Jamison at 4 months

Our little dude is changing so much these days!!  He’s getting really big to start with.  At his 4 month appointment he weighed 15lbs6oz and was 24.25” long and his head circ was 16.8”.  (For comparison, Abbie was 13lbs9oz, 25.75” and 16.1” and Ben was 14lb8oz, 25.75” and 17”.)  (Abbie at 4 months   Ben at 4 months)So he’s our heaviest baby at this age, but also the shortest?  I’m not sure I would write their lengths in stone because it seems as though it depends on how much you stretch them out and depends on the person doing it more than anything.  We’ll see what he is at his 6 month appointment.

                   Abbie, Ben and Jamison at 4 months

Jamison smiles a lot now.  He’s usually a pretty happy baby, as long as he’s being held.  My babies just like to be held, which wouldn’t be too much of an issue if I had all the time in the day to hold them, but I don’t.  It is hard to renovate this house and try to keep it somewhat clean when I have a baby that wants to be held all the time.  I just keep reminding myself that these days are short lived.

 

I was fully planning on waiting to introduce Jamison to solids until closer to 6 months, but he is VERY interested in food.  He watches us with rapt attention when we are eating and if we put him in his high chair while we are eating and don’t feed him anything, he gets pretty pissy.  We started out with a little bit of baby oatmeal.  The first time we fed him a real food (sweet potatoes), we put the bite in his mouth and he paused and then his eyes got really big and he wanted more.  I wish we had gotten it on video.  He grabs at the spoon and does baby crunches every time you give him a bite.  (Brings his knees up to his chest and then tries to grab your hand with him hands to keep the spoon in his mouth.)  We’ve never had a baby show this much interest in food so it’s been fun.  I try to only feed him some every other day and I try to only do a half of a jar of baby food at a time, but sometimes he’s not having it and then I make him an ounce or two of formula for oatmeal too.  He’s our little piglet.  I would like to start making his baby food myself (in all my spare time…) but we’ll see. I have a lot on my plate right now.

 

Sleep is always an issue with my babies.  I’m just not blessed with babies that like to sleep a ton, which I am slowly coming to terms with.  At least I’m blessed with beautiful, healthy babies.  Jamison was sleeping HORRIBLY for a while – getting up every hour or so, but the past few nights he’s slept from about 9pm to 5am in his own bed.  Occasionally he’ll wake up and I give him his paci but he’s doing really well.  For a little while he was waking up between 6:30am and 7am and he’d be up for the day, which was a bit rough, but now I can bring him to bed with me and nurse him and he’ll sleep until 8am when we have to get up to get the big kids to school.  I just started giving him a few Hyland’s Teething Tablets before bed and I don’t know if it’s just a coincidence or what, but I’m about ready to by stock in that company.

 

Jamison is still not a huge fan of his car seat, but he’s happier in it when he can see the big kids.  He likes the carriers more now and he loves to chew on anything he can get in his mouth.  He’s still a huge fan of his baths if the water is warm enough.  I need to do more tummy time with him, but he’s getting really close to rolling back to front.  He’s noticing the dogs more and more and seems to be taking in his surrounds more.  He loves it when the big kids talk to him and they are both so good with him.  He does little giggles sometimes, which are adorable, but we haven’t heard a big laugh out of him yet.  He’s really close though!

The scariest thing that happened this month was when I was looking at countertop samples.  I was standing by a rack with the tiles of quartz samples on it and had Jamison on the front of me in the mei tai.  One of the 4x8’ quartz samples fell off the top rack and somehow hit J in the head.  He SCREAMED bloody murder and I felt terrible and worried about him for the next day.  I kept checking to make sure his pupils were still reactive and that he didn’t show any signs of head injury.  He never did and he never even got a bump, but it scared the crap out of me.  Thank God nothing worse happened.

We love our little chunk!

Ostrich farm visit

There is an ostrich farm about 15 minutes from our house so we decided to go check it out in July.  We got a little tour of the area and tried to feed the birds, although they weren’t hungry so they wouldn’t even come near us.  Apparently they are incredibly dumb birds and have a memory that lasts like 30 seconds or something.  But they also usually mate for life, so I’m not sure how that works if they can’t remember something one minute to the next but can remember who their mate is.  ??

   

In the valley

This move has been really tough for me.  Usually I’m excited to move and explore new places and meet new people, and I was this move too.  But this base operates very differently from any other base we’ve been to.  So far I haven’t seen any sort of squadron function except for one afternoon bbq we couldn’t attend.  I haven’t been contacted by any wives and I’m not sure there even is a wives group here, and it wouldn’t really matter anyway since we live 45 mins from base.

