Little Miss at 3 months

It is different for everyone but for me the first few months with a baby are the hardest. We felt it with Monkey and it has been the same with LM, the first weeks seem to last forever, and yet looking back it feels like the blink of an eye.

Because here we are, we made it, our Little Miss is 3 months old, 11lb 10oz and life is definitely getting easier, albeit gradually!

3 months

So what is she up to at the moment?

Feeding and Pooing

It might seem weird to have these under the same heading but lets face it they are very much linked! It’s over a month since we moved from breastfeeding onto a Lactose Free formula and it has definitely been a much easier month feeds wise. The colic has gone completely and the reflux has been under control with Gaviscon.

The only problem we have had is that the combination of Gaviscon with the lactose free formula has made LM quite constipated at times. We started giving her additional cool boiled water but that didn’t help much so we started giving her sugar water a couple of times a day (mixing a teeny bit of sugar into the boiled water) as I read that it was a traditional remedy and worth trying. It helped loads and for a while she was much less uncomfortable.

Then our HV actually advised that it wasn’t an ideal solution as it can make their kidneys work harder, so we went back to just water. She really didn’t want to drink much and pretty soon was struggling again. We tried the sugar water again but the cheeky minx decided she wasn’t keen on it anymore. She then got really badly constipated and it was horrible seeing her in pain as it took her a long time to do her business. Because the root of the problem was the Gaviscon we decided it would be worth phasing it out, to see how she got on and how bad her reflux is now, as she has been having the Gaviscon at every feed for the last 2 months.

The good news is that she is fine without the Gaviscon. I think there are the odd times at feeds where her reflux bothers her as she has been a little fussier sometimes since we stopped it… But it is not at every feed and there have been no nighttime screaming sessions so she is doing well. The result is much better movements too which is a huge relief!

Sleeping

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I wrote previously about how we were helping LM learn to sleep better by herself and she is doing amazingly well. She had a few days of sleeping 10-11 hours through the night, though she has decided that she doesn’t want to do that anymore 🙁 It was amazing for those few days and we know she can do it! Daytimes are still all over the place, when I started writing this I thought we may have a vague routine, but she has thrown that out of the window again now so re-writing! She has actually decided she wants to be awake for about 31/2 hours at a time now, which is fine by me as long as she is happy.

And she is. The result of the good sleep and being in less pain from colic and reflux is that she is a gorgeously happy girl now. She smiles and coos all the time and is just a joy to be around. A complete contrast to the screaming of the early days poor thing! Yes she still cry’s and fusses and late afternoons can be fun, but it is all so much easier than before. I hate the lack of routine though and am praying that some kind of pattern forms if she is going to be awake a bit longer now. I know, she’s just a baby but I feel so out of control and like a hermit because I struggle to arrange to see anyone because I don’t know what she will be doing and staying home is just less stressful.

Playtime

Ok so there’s not much playtime going on with a 3 month old but it is starting. She adores the monkey and lion faces on her bouncer and sits giggling, grinning and cooing at them for ages which is just lovely! She also bats at the dangly toys and is really enjoying the ones attached to her car seat. I was really impressed that she grabbed onto one of them the other day and held onto it for ages! Monkey was totally uninterested in any toys like this until he was quite a bit older!!

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While she loves lying on her back and kicking her legs, she still doesn’t very much enjoy tummy time. That being said though she is so strong and easily pushes herself up to have a look around and has lifted her legs like she is trying to roll so I am sure in time she will get there!

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Her favourite thing is sitting up, she just loves looking around. She sits on my lap and if I lay her on my knees she is always lifting her head and trying to pull forward. We sit and sing “If you’re happy and you know it” and “heads, shoulders, knees and toes” and ‘row row row” is great for strengthening her “sit up” muscles! Because she loves sitting up so much we have just got out Monkey’s Jumperoo and she sat in it today for the first time. She can’t bounce yet and I have a cushion under her to support her but she definitely likes being in there!

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She is fascinated by mirrors and stares at herself in it, mesmerised! When she saw Daddy in the mirror the other day she could not stop smiling, though she wasn’t interested in seeing the real Daddy, standing right next to her! I think she is a bit of a Daddy’s girl already as she always has smiles for Daddy, even when she is tired!

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Ethans Escapades
Not My Year Off

Monkey at 32 months

Monkey is doing and saying so many things at the moment that I really want to capture and remember. Rather than write a specific post about them all individually, I thought it was time for another mini milestones post – even if it is more of a summary of his cute (and not so cute) behaviour rather than specifically divided into areas of development as I have done previously.

