Marigold, Eight Months

Marigold is 8 months old!

WEIGHT
19 lb 8 oz. Half a pound gained since last month!

^^No babies were harmed in the snapping of this photo. 

^^She was all smiles the second daddy picked her up.

SLEEP

We finally have a solid sleep schedule! There are still little variations, by 30 minutes to an hour here and there, but overall it's:

7:30am - wake up

10am - first nap, typically 1.5-2 hours

12:30pm - first nap cut-off!

3pm - second nap, typically 1-2 hours

4:30pm - second nap cut-off!

8pm - in her crib for bedtime

And then Little Miss typically sleeps through the night!! She will occasionally wake for a middle-of-the-night or early-morning feeding, but that's only about 1-2x per week. 

Sleep, glorious sleeeeeep! 

FIRSTS THIS MONTH
-Real crawling!
-Pulling to stand!
-Cruising on furniture!!
-First two teeth!
-Way more hair! Still not sure if she's going to be a red head tho. *shrug*
-Really figuring out how to eat food!
-Picking up and eating every last speck off the floor. GROSS.
-Figured out object permanence! As a result: extra clingy to momma.

^^She never gets any attention. ;)

NICKNAMES
Margo, Margo Moo, Margs, Margsie, Hairibow Claire

OTHER THINGS TO NOTE
-Marigold is a champ eater. I've never had a kiddo take off so fast on solid foods. She's great at bringing the food to her mouth, moving it around in her mouth, mashing it with her gums, and then 50/50 on swallowing vs. spitting it out. She seems to be getting a ton for an 8-month-old. And she pretty much tries everything we put in front of her. Favorites include cucumber, pear, soft carrots, sweet potato, egg, cheese, avocado, and bread.

-She will soon be moved out into her new bedroom! We're just working on getting blackout curtains hung. I bought the curtain rods and curtains over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, so it should all be up soon. For now, she's still enjoying her time sleeping in her crib in our closet. Our wardrobe is not doing as well, as we can rarely get in there between her naps to put clothes away. So currently it's all unfolded and strewn about the bedroom floor. Don't judge plz. Our life will be back in order soon. Hahahaha jk. But maybe our clothes will be.

-Margs is SO good at pulling to stand, but SO unbalanced once she's up. She has fallen and bonked her head/cheek/chin/you name it more times than I can count. Doesn't matter if we are right next to her because it all happens so fast. Breaks my mama heart every time. Hopefully she gets sturdier on her feet soon!

-I wish I could capture all her noises and post them here to keep forever. She yips and screams and occasionally tries to copy short phrases from us. It's so dang cute! My favorite Margsie noise is when I get her from her crib in the morning or after naps. She yips and squeals and pumps her arms and legs in excitement. Gah! Can't handle all the cute!

-John Paul and Jude have officially warmed up to their sister. They've loved her since day one, but they've also shown us BIG feelings about adding a new family member over the last 1/2 a year, usually coming out sideways as unrelated tantrums and button pushing. But now that's pretty much out of their systems and for the first time they're saying things like, "I like Margo now!" and, "I love having a sister!" :) She's obsessed with them, so it's a good arrangement. Looking forward to many more years of sibbie love. It doesn't get much better than hearing a 4yo and 2yo call their baby sis "MARGS" all day long. Lolz.

Love you, sweet girl! You're pure awesome. <3

Marigold, Seven Months

WEIGHT
19 pounds of pure, wonderful chubbiness.

HEIGHT
At her 6-month appointment on October 8, she was 27.75 inches, aka 96th percentile!

^^Our first attempt at her 7-month pics, in which she would only stay on her back if she was distracted by her brothers' cars.

SLEEP
Sleep has been bonkers amazing the past month!! We have a loose schedule everyday, and I can't even tell you how happy I am that we sorta have a schedule to the sleep madness finally!

Wake up around 8am.
First nap around 10:30am.
Second nap around 2:30pm.
Get ready for bed around 7:30pm.
In crib by 8pm.
Asleep by 8:15pm.

Occasionally there's a middle-of-the-night feeding or an early morning wake-up around 6am. But most nights, it's 11+ hours of blissful, uninterrupted sleep for Miss Marigold. We're here for it.

Other things to note about sleep. It did take a whole month for the naps to work themselves out, but she's officially taking a 1.5-to-2.5-hour nap in the mornings and a 1-to-2-hour nap in the afternoons. When we started with the schedule, sometimes she'd take a dinky 45-minute nap in the morning and that would throw everything off and result in a 3-nap day. I'm sooo thankful to finally be past that! The only downside is that my kids trade naps all day long now. Margo naps in the morning and late afternoon, Jude in the middle of the day at 1:30pm, and John Paul just officially outgrew the nap. But I'm not complaining! It feels so good to have well-napped, well-slept kids and parents.

