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Babby is four months old today!

Babby enters 2011!

He had his appointment with the pediatrician on Wednesday, the day he turned 17 weeks old.

Good news – his weight gain this month was fine. He’s now 6 kilograms, and seems to be holding steady just under the 15th percentile. The pediatrician was happy and says that Babby may have been “finding his own size” and will probably maintain this place in the percentiles. That’s fine with me. It was dropping from 85th to 15th that I didn’t like.

For the most part, parenting Babby is easier than it used to be. He no longer stays awake for 8 hour stretches,

He gets bored quickly though, so I have to walk him around the house a lot, showing him a bookshelf and letting him run his hands along the books, then showing him a curtain and letting him finger the curtain, and so on ad nauseum.  I trawled Craigslist and am sending Perfect Husband on a pick-up errand to get a Jolly Jumper for ten bucks after work today. I’m not thoroughly convinced that it won’t shatter my baby’s legs, but dangit, I need new ways to amuse this kid.

He does like his tummy time mat if I prop him on a pillow so he can’t flip himself over immediately. He likes to grab the toys I place in front of them with both hands, and then he opens his mouth wiiiiiiiiide like a monster from a Japanese action flick, and brings the toy to his mouth where he bites down on it viciously.

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…Unfortunately, it is so exciting that his delighted squeals and aggressive toy-eating quickly devolve into over stimulated screeching. He looks both delighted and angry all at once and I have to come rescue him before his rage gets the upper hand.

Babby’s evening sleeping patterns have fallen apart recently. He has been waking almost hourly some nights. You hear a lot about the “4 month sleep regression”, and I don’t know if this is it, or if the  problem is a result of the fact that Babby has been fighting off my cold. He had a fever last week, which is around the time that the sleep fell apart. But then it went away and it seemed fine, except for his waking up screaming every hour all night long. Now he is starting to sniffle and cough, and yet his sleep was BETTER last night.

I have no idea what’s going on.

I mean, he has reflux, AND he is fighting off a cold AND he’s been chewing on his hands and drooling for weeks now, so we think he’s starting to teethe. He could be all kinds of uncomfortable. So how do you know what causes any particular unexpected wake-up?

I’m very, very tired, since I’m getting over this cold myself. Also, the day Babby suddenly started snuffling was the day my sore throat came back with a vengeance.

(As a side note, being unable to succumb to the cold medications and just CRASH is a new form of torture. Being kept up repeatedly in the night when your body wants to sleep and heal itself is decidedly un-fun. Poor Perfect Husband came down with the cold too, but since Babby doesn’t need his father’s boobas to eat, PH had the luxury of collapsing into a ten hour sleep of the dead while I glared malevolently at his recumbent form, consumed by jealousy. He made up for it the next day by contritely taking Babby downstairs and giving him a bottle of pumped milk while I caught a couple more hours’ sleep.)

Anyway, I am getting rid of Babby’s cold once and for all.

…This morning, I put breast milk up his nose.