July 12, 2019

4 Month Old Baby

It’s been 4 months now since I had Bridgette. It feels normal to have a baby now. I’m getting used the title of “Mom.” Before, only my mom was Mom. She’s still Mom, but I am also Mom. We both share Mom.

Routines have been established, and I feel like I’m part of a unofficial parent club because I now get all the memes and jokes about kids.

She’s so big now, it’s hard to believe she came out of me. She seems giagantic compared to before. She continues to be more expressive, both in facial expressions, and attempts to talk. The things she says sound almost like words, but they are still babbling nonesense. She reacts to the things we say, our facial expressions, and just seeing us. Our favorite time is first thing in the morning when she wakes up because she is the absolute happiest to see us, all smiles and pumping arms.

Some fun things Bridgette has been up to:

She learned how to blow raspberries, and spent several days exclusively communicating by blowing raspberries. Angry raspberries are way better than the screaming! Sadly, it was just a phase, and now she’s bad to screaming.
She’s learning to roll over. She flips herself to the side quite a bit, but can’t make it the rest of the way. I’ll give her a little push to go the rest of the way so she can get in her tummy time (important for their development). No crawling yet though, she doesn’t understand how to propel herself.
She grabs her feet now! It’s super cute. She lifts her feet, and just teeters on back.
She constantly wants to sit up. She can’t manage it on her own, but we give her our hands to hold on to, and she pulls herself up. She’s pretty wobbly in the sitting position, but she’s happier teetering than she is laying quietly.
She has so many cute clothes, I don’t think she’s even going to be able to wear it all. (Sidenote: omg I know really kind and generous people.) She outgrew a bunch of things that she never got to wear already. Kind of want to do “Outfit of the Day” with her just to get pictures of all her cute little outfits.
She freezes up when she sees the camera. I’m still shocked she’s able to identify it when I pull it out. But it’s kind of a bummer because she’ll be doing something super cute, and then when she sees the camera, she stops and stares at it.

Now some fun things about me:

My hair is falling out in chunks. I’m finding it everywhere, as though I now own a shedding dog. It clogged up my vacumm cleaner. I started taking vitamins, but I think it’s just going to happen until it’s ready to stop. May have to cut my hair short as its looking pretty thin.
Body is otherwise okay, seems to have fully recovered. C-section scar is fading, and still have stretch marks, but they’re fading. Unclear on internal damage, but nothing hurts anymore.
I still haven’t figured out a gym schedule. I go about every 4 days, and that is just not often enough to see any results. I am still losing baby weight, but it’s any results I’m getting now is just because of the Whole 30 diet. It’s not that I couldn’t go, it’s just not a habit. I need to figure out when it makes sense to get there, as they even have childcare there!

Overall, it’s a fun experience having a baby. There’s ups and downs, but seeing her little happy face is so rewarding. It’s neat figuring out the things that she likes, especially when I wouldn’t have guessed she’d like something. For instance, my husband starting playing “airplane” with her, and surprise, surprise – she likes being up really high in the air, and being held like she’s flying. I would have thought it would scare her, but nope. She’ll indicate she wants more by holding her little arms out.

Comparison between a one month old and now, both in one time use outfits:

To the untrained eye, it looks the same. But, to her mother, who evaluates everything, she’s gained some weight, which is pretty significant because we struggled to get her to gain weight in the early weeks. And other than that – she looks about the same. The lighting makes her look tanner, she isn’t actually. But she is bigger, I promise!

I really like the idea of documenting her growth, so be prepared for further updates, likely around the one month mark. And maybe some Instagram stories about her outfits. Haha.