Wow, where does the time go? I was planning on doing these updates far more frequently, but alas, life took over and i've just been enjoying savoring every moment of my maternity leave with Mila.
Catch up
The last 5 months have been everything; exciting, hard, emotional, tiring - I could go on. We got 3 months in and Joe & I were (foolishly) thinking that this parenting thing isn't too hard, we've got it together. We had been blessed with a pretty good sleeper, generally sleeping from 11-5am with a quick feed at 5am and then waking up at 8am from around 4 weeks old, she breastfed like a dream and I guess the only thing that I used to find challenging was getting her down for a nap as she hit the 6 week milestone. Queue the 8 week immunisations to come in and ruin EVERYTHING. Mila actually ended up having her first jabs at 12 weeks and boy oh boy were they a game changer for us. Sleep was pretty much out of the window, she started waking up more in the night which to be honest I felt like I could deal with, especially after feeling like we had got lucky in the first 3 months. For me the hardest thing was that she suddenly started rejecting the breast. Everytime I would try and feed her she would kick,fuss and generally just get worked up and fustrated to the point that I was so worried that she wasn't getting enough milk. I'm planning on doing a proper post about my breastfeeding journey so I will go into more depth there, but it was a hard time and lasted for about 10 days, at which point she was finally breastfeeding well again. I've learnt that there are always these little things that crop up and I always try to remember that i'm sure it won't be forever, and like with everything she'll change again.
I've also left Mila for the first time in the last couple of months, twice with Joe and twice where we left her with grandparents to enjoy time away with our friends. I absolutely adore spending time with Mila, but it was so good to have a break and actually be able to miss her, I think it's so important as parents to have that break because I think it makes you appreciate them more and it's definitely helped me take steps to getting back to myself.
So I think that's a good roundup of what's happened over the last 5 months, onto the update!
Sleep
After a couple of months of the sleep being a bit up and down we are finally getting to a place where Mila is starting to sleep more again at night. For the past 2 months she's been waking up twice in the night. She was going to bed at 8pm then waking at 2am & 5am for a feed. So we've now made her bedtime earlier, she's generally asleep by 7.30pm every night, waking at around 10.30pm/11pm for a feed and then she'll usually have a night feed at around 3/4am and then wake up for the day between 6.30am - 7am (bar the last couple of days where she's decided that 5.30am is her new time).
Nap wise she is usually pretty good unless we're on a really busy day when she sometimes struggles to get a long sleep in. She generally has an 1 hour and half in the morning, 2 hours in the afternoon and a 30 min cat nap late afternoon. We tend to try and get her to have all her naps by 4.30pm in the afternoon so that she is ready for her 7pm bedtime. So sleep wise I feel like we are slowly getting into a routine again which I love as it means I can plan a bit more.
Feeding
Our feeding journey is something that I want to talk about in depth, but at 5 months Mila is now fully on formula. I breastfed with the odd bottle of formula here and there up until 2 weeks ago when we took Mila to get weighed and found out that she had hardly gained any weight in the last month. Being her main caregiver and source of food I felt extremely guilty that she hadn't gained more weight and we made the decision to introduce her properly to formula. We're still finding our feet but Mila generally has 6-7 bottles a day, taking around 5oz-6oz at each feed. I don't know if it's linked but I definitely feel like she is sleeping better since we made the switch and even though we aren't completely sure exactly why she didn't gain enough I have inkling that perhaps I wasn't making enough and maybe she was waking so much in the night due to hunger :( who knows, but it could be the reason. In more positive news we are very excited to start weaning Mila, I've heard a lot about baby led weaning and i'm leaning towards going that way but would love to hear peoples weaning experiences.
Development
At 5 months Mila's character is well and truly shining through. I think the most obvious thing is how active she is. She never wants to sit down, she is always insisting on standing and marching on your legs - it's hilarious, i'm not sure if she'll ever sit up! She's rolling over confidently, she can roll front to back and back to front, but usually chooses to just do the latter and then try and crawl. She's just started trying to push back onto her back legs so I think she could end up being an early crawler. She's such a happy baby and she's at the stage where she is such a pleasure to be around. She can tell now when you're being silly and finds it hilarious, she also loves it when we sing to her. Her favourite songs are anything that include her name, we've edited Miffy the sweet little bunny to Mila the sweet little bunny and she just beams everytime you start singing it. She has her favourite toys which she smiles when she sees and puts her hands out to grab and she can't fall alseep without her elephant comforter - in fact I must buy another for when I have to wash the other one! Oh and absolutely everything goes in her mouth. She actually started trying to eat the bath water last night for fun. I don't miss the newborn stage at all as she's so much fun at the moment, but everytime I see a tiny baby I do feel that sense of nostalgia remembering how lovely those days were.
So I think that wraps it up for Mila's 5 month update. I still can't believe that she 5 months old, when I was pregnant I couldn't imagine anything past 3 months. I was planning to put my update in this post as well, but I think i've rambled on long enough, so stay tuned for my 5 month postpartum update.
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