The Sixth Month

6 Month Well Child Visit:

Emma

Date: 1.16.09

Weight: 15 pounds, 8.4 ounces (45 percentile)

Length: 2 feet, 2 inches (75th percentile)

Head Circumfrence: 43 cm (70th percentile)

Olivia
Date: 1.16.09
Weight: 15 pounds, 5.4 ounces (40 percentile)
Length: 2 feet, 0 inches (25th percentile)
Head Circumfrence: 43 cm (70th percentile)

The Sixth month... the month of sleep training. The month our lives turned around. It was rough there for a week, but once the girls learned to self-soothe themselves ... mom's life got a whole heckava lot better.

The girls were getting cereal, fruit and veggies by this time, three times a day. We started on cereal for a month, once at night. And then we added green veggies for two weeks and then added fruit in the mornings. Then orange veggies at lunch. They were still nursing about 5 times a day. Not bad! It was this time that we FINALLY got into a set, predicatable routine. I mean, we had them in a routine (thanks to the NICU!) from the day we got home, but it was ever changing due to growth spurts, colds, etc. This routine actually included NAPS. Which was awesome for me -- see previous posts. :)

Sleep training -- ahhh. I think I counted once that I got up 16 times in one night. 16 times!?! That is insane! The girls were, literally, waking up every hour wanting to nurse. My fault, I'm sure of it. But it was after this night that I knew I had to do something... for all of our health. We tried Ferberizing, where you let them cry for certain intevals of time, and then go in (not picking them up, certainly not feeding them) and pat them on their bellies. This did not work. At all. They just didn't understand why I wouldn't pick them up. So we talked and talked to friends to see what they did to make their kids sleep through the night. It was a resounding -- CRY IT OUT METHOD! It was painful, but really effective. It took about a week for the girls to learn how to soothe themselves. They would go down at 8 p.m. and sleep until 1:30ish. I'd feed them then and they'd wake up again around 7. This was a HUGE step forward.

I got a fancy D-SLR camera this month. Here are a couple of my favorite shots: