Emery Tracker: Month Four

The Story
On July 6th our little munchkin hit the 4 month mark.  If you're thinking to yourself, how on EARTH is it possible she is 33.3333333% of the way to being one year old?!  Join the party! 

As you likely recall from my last post, or perhaps are aware if you've seen how disheveled I appear after any voyage longer than 20 minutes, the biggest remaining challenge with Miss Emery is car rides.  That continues to be the case.  After all, letting us win everything wouldn't be any fun, would it?  This month we've started forcing her to letting her hold a toy.  This distracts her about 10 minutes depending on her mood.  I've also tried a CD of all the songs they play all day long at school for her.  This has a fairly good success rate.  Plus as a bonus I sing the songs to Ryan which he LOVES!  (When ducks wake up in the mooorning, they always say good day.  When ducks wake up in the morning, they always say good day.  Quack quack quack quack, quack quack quack quack- that is what they say.)

Do you mind?  I'm trying to get a few sit ups in before dinner.  Thanks.

So yeah- the mom mobile still sounds like a haunted house full of teen girls about 90 percent of the time.  I always think to myself... I may be speeding but I feel very confident that the cop would only make it half way to my car before hearing the piercing screams and running the other direction. Or maybe I'd just ask them to cuff me and call her father.  

Poor napping actually continues to rear it's ugly head as well.  Sweet pea will fall asleep in your arms or on your chest but the second you try to put her down anywhere, she's back in the game.  She's usually not too happy about it either.  College Emery really is going to wonder why on Earth she'd ever have turned down a nap.

These pictures got taken at my parents house when family was in town, so my guess is that Ava or Tripp is making her laugh.

Other than that, life really is pretty grand.  She fusses infinitely less than she did those first 2 3/4ths months of life.  It's hard to believe she's the same baby sometimes.  Don't mistake that to mean now she's an easy baby.  Bless her little type A gened heart... she's still a diva.  It's just that now we usually know what it is she wants or needs and she'll usually settle down when we provide it.  I hate to say it but I think she inherited her mother's lack of patience when it comes to knowing what she wants and having to wait for it.

This month her little personality is really starting to shine through.  She seems so much like Ryan to me.  She will smile and be sociable with people she knows or in small groups but generally around a lot of people she would rather just sit and watch quietly.  Most of the time when she has long conversations its with Ryan or I when no one else is around to witness it.  If we try to get her to talk in a crowd she has to be in the right mood and it's generally not with near the same gusto as when she's by herself. 

Never too young to practice your flamingo-ing.  I hear it's the next owl-ing.

She continues to be incredibly skeptical of new things.  The moment something new is put in front of her face or she experiences something she hasn't before she furrows her brows.  It makes me laugh.   This month we've seen her exhibit some signs of stranger anxiety a few different times.  She's also in the very beginning stages of burying her head when she's being shy.  Most of the time she likes to know where Ryan or I are in a room too and will look around for us.

Emery is starting to really seem to like the water.  She kicks around and squeals in the bath tub during all her baths.  Suuuuuch a stark difference from the first 2 months worth of baths when I kept waiting for a cop to knock on our door after a call from our neighbors.  She also got to "swim" (read: get carried around by her Mama) a lot in the pool over the week of the 4th when my Indiana family was in town (post coming soon).  She liked the water so much that she fell asleep in a little float that we held her in a couple of times.

Hey... maybe if I look away they'll stop...

Oh, she's also really started to show an interest in toys.  If you talked to me, or listened to Ryan tease me, for the first few months you might remember that I was really worried that she didn't seem to care about toys.  Now she is all about them and has become coordinated enough to pick something soft up off of a table or the floor.

Overall it's just been an incredibly fun month and everyone tells me from here on out it only gets better.  I'm incredibly addicted to our sweet girl.  I look forward to rushing home or to school to get to see her every day... just can't enough of my little boogie!

...Negatory.

The School Stuff
I really need to remember to start writing the conversations I have at school down because I know that I'm forgetting some from the past month!

Emery seems to have become pretty good "friends" with one of the little girls in her class.  Her teacher said that they always fall asleep and wake up at the same time.  They also apparently stare at and talk to eachother.  So stinking cute.  Never too soon to find yourself some quality BFFs.

Still working on the fist pumping technique.

