6 months and counting

So, welcome back, those that are around.  I know it’s been a long time, and we have some catching up to do.  I apologize, but man, who knew that an infant could be so much work, and totally sap my will to do anything productive.  Also, I’ve still been in school part time, and of course working.   I made some creative resolutions for this year though, and as part of one of those, I need to start writing more again.  I’ll keep you up to date.

First, let’s go over the first 6 months.  I’m going to gloss over this for the most part.  A lot obviously happened, and there will be time to revisit some of those things later on.  I left off with going home from the hospital. So things we dealt with.  First time parent jitters and not knowing exactly what to do with her when we got home.  Adjusting to being woken up a million times a night.  Realizing that she didn’t need to be in our room, we could hear her (even without a monitor) just fine in the next room, with all the random baby noises she made.  My wife realizing she was dealing with post-partum depression, and how to deal with that as a family (She has stated that she would like to write something about it eventually.  I hope she does.  One of the things that was hardest was just how little discussion there is out there about it, which made finding peer support very hard). Then there is the fact that our daughter wouldn’t sleep without being swaddled, and now we can’t get her to stop.  It’s slowly getting to the point where she doesn’t need it, but she hasn’t fully realized it yet.  There was a couple months where every day on the way home from her Nana and Papa’s house she decided that screaming was the thing to do.  For 30-40 minutes straight.  We tried a lot of different things to help alleviate that, and she finally realized that she could just sleep the entire way home.   Makes for a much nicer commute on the way home.   She had pooping issues for a while where she was constipated.  She also was diagnosed with acid reflux, which she has seemingly outgrown (The doctor thinks that the car screaming may have been tied to this, as the acid build up by the end of the day was just painful for her.)  She’s now off her meds (fingers crossed) for that.   We’ve dealt with the mass exodus of friends that occurs when you have a kid.  You definitely learn very quickly who your friends are once you have kids.  The ones willing to still make an effort to hang out, even when you can’t make the effort are the ones you know you should keep around.  What’s been most funny to me is the amount of single or childless male friends who didn’t disappear.   Needless to say, it’s been a very interesting 6 months.  There are probably a billion other things I could talk about, and I’m sure they might come up sometime, but let’s move on.

Our daughter is now 6 ½ months old.  Just this week she finally figured out that even though she can’t crawl yet (although, she is just now starting to get those knees up and then push herself backward) that she can spin around on her stomach.  She also hasn’t figured out how to roll from her stomach to her back, although she now flips over and occasionally will sleep on her stomach.   Then she wakes up, and wakes us up, because she can’t flip herself back over.  She gets close, but she just doesn’t know what to do with one arm and it keeps her from flipping back over.   She has started to get better at mimicking noises, and has added “hi” to her repertoire.  Obviously, we don’t consider it her first word, since I highly doubt she understands what it means yet, but it’s funny to hear thrown into otherwise unintelligible baby babble.  Which, while we’re on the topic, is hilarious. What’s even better, is that when she’d be tired, or overly-tired, she’d scream and cry. Now, she babbles even more than usual, and giggles a lot. We always know when she’s tired, and she seems to think it’s the funniest thing on earth.  She has also figured out that whenever someone has a camera (or phone pointed at her to take pictures) she should smile.  She loves to ham it up for the camera.  Tomorrow, she starts baby swim classes.   I’m actually pretty excited about that.  I can’t wait to take pictures and video of that.  I think I have an addiction to those things with her. 

I think that should do it for now.  I’m working out how I’m going to schedule posting. I’m aiming for once or twice a week. What do the 14 of you followers think?