We always knew our Lily Jumping Bean was special, but we didn’t know she could also catch the sun in a jar.

And, after seeing Corbin sitting in one, I wanted a hanging high chair for Lily too, so I decided to get one too. Just in time, as she had vomited all over her regular high chair the other day and we haven’t washed the straps yet.

I must be going insane. I’m u pat 3:30am. Willingly! Lily Bean briefly woke up for a binky emergency, but she’s long since gone to bed, and I’m still up. I got the munchies, too. So I decided to make myself something to eat, and now I’m still up. I need to get to bed soon. She wakes up in a few hours!

But, before I do, I wanted to update a bit on what’s been going on. Today (the 12th), is Lily Bean’s 7th-month “birthday.” She’s SEVEN months old! WOW!!!! Our baby girl is growing soooo fast. How awesome is that? And each day, she gets cuter and cuter, and more “grown up,” so to speak. We can see what she’s going to look like as a toddler. She totally doesn’t have that “newborn” look anymore. She hasn’t for a while. I’m just still so amazed at how fast she’s growing.

Today also happens to be Dave’s and my 10th-year anniversary of the day we met in person. The day we decided we were a “couple.” Wow, has it already been 10 years? Ten great, healthy, happy years. I’m looking forward to many “ten”s more, Husband O’ Mine! We create beautiful magic together, and we create even more beautiful baby(ies?)!

Okay, so…

Lily started getting constipated about 5 days ago. Give or take. She only pooped twice during those 5 days. We were really starting to panic after the first day, so I looked up what could be causing it in her diet. It turns out rice cereal is a great culprit of constipation, and so is apple sauce (among other things, but those are the only things she’s had recently that may explain the situation). So I cut those two completely off her diet (for now). We introduced puree’d prunes to her diet on the 2nd day. Gave her just a couple of spoonfuls at first. That didn’t seem to help for the next couple of days. I gave her prunes and peas for breakfast and dinner, and that didn’t really seem to help. She was farting a whole lot, but that’s about as far as it went.

We also did many “bicycle” leg exercises with her, and rubbed her poor little tummy. Got lots of farts, but nothing more. So yesterday, I went in search of some organic prune juice. Got one at the Coop in Bellingham, after work. I diluted it with some water so that it’s not so intense. Gave her about 3 ounces. She gulped it down like crazy (she LOVES prunes!!). Then put her in a warm bath, to which she was delighted! This was her first “big girl” bath, where she got to sit up on her own. She was weary at first, though, since I took her into the bathtub and she’s never been there before. But once she was in the water and sitting up, and acclimated to the warm water, she was having the time of her life!

She figured out that she could “splash splash splash” and that it wasn’t the swimming pool. Hahha! She was kicking and kicking her legs, and going “splash splash splash,” trying to get at her rubber duckie.

It was so darn cute, I even got a video!

After the bath, I fed her another bottle, and rubbed her tummy some more. She was soooo fussy, so irritable, so antsy and fidgety. Poor girl needed to let out a biiig poop. I heard little farts, and boy it got stinky really fast! And then suddenly, she just calmed down, was content to just sit there in our arms. So I decided to check her pants to see if she pooped.

Yup. BIIIGGG POOP! Like, up her back, leaked through her diaper, up her front type of poop! Boy oh boy!! So I ran her into her room to clean and change her, and I was making faces and exclaiming, “OHMYGOSH, BABY!!! AAHHH!!” And she started cracking up at me! Big, loud giggles, “HAHA” style. She thought it was hilarious that I had to change her stinky, stinky diaper. Silly girl.

But we are beyond relief now. Heh. Now, we can go back to normal. I’ve been living in a fog of panic for the last few days. I feel like I just let out a big sigh of relief.

I wanted to document some things we’ve been experiencing, so that I don’t forget later on.

• As noted before, I’ve been reading the book, “No-Cry Sleep Solutions” by Elizabeth Pantley, and I absolutely love it! It has so many suggestions for gently encouraging your baby to sleep that does not include the Crying-It-Out Method, which as we all know, is controversial and no parent does it willingly or happily. Dave doesn’t like that method, and while I’m more consistent with it myself, I don’t like it either because it just breaks my heart to hear her “cry it out.” So over the last week, one of the things I’ve been working on is encouraging her to get an earlier bedtime. It used to be anywhere between 9p and 10:30p. Sometimes even 11p if she’s really fussy and annoyed with us. Heh. I want her to sleep sometime between 8p and 8:30p, to begin with. And eventually by 7:30p. That is the ideal. So I’ve created a pretty stringent “bedtime routine” with her that starts out at 8p to start with. The time doesn’t matter, but the sequence of events does, apparently.
• Our sleep routine now looks like this: lights dimmed out all throughout the house, sleep music on in her room, she gets changed into her night time diaper, she gets oiled and creamed up by Mommy, gets a massage in the meantime, gets into her pajamas, gets zipped up into her potato-sack sleeping bag, story time in her room on the rocking chair (around 3 or 4 books, to settle her down), lights out while nursing last bottle, burp, rock to sleep in rocking chair or standing up with her “lovey” (her stuffed bunny blankey she sleeps with). When she’s about 85% asleep, we put her into her crib.
  
