Passin' Milestones

Sadie reached another milestone today: the ear-splitting shriek. This came out of nowhere, as I was putting on lotion after my shower while Sadie sat in her bouncy seat, batting her hippo back and forth. Of course, once she did it once, she proceeded to shriek another 467 times. Approximately. I wasn't really holding my breath waiting for her to reach this particular milestone.

She's almost 15 weeks old now. I went back and reread all my old blog entries yesterday, just to remind myself of what she was like when she was younger, because it's already difficult to remember. (Unlike the pregnancy itself, of which every single day is etched in my mind because they were all so damn long and uncomfortable). I'd forgotten that it used to take her so long to get her back to sleep each time she woke up in the night, or that she didn't always used to love bathtime. It used to be that every time she woke up at night, I'd have to unwrap her miracle blanket, change her, feed her, wrap her back up and then bounce her back to sleep -- a process that could take as long as an hour. Ha! Now when she cries I stumble out of bed, pick her up blanket and all, nurse her while still half-asleep, then lay her back down in her crib and have my head back on the pillow within 15 minutes.

I remember the nights I used to sleep in the nursery, getting up with her every hour or two and then soothing her back to sleep. By five or six, I'd walk down the hall to our bedroom to wake up Scott, who would take over watching her while I tried in vain to catch a few extra hours of sleep. I remember being too worried to introduce a bottle until she was four weeks old, afraid of that spectre known as nipple confusion, afraid that one day I'd try to nurse her and she'd refuse, wanting only the bottle. Now we know that not only will she take anything that's offered to her as long as it expresses milk, but she doesn't even mind if it hasn't been heated first.

The one milestone she seems nowhere near to approaching is rolling over. By this, the fourth month, she's supposed to be supporting herself while lying on her stomach, able to prop herself up and look around. We're making very slow progress in this area, due to her aforementioned hatred of "tummy time." We were making no progress at all, until my sister gave us, as a Christmas present, a tummy time mat with a little half-doughnut-shaped pillow Sadie can drape her arms over. This definitely helped -- instead of just lying there crying, she can actually pick up her head and look around. She'll even find me and smile at me. But her tolerance for any sort of belly-floor contact is very limited, and if you remove the pillow she still mostly just grunts and fusses and sucks her fist, then finally loses it completely. Plus I don't know how much the pillow is actually helping her develop her upper body, since she doesn't need to flex her arm muscles to hold herself up. Oh well...I'm sure in a few months I'll be wishing that she was still that immobile little 3 month old who stayed put.