FIRSTS THIS MONTH
-Army crawling SO fast across the whole house.
-Absolutely trying to real crawl. She can get up on all fours and rock, but hasn't moved the hands or knees forward yet. SO SOON!
-Eating all the big girl foods! More on that in a sec.
-Consistently sleeping through the night! *happiest of all happy dances*
-Babbling "dada!" Her favorite version is using her high-pitched screamy voice.
-Trying to copy sounds we're making, like shhhhhh, and gestures, like fist bumps and "all done" hands.
-Repositioning from sitting to laying on the floor with relative ease, although there is still the occasional head bonk when she doesn't have full control.
-Popping her first tooth! And it seems the second is soon to follow.

NICKNAMES
Margo, Margs, Sis, and Margsy are the most used.

OTHER THINGS TO NOTE
-On the first day of her 7th month, we arrived in Rhode Island for a one-week trip to visit my family. My siblings hadn't met her yet, nor my extended family, so it was great fun to show her off all week. The boys obviously loved the adventure as well. And because we had gotten her on a sleep schedule the two weeks before we left, her sleep was basically unaffected, even with all the traveling and sleeping in new environments. So as it turns out, she's an awesome travel baby. See following pics for some of my favorite moments in RI.

^^ My sister made this troll doll hat for Margo and it's hilariously cute.

^^These "baby holders" in public restrooms are quite hilarious and possibly not all that safe. 🙈

-Marigold got to start solid foods this month! Her first food was cucumber, and from there we've given her little bits of what we're eating, so long as it's not too salty. She's tried avocado, bread, carrots, zucchini, squash, mushrooms, chicken, steak, eggs, apples, strawberries, hummus, peanut butter, and so on. Of all my kiddos, she's figured out food the fastest. She's not swallowing much yet, but she's so excited to try, can basically pick up and get anything she wants up to her mouth, and she's getting enough to change the consistency of her diapers. Eep! It's so fun to watch her explore this new world!

-Sis continues to love playing on the floor, and now that she can army crawl, she loves it even more. She will move all the way across a room just to get her hands on a toy. I've even seen her "chase" after John Paul, who was crawling around and away from her. It was the most adorable game of tag I've ever seen.

-Miss Margo is still sleeping in our closet, but will soon be updated to her own bedroom. Our hold-up is that we wanted to get her room painted before we move her over. So we've been mulling over colors for weeks, and finally settled on the perfect pink for her ceiling and a creamy white for her walls. I'll be sure to include some pictures in a later post, once it's finished.

-Marigold has had croup over the past week. John Paul had it first, probably picked up from school, then Jude had it, and now Margo is finally recovering from it. She has sounded pitiful, like an old smoker when she babbles and cries. But she was never miserable, and it didn't interrupt her sleep much at all. What a trooper!

^^ Marigold really interacting with her cousin, Gus, for the first time. He's only 4 months younger than her, and we live 5 minutes down the street from them. They're going to be thick as thieves.

-The boys continue to enjoy having their little sis around. There are certainly moments where they don't enjoy how much of our attention she requires. And there are occasional comments like, "I want to throw her away." Yikes! But more often than not, they love to do things to make her giggle, and hold her, and play on the floor with her, so I'm almost positive they will be theee best of friends, as soon as she stops demanding so much of mommy's attention. ;)

Marigold, Six Months

Marigold is 6 months old!

WEIGHT
18lb 6oz :)

LENGTH
*I don't know emoji*

SLEEP
At about 5.5-months-old, we decided something needed to change. Margo was taking forever to fall asleep for naps and bedtime, needing my full attention to do so; she wasn't napping in the Ergo (or any baby carrier) at all; she barely napped in the car; and she was basically dependent on nursing or rocking to fall asleep every time. The SNOO bassinet was still somewhat working, but she wasn't sleeping longer than 4-6 hours at a time. Nothing like the great stretches of sleep we were getting before the 4-month sleep regression started. So, we pulled the plug on the SNOO, literally, and decided to transition Margo to the crib.

I had purchased a sleep plan for 4-5-month-olds (Little Z's Sleep) a few months back, but had ignored it ever since, as it didn't exactly seem compatible with the SNOO. But when we were ready to ditch the SNOO and a little scared of how it was going to go, we decided the guidance of a sleep program would be v helpful. The new sleep plan would be most successful in a crib, so we were planning on stealing our sole crib from Jude so Margo could use it. But most randomly, a few days before we began our SNOO-less adventure, our friends (who have 6 kids) reached out and asked if we wanted a free crib, as they were ready to give away many of their duplicate baby/kid items. Perfect timing! We snatched the free crib, put our new organic crib mattress inside (I had bought one a few weeks earlier, anticipating that Margo would need a new mattress, as our old crib mattress had gotten saggy from toddler sleep/jumping), and haven't looked back since.

Now that we are on the other side of the 4-5-month sleep program, Margo is an AWESOME sleeper. She take 2-3 naps a day, for a total of 3-ish hours of nap, and she sleeps from around 8pm to 8am overnight, with one feeding in between. She's also learned to put herself to sleep!! So I go through our little sleep routine with her (which cues her brain to start settling for sleepy time), then lay her down in her crib, turn off the lights, turn the sound machine on, say, "night night," walk out of the room, and she's asleep within 5-10 minutes, with minimal to no fussing! Bedtime isn't always that easy, especially if she hasn't had enough wake-time between her last nap and when I'm trying to put her to bed, but even then, it's usually no more than 15-20 minutes of fussing. And I'm popping in to check on her every 10 minutes if the fussing persists.

We've never been fans of CIO methods, so this sleep plan seemed to hit the sweet spot of not letting her cry too long on her own, but successfully teaching her to fall asleep on her own. And helping her get the consolidated sleep she (and we) so desperately needed.

Now keep us in your prayers as we barrel toward the 7-month sleep regression. *eep*

FIRSTS THIS MONTH
-Rolling front-to-back.
-Army crawling just the tiniest bit, like an inch.
-Sitting unassisted for several seconds, sometimes up to a minute, before attempting to face plant into the floor.
-Sleeping in a crib.
-Putting herself to sleep.
-Attempting to grab our plates off the table as we eat.
-Sitting in the cart at the grocery store!

NICKNAMES 
Margo, Margs, Meergs, Meer Claire, Margo Moo, Girlfriend, Sis (more like "siiiiiiisss!"), and Sissy

OTHER THINGS TO NOTE
-Girlfriend FINALLY likes the carseat! And her timing could NOT have been better. We took a 12-hour trip (more like 20 hours EACH WAY with all the stops!) to Rhode Island right as she was turning 6 months old and she did so well! Sure, there was some crying, especially when we were getting toward the end of 2-3 hour stretches in the car, but it really wasn't bad at all. What a big girl!

-Refer to first picture for Marigold's newest favorite trick: sticking her tongue out!

-We were a little scared for 0.2 seconds that Margo had a milk protein allergy just like her big brother, Jude. Let's just say her diapers were a little . . . blood-streaked. Yikes! But I got in touch with our lactation consultant and she suspected that it was bleeding from a fissure or something like that, since she didn't have any other symptoms. So we switched to an easier-to-wipe-off diaper ointment, aka A&D, and we haven't had an issue since.

-Margo has been upgraded to her own sleeping space: our closet! We do have another bedroom just for her, but it's down the hall from us. For now, we prefer to continue keeping her close by while she sleeps.

-Our favorite new Margo skill is that she can sit in her highchair while we eat now! Which means we can eat hands free! So long as she's in the mood to tolerate such thing. :P

-All of a sudden, Marigold LOVES books! She loves when you sit and read to her and she especially loves if she can get the corner of the book in her mouth. One could say she's really devouring books these days. Yuk yuk yuk yuk yuk.

-Milestone unlocked: TRIPLE SIBLING BATH!

-She's always been great about letting me put her down for self-play, but this month, we've seen her enjoy it even more. Probably helps that she's getting the hang of this rolling thing AND she can inch forward the teeeniest bit AND she's really into all the toys. Now please excuse me while I go re-baby-proof the whole house, k bye.

Marigold, Five Months

Marigold is 5 months old!

WEIGHT

17 lb 4 oz the day she turned 5 months old. That's the 88th percentile! Yes, I'm proud of every last ounce.

LENGTH

One day I will measure this and actually have this stat. But she's def long.

SLEEP
The TLDR version is I cannot predict this girl's sleep.

Naps are consistently getting longer, and we even had several days in a row where she reliably took 2 solid hour+ long naps. But then there are days where she just takes 30-minute naps all day long and it's crazy making. Those dinky-nap days seem to be happening less often, so let's hope she trending toward 2 solid naps a day, plus a catnap around dinner time. Because that seems to be more normal for a 5-month-old.

Nighttime sleep is usually one wake-up, sometimes no wake-ups, sometimes several wake-ups. No rhyme or reason to it as far as I can tell. And getting her to sleep for bedtime is quite the marathon. At least an hour of snuggles and nursing. If I try to put her down earlier than that, she just screams until I pick her up and start over so it's not worth it.

