NOT HAVE SEX, LEST YOU HAVE A BABY JUST LIKE HER. Should go over well, no?

The smiles, though, oh my goodness, the smiles are just too much. She smiles with her whole body these days. You say hi to her, and she bunches up her arms and legs and vibrates with excitement and her mouth opens and her tongue sticks out and her eyes bunch up with happiness. Those smiles make me want to get out of bed every morning. She is cooing also, and talks to herself and everyone else all the time. This has to be a girl thing, because Gabe never talked this much. I'm a little afraid of toddlerhood, I have to admit.

The sleeping was good, then wasn't good on vacation, and since returning to our small abode has been steadily improving. I am reserving judgment until we are back in the swing of life. She is generally a good sleeper although it takes me a long time to get her to actually fall asleep. She will nap about 3 times a day, once for an hour, once for 2 hours, once for 30 minutes or so. The 2 hour nap has been consistently falling within the same time frame as Gabe's nap, and those are some of the most wonderful 2 hours of my life. I sit on the couch and watch dvred shows and eat cookies. All of this explains why I haven't lost the last few pounds, but who cares! 2 hour naps! Yay!

I almost forgot to tell you about one of the most traumatic experiences of my life, and definitely the worst moment of the whole vacation. Even though Josie won't take any bottles, I continue to pump in the morning and at nighttime because I am confident that someday she will. Maybe it'll be in a sippy cup, maybe it'll be mixed into cereal, but darn it, she'll drink that milk. In Florida, I'd pumped about 45-50 ounces and packaged them up into bags and frozen them for the trip home. I was planning on putting them in a small cooler with tons of ice and bringing them back to our freezer here, where I'd add them to our stash. Anyway, in my sleep deprived and foggy state (see previous post), I took the bag of frozen breast milk out of the freezer to add the last pumped bit of milk and get it ready for the flight the next morning, and then, I can't even type this, I (SOB) left it out on the counter. All that milk. Left on the counter to spoil. By the time I got up in the morning, even just a few hours later, it was all defrosted and some was warm. I had to throw it all down the drain. Or at least I made my mother in law throw it all down the drain because I couldn't bring myself to do it. I know it's just milk, but so much WORK goes into that milk, and hours of sitting up late at night hooked up to that instrument of torture. Oh, it pains me to think about it. Thank goodness the boobs keep making more, or I'd really be crying.

All in all, though, she really is an amazingly charming and sweet girl. I have to restrain myself these days, because I can't help biting her cheeks because she is so yummy. I will actually slobber all over her because I find her so scrumptious. Isn't that strange? But she really is too good to be true.