Things Monkey Says

After being a little slow on the speech development side, Monkey now chatters and sings pretty much constantly and it is really lovely. There are still occasions where we aren’t sure what he is saying, but for the most part he is pretty clear, and his pronunciation is getting better all the time. He still struggles to pronounce his Ls and they come out as Ns but when you think about how you say them, they take a pretty similar tongue movement so I am sure he will get there!

He is so polite and really learning about when to say please and thank you, although please sounds more like “twease” sometimes!  He has picked up a really very cute habit of saying”you’re most welcome” when anyone says thank you, which melts a few hearts!

Other favourite phrases are “my turn” (shockingly) “don’t want to” (again no big surprise) and it has taken a lot of effort to stop him announcing “Merry Christmas” and “Happy New Year” to everyone we come across!

He has started saying “Hello there” which is pretty adorable and loves telling us “I love that” when he really likes some food or some activity or something. The other morning he came downstairs and said, completely unprompted “I love you daddy, I love you mummy!” Which melted our hearts.

He keeps trying to get away with calling us Mum and Dad instead of Mummy and Daddy and we are not ready to accept that yet!!

When he does something that makes us cross or upset he looks at us and says “Make happy now” as he really doesn’t like us being anything other than smiley bless him!

He sings all the time, with the alphabet song being his favourite, though he also loves incy wincy spider, twinkle twinkle little star and well most nursery rhymes really!

Post office

Monkey's post officeMonkey has always been a fan of Postman Pat so be extension he loves anything to do with post. he runs to the door to get the post for me every morning and loves letters, parcels etc. He has a toy area behind our sofa with cubby holes, boxes and a couple of drawers. One day I saw him pick up a DVD insert and go trotting off behind the sofa with it saying something about post. Intrigued I had a peek and he has decided that one of his drawers is a “post office!” It’s hilarious and there is all sorts of bits and bobs in there, taxi leaflets that have been pushed through the door, old envelopes, dvd inserts, all sorts and every time he finds a bit of paper lying around he goes “ooh post” and pops it into his post office. It’s hilarious, I just love it and now we know where to look if we ever lose something!!

Naps

He doesn’t need a nap every day now, which is good as with two afternoons a week being at playgroup, he can’t really, but if he goes for a couple of days with no nap, he gets very very testy and we have the mother of all meltdowns. He has always been a child that relies on the right balance of food and sleep to make him happy and it still makes a huge difference to his temperament if he is hungry or tired! When he does nap, he cans till sleep for around 3 hours between 2 and 5 and then still goes down to bed and sleeps through the night from around 7.15-715. It’s bonkers really but it works.

Bedtime Friends

His two loves of doggy bear and blankie have been companions at bedtime for a long time. Gradually he has taken to a few other teddies and now he has loads which he loves. They all have to be present at bedtime and there has been times where they have all had to come downstairs after his nap, though we are trying not to indulge that too much as there is a lot of teddies to cart about! Sometimes though he has a little ritual where Mummy Teddy, Daddy Teddy and Doggy Bear all have to be tucked up under blankie before he will go to sleep. So cute!

Jigsaws

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Monkey is obsessed with Jigsaws at the moment. We got him a fab set for Christmas from the ELC which has 10 jigsaws all at slightly different levels of difficulty. He started off a bit unsure but all of a sudden he can now do 5 or 6 of these entirely by himself. The ones that are more than 2 rows high seem to daunt him a little bit but the others he just loves and does them so quickly now it is incredible!

Food

Our little fusspot is still very up and down with food, we had a real low patch where he barely ate any evening meals, then we reinforced our behaviour and he seemed to do better for a while , but now we are in a dip again! He has this awful habit at the moment where he will put food in his mouth, but then won’t eat it, just leaving it sitting there for ages and ages and eventually he wants to spit it out – which I have to admit really winds me up as I think it is disgusting! Sometimes he will store it for ages then randomly swallow it which I don’t really understand but prefer it to spitting it out.

It winds hubs and I up no end though and we do all sorts of bad things, bribing, threatening, cajoling,  and nagging to get him to eat. I know it isn’t right but hey we are not perfect people and we really do try, but sometimes it feels like the only tactics that work! The randomest tactic that works is using his Postman Pat toy, putting on a deep voice and having “Pat” talk to Monkey and ask him to eat it. He responds well to that a lot of the time – the power of Pat!