Another morning I mentioned that Emery had rolled over from back to belly (she actually did this 4 days after her 4 month birthday, so I'm cheating) and her teacher said, "oh yeah- she's been doing that a while."  :c(  At least I didn't know and got to feel like I saw it for the first time myself.  She also told me that the boogs moves around a lot and that Ryan & I might be in for it pretty soon.  Awesome.

She missed the whole week of 4th of July at school and her teachers seemed so genuinely happy to have her back when she returned on Monday that it melted my heart.  I feel very fortunate to have found a place where she is so loved when we can't be with her.

Pointing out her due date to me.  Soooo clever.

The Stats

• Height:  25.75" inches (95th percentile)
• Weight: 14 lbs 3.75 oz (50th percentile)
• Head:  16.25" (68th percentile)
• Diaper size: 2
• Clothes: 3-6 months.  Although some of her jammies are getting a liiiiiittle snug.
• Feeding:  She still eats pretty much every 3 hours, give or take 30 minutes.  She has either 3 or 4 four and a half or five oz bottles at school.  About 3 1/2 months we got the dreaded, "I think you need to start putting more in her bottles," note from school.  Le sigh.
• Firsts: 
• First time batting at toys (June 10th)
• First time to hold a toy (June 14th)
• First artistic masterpiece (June 18th)
• First time sleeping so long (until 7 am!!!) Mama panicked (June 21st)
• First trip to Conroe without crying (June 28th)
• First time holding her own bottle (July 4th)
• Games:  Still really loves practicing standing.  If we prop her up against the couch or something else soft, she can stand there by herself for about 0.05 seconds.  She also still really loves looking at and studying your face.  She's started to really love to grab things... particularly necklaces and anything sparkly (so my genes are in there after all).  She has a taggie zebra from Aunt Courtney that is her favorite.
• Songs:  We sing row, row, row your boat and twinkle, twinkle little star a lot while we change her.  I think that might be what they sing to her at school.  Mama also has all 40 songs memorized from her CD from school (thanks trips to and from Conroe!), so at any time one of those is stuck in my head.  We also still make up a lot of songs about changing clothes and diapers.  Daddy is better at it.  He clearly missed his calling as like Raffi #2.
• Foods Dripped on Your Head/Fished out of the Ergo Baby:  The usual suspects- spicy ketchup (Daddy), rice, beer, shish kebab sauce, etc.
• Sleep:  Somehow I just realized this month that will be something I want to be able to look back at when I'm wondering at 3 AM with the next one if I'll ever sleep again.  Let me catch back up on the months I didn't track this.   
• Months 1-2.5: Emery refused to sleep anywhere but on us.  She normally was out for the night sometime between 10 & 1.  This was highly dependent upon how long colic decided to plague all of us on any given night.  There were times we didn't get her to sleep until 2 AM or later.  She mostly would sleep 4-5 hours after the last nightly feeding.  After that she would wake up every 2.5-3 hours on the dot.  She would wake up for the day between 10 & 11:30. Keep in mind these times were because Mama was still on maternity leave and letting Emery make her own hours.
• Months 2.5-3:  Emery finally started sleeping in her pack n play but her sleep routine was pretty sporadic.  She would normally go down for the night about 10:30 (Mama was trying to slowly create a loose, more sustainable schedule for work).  Sometimes she would wake up every 1.5-3 hours and sometimes she would sleep for up to 6 hours.  She typically would be up for the day about 11 hours after she first went to bed.
• Month 4:  For the most part Emery sleeps in her pack n play, but sometimes in the name of sleep Daddy will pick her up in the wee hours to have her sleep on his chest.  She normally gets pretty restless at some point in the early morning.  If you catch it early enough, you can get to her before she actually wakes up.  She usually goes down for the night between 8:30-9:30 until sometime between 3:30 and 4:30.  After that feeding she USUALLY sleeps until 6 when I have to wake her up.  If it's a weekend she will go back to sleep for another 3-5 hours.  Although when we were in Conroe for a week over the 4th she decided she was going to go back to waking up whenever she felt like it.  So we are still working on breaking that bad habit. :c)
• Other Notables:  Emery's hair has started to even out and fill in.  In the last week or so it's started to really look light brown.  We shall see though- she changes daily.

You know I can't resist these!