This past week our Olivia turned four months old!
We won’t have Olivia’s four-month appointment until later this month. I’ll have updated weight, length, and head circumference with percentiles for her next month update.
The biggest highlight of this past month is that we finalized Olivia’s adoption! As Olivia’s adoption was out of state, the finalization took place on Zoom. I’m not one for a lot of pomp and circumstance. But I really enjoyed Tommy’s adoption finalization in the courthouse. It was a little surreal doing it over Zoom. But the finalization was still a really nice little event. Obviously, it’s such a weight off to have reached this milestone.
Olivia doesn’t want to miss anything. When she’s awake, she almost always wants to have someone holding her, so she’s sitting up. She can’t wait to be sitting up on her own, especially at mealtimes. When we’re out anywhere like music class or church, she’s almost always awake, and she wants to be out of her car seat and part of what we’re going. At home, Olivia constantly wants to see what Tommy’s doing, especially when he’s playing with Daddy. If she’s with me in another room, she gets frustrated and basically demands that I move her, so she can watch them.
Olivia’s favorite thing right now (after Tommy, of course) is the toy bars for her bouncy chairs. She’s also still all about the vibration function in the infant-to-toddler rocker. We’ve burned through a couple of sets of batteries already. When she’s in the right mood, she loves holding one of her lovey animals or playing in her activity gym. As she’s more and more awake during the day, she goes longer stretches in these types of activities.
One of our favorite things lately is that when you give Olivia her pacifier, she often holds onto your hands. It’s the sweetest. She’ll often hold on while you’re feeding her, too. Olivia has also started doing the classic baby thing where she rubs her eyes with her fists when she’s really tired. I die every single time.
Olivia is holding steady at eating four ounces at a time every three hours. When she gets a really long nap during the day, she’ll go four or even five hours between bottles. Sometimes we’ll push to five ounces when I know she’s really hungry. But she’s not eating five ounces consistently yet. The biggest development with Olivia’s eating this past month is that she’s able to hold her own bottle. She has been motivated to hold her own bottle right from day one and finally has the strength and coordination to do it largely independently. I can’t even tell you how excited I am about this development. She’s swaddled at night and still feeding once or twice at night. So I have to help her with that. But it makes such a difference during the day.
We’ve actually regressed with sleep this past month, which is very discouraging. At three months, I was only feeding her once during the night, usually not until four or five a.m. Now she’s often waking up at one a.m. and then again at four or five a.m. and almost always wants to be fed both times. I try to get in a final feeding for the day around nine or ten p.m. to stretch out the night time feedings. It doesn’t always help, though. She is still going down much more easily than she was at one or even two months old. But the more she wakes up at night, the harder time I have going back to sleep, so that’s still tough.
Otherwise, Olivia’s sleep routine is pretty much the same as last month. She crashes first at night, sometime between eight and ten p.m. She still doesn’t want to be put down for naps too far away from me. I’m starting to be able to get her settled somewhere, like the living room or my office, and then walk away, which helps her get a little more sleep. She still loves sleeping in the car seat, either in the car or stroller, so we maximize those opportunities whenever possible. Now that the weather is warmer, we’re out and about more days than not. She often gets in a good nap during that time.
The past month I’ve finally been able to get back into something of a groove where I get something done besides laundry, dishes, or dinner during the late afternoon stretch of the day when Tommy naps, namely computer work or other house tasks. Other times, I’m able to push through the last of the laundry or dishes before dinner, so I have a little (and I stress little) time to do something else after dinner.
Olivia is still wearing some newborn pajamas and pants and otherwise is in a combination of 0-3, 3-month, and 3-6 month clothing. This past month she transitioned up to size two diapers. Thus far I’ve been following Tommy’s diaper size schedule and simply moving up a size when we run out instead of pushing through until the diapers get too small. This way we don’t end up with leftover small diapers.
You can find all of my Olivia updates as well as my Tommy baby/toddler updates, general family updates, and other family-related posts in the family section of the blog.