  That’s her lovey, the pink bunny!
• (Note: first 3 days of this new routine was a NIGHTMARE. Yes, absolute NIGHTMARE. It took us over 2 hours to get her settled and into bed, asleep. She wouldn’t have it, and she was confused as to why all the lights were out, and why we were hanging out in her room. After that, piece of cake. The whole routine now takes approximately 20 minutes to complete, from start to sleep finish!)
• She started going to sleep at 8:30p when the bedtime routine became a success. This was aided by earlier nap times encouraged during the day. She now has late morning naps and mid-afternoon naps, so that she’s ready for bedtime at around 8p-ish. At first, going to bed earlier than 9p didn’t cut it for her. While she easily went down, she didn’t stay down for the whole night. She had about 3 awakenings during the night to start with. Sometimes hungry, sometimes fussy and confused and wants a Mommy-cuddle, and sometimes just wide awake (to which I had to rock her back to sleep in the dark). However, the first successful early-bedtime night was last night! She slept 11 hours straight, no wakings, not even binky emergencies. Woohoo!!!
• I am now working with her on falling asleep on her own without crying in her crib. Slow classical conditioning, basically. She likes her binky a lot, so it’s not as hard as it would be, but eventually I will wean the binky out as well.
• Her rash on her face has 98% cleared away. I think it is because the breast milk I’ve been giving her from our storage slowly eliminated eggs. We were using the earlier stash, when I was still eating eggs. Now that we’re dipping into the later stash, some without eggs, her skin has cleared considerably.
• To date, she has tried the following solid foods: rice cereal, peas, carrots, apple sauce, barley cereal, and avocado. She likes them all except apple sauce (she just has to get used to the different “fruit” taste after getting so much vegetable taste with peas and carrots). She LOVES avocado. She broke out into hives a couple hours after trying barley cereal, so we think she may be allergic. Or intolerant. We may try it again in a couple of weeks to see if it has improved.
  
  Here she is eating avocado (yesterday) for the first time. It was a surprise taste in her mouth, but she kept opening her mouth for more, so yay!
• My milk supply is decreasing. I had really sore nipples for the past two weeks, so I wasn’t able to pump as often. This has created my milk supply to lower considerably. I am only making about a bottle and a half a day, versus the 8 bottles I used to make. Ouch. So we decided that we will stretch out the rest of the BM supply and supplement with formula until she’s a year old. We gave her formula (organic) for the first time this morning, since she was a newborn. Within minutes, she broke out into hives and rashes all over her body. OMG!! I bathed her in warm water, creamed her up, and within a couple hours, the rash and hives were gone. She had a bit of cough, and we were afraid she was going to have some respiratory issues, but it seemed to have gone away. She may be lactose-intolerant. We’re going to have to see her doc again to see what will be recommended. I’m uncertain about going soy-based for formula, since I’ve heard a lot of aluminum and extra estrogen can be found in soy, and we don’t want that. *sigh* This girl has so many sensitivities. I hope she grows out of them.
• She has become quite good at scooting backwards while on her tummy. Still working on going forward though!
• She can now get onto her hands and knees, in the ready-to-crawl position. She doesn’t quite know how to manage the next steps from there, though. Hehe.
• She is making more “conversational” sounds, or what sounds like conversational sounds. Her favorite sayings are, “Da? Da da da da da!!” Da?” and “Oh? Oh oh oh? Oh?!” And of course, the grunts continue too.

And to end this long post, here are a couple of photos of Lily Bean.

Daddy and Lily Bean having a cuddle.

Boy, look at that face. We’re in trouble!

Apparently, today’s the day when lots of things happen. Or so, Lily has decided.

• She slept 12 hours last night, straight through. One “binky emergency” at 11p, but that was it. It turned out that it wasn’t her teething that was waking her up numerous times — it was the darn, noisy humidifier we had on! I turned it off for last night since she’s no longer sick, just to see what would happen. It makes sense, though, because while it was on for the past two weeks or so, every time we carry her near her bedroom, she starts freaking out, and when we lay her down in her crib for naps or sleep time, she freaks out and cries for us when we close the door behind us. It has made sleeping very difficult. I think she’s actually afraid of the loud noise that it makes, and she’s a very light sleeper, so it wakes her up during the night pretty often.
• She said her first word today… it seemed to have been on purpose, but who knows? She’s only 6 months old, after all. She stared straight at me, and said, “Ma!” It seemed purposeful, and I’m gonna take it as such because darn it, I believe my baby is a genius.
• While on her tummy, she got onto her hands and KNEES and started pushing off on Daddy’s hands… and made a crawling movement for the FIRST time! She moved forward!!
• She got her 6-month vacs today, and all was well. She was a trooper. Didn’t even cry at the first shot — didn’t even notice it. Second shot, she yelped for about two seconds and then stopped.
• We started the first round of Your Baby Can Read. She LOVES looking at the words and the babies doing stuff on the screen. We’ll see if we can get this little baby reading by a year old!