Clever boy

Now this may sound like I am bragging and I don’t mean to, I am just really proud of our boy and think he is really clever. I have no idea what is normal or advanced for his age but I am just really proud of him, he’s like a little sponge soaking up knowledge! He knows all of his alphabet and switches been phonics and letter names for most letters. He can recognise his own name written down and when playing with letters can even put them.in the right order for his name sometimes.

He knows loads of colours and when I asked him what colours he wanted to paint with the other day, he recited them in rainbow order, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple lol! Then added pink on the end too 🙂 so with a little help we then made s rainbow picture! Before mixing them all up and doing lots of brown splodges and hand prints :).

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He is really good with shapes and points them out all over the place, pointing at a door and saying rectangle, a 20p piece and saying hexagon, an old teething ring and saying oval. He still loves numbers and recognises up to 100 though occasionally gets them mixed up,so for example if he sees 63, sometimes he will say 36 instead, but not every time. He is also really good with his left and right and he gets that right nearly every time which astounds me as I still have to think about which is which, my brain just can’t get it at all so the fact his does really impresses me!!

I feel like I could go on forever about our gorgeous boy but I think this post is long enough! Needless to say though I adore him and even though he really pushes my buttons sometimes I am so so proud of him every day as he is just a lovely little boy 🙂

Ethans Escapades
Not My Year Off


RaisingEmily

Siblings December

Monkey is really growing to not only accept, but love his baby sister. He includes her whenever he talks about things as a family. When making cakes with Daddy recently he said “One a Mummy, One a Daddy, One a me, One a LM (he uses his actual name for her, not LM but just to avoid confusion).

He has gone from not wanting to look at her or have anything to do with her, to looking at her, and now to actively trying to engage with her. He gives her little cuddles and kisses. He holds her hand. He strokes her head and her arms. In the morning if she is asleep upstairs he asks where she is and wants to wake her up. He pretended to be Dr to her and gave her some “medicine” probably because he sees we are always giving her medicine (infacol, gaviscon, colic calm).

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Monkey’s Mini Milestones at 29 months

I haven’t done a mini milestones post in a while and there are a few lovely Monkey things that are making me dead proud at the moment so I thought it was time I did. It seems that he has grown up and his development has sped up rapidly just in the last couple of weeks since the arrival of his baby sister. It is incredible and he really is very fun to be around at the moment.

This may seem like a slightly braggy post (Look how amazing my toddler is) but it’s mainly to keep a record of what he can do, when, and if I sound a bit braggy it’s because I am actually pretty amazed by his development, and loving every minute of it.
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Mummy & Daddy take the night off!

On Friday morning hubby and I left the house at about 8.15am and headed off to Hereford for a wedding. Monkey? Monkey stayed at home, in the care of his Nanny & Pops! This was quite a big deal for us. Before we had Monkey and when he was a tiny baby we had grand ideas about leaving him with the grandparents fairly regularly so he would get used to it from a young age and it wouldn’t be a big deal.

In reality things didn’t quite work out as we planned (when does it ever, with babies?). Colic didn’t help matters and I always found leaving him behind difficult when breastfeeding – having to express extra milk before the event, trying to ensure he would drink out of bottles, having to find somewhere quiet to express your engorged boobs while at an event (trying not to get any on your fancy outfit) to relieve the pain. Not simple or stress free, in my personal opinion. We did manage a couple of days like this but didn’t actually have any events or plans far away, requiring an overnight stay, when he was very little so always came home for the night.

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Lots of Learning – Mini Milestones 26mths

Monkey seems to be at an age where he is learning so much- and just soaking things up like a sponge so I thought it was a good time to write another Mini Milestones post to write it all down somewhere. I also feel that a fitting word for my word of the week, is Learning.

Speech & Cognitive Development

This is the biggy at the moment really. His speech is, all of a sudden, coming on leaps and bounds. As a slightly later talker I have worried in the past and been frequently reassured that one day it will just click and there’ll be no stopping him. I wanted desperately to believe this but there was always a seed of worry and doubt at the back of my mind that it wouldn’t happen that way. But, well, everyone was right! Something has clicked in his brain and the words are flying out of his mouth.

