Anya is not going to the pediatrician this month – our next appointment will be when she is 6 months old – so I can’t report on her exact weight or length just yet. I’d estimate she is over 17 lbs, based on weighing the two of us together and then subtracting my weight from the total. However, our scale rounds to the nearest 1/2 lb, so it’s hard to be precise. She’s definitely longer, since most of her 3-6 months pants are now too short and we had to raise her jumper to the next height.
This has been an exciting month for Anya in terms of development. Aside from learning how to roll from her tummy to her back, she’s also gotten good at sitting by herself for short periods (15-20 seconds max). She’s close to rolling from back to tummy, but right now she gets very distracted by her feet, which she loves to grab – and has even managed to get them in her mouth a few times. Speaking of grabbing, we can really see Anya reaching for things with intention and starting to explore different things to do with them once she gets them. She goes for toys, Lex’s hands, my face, and even Charlie (our dog – but he runs away when she gets too close). Mostly she still puts things directly into her mouth, but we also see her shaking, dropping, and studying things. She also loves to bang on the computer keyboard.
Anya has been experimenting with what her voice can do, specifically when it comes to volume. There are some evenings when she is as happy as can be but yells over and over again. We think she likes the way it sounds. She’s mainly babbling vowel sounds still, though we get a consonant here and there.
Sleeping remains a tough situation. She’s gotten much better at falling and staying asleep without being swaddled. In fact, we don’t swaddle her for naps, and we only swaddle her with one arm in at night. We still need to hold her arms down some of the time or she yanks to pacifier out and then cries, but she’s really not startling herself awake anymore, and when she does, it doesn’t upset her quite so much. The real challenge now is getting Anya to sleep through the night. I’ve been trying to teach her that she doesn’t need to eat by doing everything other than pick her up and feed her when she wakes up. We’re aiming to get her to go from 11 to 6:30 without eating, but most of the time she can only go 6 hours maximum. Sometimes I mess it up, especially when I’m very tired, and I feed her when she wakes up at 2 or 3 because I’m too sleepy to remember not to feed her. Lex is confident that once we move her to the crib at night (which will now happen at 6 months, because of Lex’s upcoming trip to Los Angeles and then our family trip to Tucson in April), she will learn to sleep better. I hope so!
The only other thing to report is that we’re starting to see some stranger/separation anxiety rear its head. When I say stranger, I mean anyone who isn’t me or Lex. Anya needs time to warm up when someone else comes to see her before being handed over or she cries, and if someone other than Mommy or Daddy holds her, she will check every few minutes to make sure we’re still there. This is totally normal, of course, but it’s hard on some of her loving relatives – especially her Grandma Esther. Don’t worry, Grandma – Anya still loves you.
Check out Anya and her bear at 5 months:
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