Daddy singing “I’ve been working on the railroad” with Lily Bean

Apparently, today’s a good day for firsts! I missed the crawling thing, since I was at work (grrr), but I was right here for the Ma and the sleep! Yahoo!!

Lily’s had a very, very busy few weeks, ever since the holidays started! Now it is all back to normal, so Mommy can finally update regarding what’s been going on in the Life of Lily.

First, Auntie Sophia (my sister) visited for a week for Christmas, and then, a week later, Uncle Eddie (my brother) visited for a week. It was the first time both of them had met Lily, and of course, they both fell in love with her as soon as they saw her. Eddie even got the baby voice out, and started talking to her in a high-pitch tone (which sounds oddly off because his voice is so raspy and deep). At first, she wasn’t sure if he passed her approval scale, as she only let him hold her for two seconds upon the first meeting before she cried out for Mommy to take her back. But, an hour later, he tried again and she was fine. The rest of the week, she was completely fine with him.

Then, as the week progressed, we had some fun with Lily. It was still snowing up here in Southwest British Columbia, so we decided to finally take some advantage of the snow, and Eddie and Bianca (his girlfriend) made a couple of snowpeople! It’s supposed to be of me and Lily Bean. They were going to make Dave as well, but it got too freezing cold for their poor hands (they weren’t used to this weather — in North Carolina it only maybe snows twice a year, if that).

Uncle Eddie finishing one of the snowpeople while
Daddy held onto Lily Bean in her eskimo suit.

She was the cutest little snow baby ever!

We even managed to get a wave from her when the snowpeople were done!

Then, midway through the week, Lily started getting a cold. It started off small, but caught on quickly. She began with a wee bit of a cough, and some sneezes. We noticed it on Wednesday, but then by Thursday morning it was full force. Her cough was very raspy and phlegmy, and her nose started dribbling snot. No fever, but her throat hurt. We could tell because after she let out a ripping series of coughs, she looks at us and whines. Our poor baby girl. We started giving her Infants’ Tylenol on Thursday morning — the recommended amount for her age and weight. It doesn’t appear to have gotten any better, though. Her coughs are actually getting worse. We have a doctor’s appointment for her on Thursday, which is also for her 6-month check-up. I don’t think we can wait that long though, so we’re going to a health clinic tomorrow and see what the doctor there has to say about it.

I’ve also rubbed some Vic’s vapor rub on her throat and chest, and on the bottom of her feet before putting socks on her. That seems to help a bit with her sleeping, but hasn’t alleviated any of the symptoms, unfortunately. However, she is just about the cheeriest, most easy-going sick baby I’ve ever come across. She’d cough, whine, and then break out into a giant smile for us, as if to say, “I’m not feeling well, but thank you so much for taking care of me, Mommy and Daddy!” So CUTE!!

This has affected her sleep a lot. Last night, she went down at 10p, which is over an hour past her usual bed time. The night before, she didn’t even go down until 1am. She was so, ssooo exhausted, but she couldn’t fall asleep because she kept coughing when we put her on her back. And she was fussy because she was so tired. She would want to sleep in our arms, and once we put her down after she’s fallen asleep in our arms, she wakes up again with a coughing fit. She was just tired out and puckered by 1am, and she forcefully went to sleep at that time. The night before that, she didn’t go down until 10:30p. And, throughout these nights, she wakes up coughing and whining, so I have to tend to her about every hour or so. Our poor baby…

We think her immune system is down because she’s teething. She’s been trying to gnaw at things pretty ferociously. She tries to sink her teeth into everything! This photo is an example! I put this bumblebee toy of hers in the freezer for a couple of hours, then gave it to her. She immediately put it in her mouth and was instantly relieved. When it finally melted, she threw it away and cried to me. Heh.

And I want to show this photo to you here because it’s just so darn cute not to:

Today, we will be giving her her first foods! I went to B’ham’s Food Co-op to get some awesome organic baby rice cereal. We’re doing it tonight. Tomorrow is officially her 6-month birthday, but I have to work tomorrow so we want to spend some time to be able to do it today. Well, this late afternoon. It’s all very exciting!!! We’ve put her in her high chair and gave her a spoon to play with, and she thought it was pretty nifty — until she realized there was nothing on the spoon to eat, and that if there was nothing to eat, there really wasn’t any reason to be restrained in a chair with a tray in front of her. Heh. She’s a quick one, that girl.