 

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Monkey’s Mini Milestones at 22 months

I feel that Monkey is learning so much all of the time lately, that I need somewhere to record these little milestones (the lovely ones … and the less lovely ones). So I have created Monkey’s Mini Milestones – so every now and again there will be posts like this! Mainly a way of charting Monkey’s development, and his likes and dislikes!

Words

Monkey is being very chatty lately, most of it is still undecipherable but he is really trying to talk to us!  Some of the words we do understand are:

Yum yum
Go
Two
Shoes
Oh dear – after yum yum this is his favourite phrase, very cute as sometimes it sounds more like oh doo or oh doh but when it is accompanied by his hands to his mouth it is very lovely!

Skills

Last week, while enjoying the sun with my neighbour he managed to make his first bubbles! He doesn’t really understand blowing yet but he after a little experimentation he learnt to dip a ring in a bowl and wave it around to create bubbles! Simple thing I know but I was a proud mama watching him figure out how to do it!

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He loves giving high fives and now sticks his thumbs up (previously he held up 1 finger instead). He tries to count on his fingers, at a birthday party during the games, daddy was telling him so and so had ‘won’ and Monkey kept holding his finger up, as if to say ‘one?’  He loves numbers and likes pretending to count. He basically points at things in a row making lovely noises like ah, noo, mah, buh etc, so cute! He loves clocks and things too and is just fascinated by clocks and numbers.

Whenever we are out and about and he hears an aeroplane, his hand goes over his hear to indicate he has heard it, and then he HAS to find where it is in the sky. He very often spots them way before I do, even when they are tiny and far away! Clever monkey!

He is such a good climber, and has been for a while but we are proud that he now finally understanding how to climb backwards down something, rather than essentially leaping off hoping to be caught!

Music

He still loves Wind the Bobbin, of course, but he has a couple of other new favourites too:

Row Row the boat – he can be seen standing by himself rocking backwards and forwards, which is v cute, and at every opportunity he commandeers Mummy to do it together! He’s getting very good at the Lion roar too hehe

The Wheels on the Bus is another favourite – he has always loved buses and now whenever we see one his arms go round and round until I sing it to him hehe

Books

Monkey loves books, always has done and we have loads, and it is funny seeing some go in and out of favour! His favourites at the moment are:

Zaza’s Baby Brother – we’ve had this for ages and he was never interested before, but at the moment he is obsessed with it – I wonder how much he understands about me being pregnant, it does seem like quite a coincidence though!

Pig in the Air – This was one of daddy’s books as a child and Monkey adores it! He giggles his head off at the clumsy piggy falling over while trying to fly, says ‘go’ when he takes off, and ‘Oh dooo’ when he crashes into a tree he he. It is funny, I confess to being a bad mummy though and trying to hide it after reading it about 5 times in a row – I love how much he loves books, I do, but it’s exhausting re-reading them over and over!

Food

He’s been increasingly fussy again lately so we have been reevaluating snacks etc to see if we can get back on track a bit. He’s so stubborn though and knows where all the snacks are in the cupboards and of course wants them all the time instead of his meals. Joy! We need to look at what we are doing too and try and get back to following the rules that helped us before!

Playtime

Cars, train, helicopters, BUSES, basically  anything transport related is a big fave at the moment, particularly his Postman Pat cars!

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He loves dens at the moment, particularly with my Granny Square Blanket as the roof (which I love!). He is so good at building with Duplo now and he also made a fantastic tower with his blocks the other day, clever little builder!

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Colours

Monkey has two very definite favourite colours at the moment – red and yellow! He is getting good at matching colours in general but red and yellow are definitley the faves. When we are playing with multicoloured things he always finds the red and yellow ones and holds them up for us to label. Even in a craft shop last week he suddenly produced a red pen and a yellow pen from a display behind us! Seriously obsessed – not sure but maybe it comes from his love of Postman Pat?

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Less nice things

He has taken to picking things at the moment – picking his nose, picking the wax out of his ears, picking at his bathy crayons, picking, picking picking! Yuck!

He is extremely stubborn. This isn’t a particularly new thing but he is insanely stubborn at times and gets himself so worked up when we say no to things but he does not give in. For example if we say he will get pudding if he eats one more bite, there is no way he will take that bite. None. Absolutely zero. So he doesn’t get pudding but it makes for some miserable stand-offs!

So that is some of the things I can think of that sum up Monkey’s development right now! I love seeing him grow into his own person with his own mind – even though he drives me crazy sometimes! How do you keep track of your mini milestones?

Ethans Escapades

SuperBusyMum