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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Well, not really, but in the last few weeks Anya has become aware that her feet are there and that they seem pretty neat. When we had been holding her so that she could sit up, if she noticed her feet she would bend herself in half to try to put them in her mouth. Also, during diaper changes, she’d often try to grab her toes (when she wasn’t flailing her legs, shaking her tush, or making the process otherwise difficult ;)). However, in the last few days Anya finally figured out how to grab them on her own while playing on the floor:

Check out more photos from March!

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Lex and I have been having Anya’s picture taken once a month at JC Penney. They have the best deal of all of the picture studios – 37 pictures of one pose with no sitting fee for $7.99, plus we get an additional $3 off for taking their online survey. As long as we have enough willpower not to buy any other poses, it’s very inexpensive and a lot of fun – plus we’ll have great pictures to document Anya’s first year. The first two times it wasn’t that hard to choose which pose, since Anya wasn’t too cooperative at the photo sessions, but at her 4 months pictures she was as happy as can be, and though we debated for a long time, we finally chose this one:

That’s our cutie! She’s so cute, in fact, that when we were at Babies’R’Us on Friday, one of the photographers from their portrait studio asked if she could take pictures of Anya for her licensing portfolio in exchange for a free 8×10.

Clearly she’s a cutie – her shirt says so. Speaking of Babies’R’Us, we were there to buy, among other things, some new clothes for Anya since she’s still so big. She’s not even 5 months yet, and she’s already transitioning to size 3 diapers and 6-9 month clothes (except in Gerber onesies – in those, she’s wearing a 12 month size!). Big AND beautiful – that’s our Anya.

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Can you believe the video of my beautiful Anya rolling over? She’s getting so big and strong! Actually, she’s technically been pretty big and strong since her womb days; she’s just learning new ways to channel it…

Diaper changes, for example, have become a real challenge in the last few weeks. Anya is really proud of her ability to be a “squirmy wormy,” as we affectionately call it, and she loves to showcase it most when her mom and dad want nothing more than to get her cleaned and covered up as fast as possible. With me in particular, she has a real penchant for twisting her bottom every which way when I am trying to put on the diaper rash cream – I call this the Desitin dance. My hands are pretty small, so to make matters worse, she often manages to wiggle one or both of her feet out of my grasp while I’m trying to hold them. She smiles and coos during this whole process, of course. With Lex, she likes to grab at his hands and pull her legs up to her chest. We both have had to find various ways of holding her down to complete the diapering without having a poop or pee fiasco.

Speaking of holding her down, putting Anya to bed has become a wrestling match since we stopped fully swaddling her. She’s now being swaddled with one arm out, and though this has thankfully made a big difference in how long she will stay asleep (as compared to when we tried to quit swaddling her cold turkey), she still has a hard time contending with that free arm. I give her the pacifier, she promptly brings her hand up to her mouth and inadvertently knocks it out, cries because she doesn’t have it any more, and then we start over. Most of the time, I end up having to pin her arm down next to her until she calms enough to fall asleep, and then the arm relaxes. I realize I’m basically swaddling her with my hand instead of the blanket, but once she falls asleep she’s not startling herself awake as much anymore, so there’s definitely been an improvement.

Nursing is no cake walk anymore, either. Since she learned how to get those hands in her mouth, she’s adopted an attitude of “the more [in my mouth], the merrier.” I spend much of our sessions prying one or both of her hands out of her mouth while she is latched onto my breast. As with diaper changes and bedtime, I often find it necessary to pin her arms down, at least temporarily, or we both get very messy. She also has become very distractable when nursing and will crane her head around in every direction to check out what’s going on in the room. This is all well and good, except when she’s clamped onto my nipple and doesn’t let go as she tries to see what’s going on behind her. Since I’m not Gumby, I would prefer very much that she not do this. I’m rather attached to my nipples and feel it’s better if they stay attached to me.

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