Claire Bear at 4 months

Sleep!  Oh, how we miss it and boy are we working on it!  The girl has made some great progress in self soothing but we are still working our plan for night time sleep.  Claire takes about 4 naps a day right now.  An hour plus for her first, then a quick cat nap, a longer afternoon nap and then another evening cat nap.  We had been struggling getting her to sleep and were joking that she needed to be put in a sleeper hold to get to sleep.  We were walking her, bouncing, clutching her to our chests trying to get her to soothe when we knew she was ready for a nap.  She was doing all she could to fling herself backwards out of our arms.  It was getting ridiculous.  The girl was just ready to self soothe and we weren't ready to hear her cry.  So, now here we are almost 2 weeks later and she is really doing well and my back is so much happier.  It takes her anywhere between 5-12 minutes of crying to get to sleep.  She is unswaddled and on her back but we still wrap a blanket around her torso and legs.  She is plus/minus on using the paci.  Sometimes it seems to help, other times it seems to just make her mad.

So, her night time sleep...sweet girl usually wakes up at least twice, sometimes 3 times these days.  Pays has been awesome about going in if she wakes up before 5:00am and trying to get her back to sleep.  He is successful the majority of the time but it can take up to 20 minutes.  Now that she is self soothing we are hoping that she will get better at putting herself back to sleep.  I usually feed her about 10:30pm so if she could sleep until about 5:00am, feed and then go back to sleep until about 7:00am, life would be just about PERFECT.

Claire is eating well and is growing.  At her last well child exam she was almost 14 pounds and is 50% for weight, 75% for length and 10% for head circumference.  Such a funny proportioned little body!  She does well bottle feeding for Pays while I am at work and every once and a while will refuse to breast feed when we are both around and she is very hungry.  I can usually trick her back onto the breast by letting her bottle feed for a few seconds and then transitioning her over to me.  Little booger!  We have tried rice cereal a few times but she doesn't seem to be interested quite yet.

She is enjoying being more upright in the exersaucer and in swings.  She loves to travel in the Bjorn and will start kicking her legs when she sees one of us putting it on.  She does like being on her back on play mats and prefers to not have pants on so that she can hold her feet.  Her feet are a new fascination for her.  Her hand control continues to improve and I need to remember to have baby toys with me now when we are on the go.  She has not rolled from her back to her front yet but it is probably coming soon.  She can curl the upper part of her torso up into a little C shape when she is straining to look at something.

Claire LOVES her Poppy and her face breaks out into a hug grin when he looks at her.  Then she will bury her face in my neck for a few seconds and then immediately look back up to see where he is.  She is such a sweet, smily girl.  She can melt your heart with a big, gummy grin.

This is a sweet video that Pays took of Claire fascinated by her feet.  I love that you can hear her sweet baby noises and see her current Harry Potter scrape on her forehead (courtesy of her older brother who accidentally dropped an ornament on her).  The angry typing in the background is me work on my charts at home, blech!