Holly is Seven Months Old Today!

And she’s my darling girl, even though she is not sleeping through the night!

I realized the other day that while Holly’s newborn days were much easier than Emrick’s (much, much, much easier) that at this point — at seven months — Emrick was the easier baby. I know comparing them is useless, but it’s just where my brain naturally goes. She has almost always woken up at least twice a night to feed, but a few weeks ago she started waking up a lot more often than that. Her weight is fine, so I know that some of those feedings are just “comfort nursing,” as they call it. In other words, she’s not hungry, but when her body naturally wakes she wants Mama to nurse her back to sleep rather than getting back to sleep on her own. Emrick took milk (and later, formula) from a bottle, and so never became accustomed to falling asleep across a soft pillow on my lap. Holly, on the other hand, depends on it. That situation used to be fine by me, but lately she wakes up not even to be fed, but just to be rocked back to sleep on that pillow. And hey, even THAT would be fine with me, if it bought five or so hours of sleep at a time. But lately? It buys 45 minutes. So something has to change, and that’s what I’m working on this week.

Otherwise, though, Holly is doing great! She’s starting to make consonant-vowel combinations, and as I said in the last post, she can pull herself to standing now. Marcus lowered her crib mattress the other night to allow for this new development, which is a good thing, since it took her only about 24 hours to apply her new standing skills to the crib. I have little doubt at this point that she will be an early walker.

A co-worker of Marcus’s recently gave us a bin full of clothes that his two little girls had outgrown, and that tutu-reminiscent skirt was in the mix. I didn’t necessarily have feelings one way or the other on whether or not I was the type of mom who enjoys dressing her baby girl in a frilly skirt, but as it turns out, I am TOTALLY the type of mom who enjoys dressing her baby girl in a frilly skirt. I mean, look at that picture. How could I NOT be?