I feel really alone here.  Mark is busy with work and is usually gone from 6:45am or before until after 5pm.  Things haven’t changed much for him because he’s just doing a different job but still has adult interaction and the automatic system of friends with the guys he works with and sees every day.  Meanwhile, I’m at home with the kids and dogs in a house that’s an absolute disaster.  This house has pretty much no storage so I don’t know where to put things to get them out of sight.  I just shuffle boxes around and sweep the floor so it’s somewhat presentable.  The kids managed to scratch the new wood floors we put in less than 24 hrs after we took the cardboard off of them.

Mark gets home from work in the middle of the dinner hour chaos and then it’s trying to get the kids fed and bathed and to bed and then Mark wants to just veg for a while, which I don’t blame him since he gets up early and has been working all day.  I just give him his space to do whatever he wants and then we go to bed and start it all over again the next day.  My one job now is to be a mom and I feel like I fail miserably at that most days.  I have no patience with the kids who are constantly making bigger messes than we already have in the house or breaking/ruining things.  I want to be a fun mom who does fun projects with my kids and I find myself just shoeing them away most of the time or telling them to be quiet because the baby is sleeping and there’s no door on his room that’s right in the middle of the house.

I’ve asked my mom to come out and help with the kids and unpacking/organizing, but she said her garden will die if she leaves and doesn’t water it and “It’s not like they sit around doing nothing”.  Mark’s parents were just here because he wouldn’t tell them to wait to come out until after we were moved in like I asked him to do way more than once.  I remember when I was pregnant with Abbie, both my mom and Mark’s mom came out to help us get unpacked and organized.  And now that I have 3 kids and 3 dogs, neither one is available.  I feel like it’s pretty much on me to get the house organized except I don’t really even know how to do that since we’re lacking so much storage.  And the list of things we want to do to the house just keeps getting longer by the day so I see all of our weekends from now until about December being consumed with trying to get this house done.

Hopefully things will be better when Abbie starts school tomorrow.  She is so excited.  I asked Mark last week to get tomorrow morning off so he could be there for her first day, more so to support me than anything else, but they scheduled him to fly and he thinks flying is more important so I’ll fight holding back my tears while dropping her off myself.  I’ve been doing that a lot lately anyway so I guess tomorrow won’t be much different.

Jamison at 3 months

 

Jamison has been a pretty fun and easy baby for the most part.  He’s usually pretty relaxed, unless he’s over tired and then he gets cranky sometimes.  But he’s full of smiles a lot and talks up a storm when you talk to him.  It’s fun.

 

Sorry for the picture dump.

 

 

I think he weighs around 15lbs based on our home scale, and he’s around 25 inches long.  He’s got really chunky baby thighs that I just love to squeeze.  We just moved him up to 3-6 month clothes and size 2 diapers.  He nurses quite a bit and then we feed him a 5 oz bottle of formula before he goes to bed.

His sleep is still throwing me for a loop.  He’s typically down for the “night” at 9pm.  Sometimes he’ll sleep until 1am, or sometimes he’s up at 11pm and 1am and then 3am and 5am.  Very rarely he sleeps until 3am.  I try to get him back to sleep in his sleeper next to my bed, but he cries constantly and wakes Mark up so I usually end up just bringing him to bed with me.  Occasionally that works, but my neck, back and shoulders are really, really sore from trying to stay in the same position all night.  If I relax at all, my boob comes out of his mouth and then he cries.  It’s been tough.  Typically right as I’m falling asleep, he’s waking up.  So needless to say, I haven’t had a good nights sleep in quite a while.  And I also sleep with my glasses on because I’m blind as a bat without them and usually so out of it, it would take me twice as long to find my glasses to see him so I could give him his paci.  I’m really looking forward to a good nights sleep one of these months.

Jamison is usually up for the day around 8am.  He takes a little hour or so nap around 11am and then his really good nap is from 1-4ish, although that’s going to change because we’re going to have to pick Abbie up from school at 3:15pm starting tomorrow.  Then he’ll take another small nap around 5 or 6 for an hour or so.

He’s just starting to laugh and has discovered his hands.  I was worried because he wasn’t really grabbing at things right at 3 months but now at 3.5 months, he swipes at things all the time and brings his hands together in front of him, and tries to put things in his mouth.  He hangs on to bottles when you feed him.  He’s getting a lot better in the car seat and is usually happier during the day now when you’re not holding him.  Before you had to hold him all the time for him to be happy, but now you can set him somewhere and he’s okay for a little bit.  I still don’t do much tummy time with him but sometimes he’ll be okay for 10-15 mins on his play mat.  He has pretty good head control when he’s sitting up and he loves to face out and look around.  He’s very happy on stroller rides usually and sometimes likes to be worn but I think he gets hot in the carriers I have.

I finally got most of his cradle cap to go away but combing it during a bath.  He LOVES bathes.  And I think he might have my brown eyes.  Verdict is still out on that.