And the SNOO has lost it's magic because *I think* she's outgrown the need for the rocking motion to help her sleep. It will still occasionally rock her back to sleep, but more often then not, the escalating sound and motion just upsets her when it's supposed to be calming her. I've even turned the motion off altogether a few times and that actually helps her get back to sleep better. Safe to say, I think she's ready to transition out of it. Now we just have to transition Jude out of the crib to free that up for Marigold. Wish us luck!

FIRSTS THIS MONTH
-Blowing raspberries.
-Holding items and bringing them up to her mouth on her own.
-All the drooling and vinegary poops because teething (no teeth to show for it yet, though)
-Really getting her full chest off the ground during tummy time.
-Moving around more on the floor; wiggling around until she's facing a different direction.
-Rolling from belly to back just a few more times. Not the other direction though because she doesn't like being on her tummy much so why try?

NICKNAMES
Margo, Margs, Meergs, Margo-rita, The Silly Girl

OTHER THINGS TO NOTE
-Marigold does not like her carseat. This has been true since day 1, but it was officially proven true when I needed to take all three kids on a 1-hour round trip to a neighboring town on my own, and instead of napping in the car (because she was exhausted) she screamed/cried the whole ride, both ways. Hopefully she learns to love it over the next month (wishful thinking?) because we're going on a very long ride up to Rhode Island to visit my family at the end of September. Pray for us.

-I'm enjoying that she can stay up a little longer between naps, about 2 hours now. It's fun to have more awake time with our baby girl. We can actually get out of the house every once in a while! ;)

-Margs got a double ear infection this past month. It was pitiful! And can you believe it, it was the first ear infection we've ever had in our house! She had to take 2 weeks of amoxicillin, and the whole time I was drooling reminiscing about the delicious bubble gum flavor. Such a blast from the past! Meanwhile, Margo was not interested in it at all. She got REALLY good at spitting it out, no matter where I dropped it into her mouth. So then I would push it back in and she would spit a little more out and repeat repeat repeat until she at least got some of it. Thankfully, her ears are back to normal now. Here's hoping it was a one-time thing!

-My postpartum anxiety is still a thing. It's definitely better now that I'm on oral progesterone, but it's not gone and my worst time of day is the afternoon, no doubt. By the time lunch hits and for a few hours after, I'm at a low point. It's weird that it's so predictable, but I guess that's hormones for you! My friend, Emily, recommended a self-help book for anxiety, so I'm going to give that a go once the audio version is available from my library. The good news is that the oral progesterone has not affected my milk supply, so at least that's going well. :)

-Marigold is still getting nightly baths, which is new for us because we have always been once-a-week kid bathers in the past. But ever since she had some pretty gnarly acne at 2 months old that would not go away, and her ped recommended nightly bathing to get all the ickies off her skin, things have really cleared up. So she gets a luxurious nightly bath and she loves it! Even if she's cranky because she's overtired, she'll still calm down once she's in the water and enjoy herself while the bath lasts. One night I used her old soap (Honest Co soap, which is what we were using when she had her bad acne, so we switched to unscented Dove hoping it would help, and it did), and she broke out again the next day! Wow! Maybe it was a coincidence, but I don't think so. I went right back to using Dove and the acne cleared up within a few days. And I thought Honest Co. was supposed to be stripped down and "safe!" Suffice to say, this little lady has sensitive skin! 

-Speaking of her sensitive skin, she's also way more prone to diaper rash than my boys were. If we skip the diaper cream for just one diaper change, she will have a red, turning-rashy bummy by the next diaper change. It's wild! So she gets diaper cream lathered on like cream cheese at every change. And while I've always liked Boudreaux's Butt Paste, I've found that Triple Paste works way better for her hyper-sensitive skin. Clears it up and keeps it rash free all day every day. Now you know.

^^Queen Margo says, "I am merely putting up with these kisses."

-At 5 months old, Marigold is transitioning out of 3-6 month-old clothes! I just pulled out all the 6-9 month clothes that I borrowed from my SIL (we were able to swap baby clothes since we each just had a baby of the opposite gender as our first(s)!). And it's always bittersweet to pull out a new, larger wardrobe. Sad because you're putting way all these clothes that you've come to know and love, that have defined her style of the past few months. Happy because it's a sign that she's growing and thriving and it's fun to play dress up with new outfits!

-Our knuckles are her favorite chew toy. She must be working hard on teeth because all she wants to do is gnaw on our fingers! It's hilarious to watch her ATTACK them. She will lean her whole body forward with mouth wide open if she thinks she has a chance of latching on to your finger.

-Margo loves it when we sing her her. Her face lights up! I hope she always loves it, though I'm pretty sure all kids go through a, "NO! DON'T SING, MOM!" phase. Jude is in it right now. So while I'm singing to Marigold, he's demanding that I not sing, and John Paul is singing along. Yes, we are a circus.

-Marigold has her own emoji, as determined by my husband: 🐣.