Gwendolyn at Five & a Half Months

I feel like I’m supposed to wait until Gwen is 6 months old to post an update about her but I hate rules and anyway calendars are arbitrary and meaningless so I’m posting this at 5 1/2 months. Basically, DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO, TIME.

On the weekend I went through her clothes and packed up everything that was too small, so basically all of her 3-6/4-6 month onesies and most of her pants/sleepers with feet. It was kind of sad, I had a lot of favourite outfits in that size. Packing those clothes away though meant I got to unpack all her 6-9/6-12 month clothes, so now I can have all new favourite outfits!

Gwen is still a professional at sleeping and generally sleeps 10-11 hours overnight. Sometimes she wakes up earlier than I want her too but if I roll her over and give her Elke she’ll usually go back to sleep for another hour or so. I have almost got her daytime naps worked out, sometimes it’ll get screwed up if I lose track of time but overall it’s going well. She is basically on a 2-hour schedule, something like this:
awake 7-9am
nap 9-11
awake 11-1pm
nap 1-3
awake 3-5
nap 5-7
awake 7-9
sleep 9pm-7am
Obviously she’s a human being not a robot so times can vary, ie sometimes she’ll be awake for 2.5-3 hours and she might only nap for 1.5 hours in the morning and 3 hours in the afternoon, but I try to stick as close to the schedule as I can and if I do she is content and happy with no meltdowns.

Once she started unswaddling herself at night I was planning on getting her a sleepsack of some kind, but I couldn’t find anything I really LOVED, so for a while we were just putting her to bed uncontained. That worked alright but she tended to shove her feet through the bars of her crib and crying when she realized she was stuck/hurting herself. I started looking at sleepsacks/wearable blankets/etc again and the other week we picked her up a Mod Swad bamboo sleeper (she’s wearing it in the pic above). It’s basically just a very long nightgown that you knot below the feet. I like that it is lightweight (Gwen is prone to overheating/sweating prodigiously) and the extra length/the fact that it can be knotted anywhere mean that it’ll fit her for much longer than a sleepsack with a fixed length.

Since we got her high chair we’ve been sitting her in it during meals that she’s awake for. After a rough start (she HATED it the first time, but she hated her floor seat at first as well) she has started to enjoy it. We usually give her a couple of toys to play with so she doesn’t get bored, but she is mostly fascinated by watching us eat. I’m looking forward to starting to give her solid foods in a few weeks, and I’m hoping she enjoys it as well! We are planning on doing BLW (baby-led weaning) because I haaaaaaaaaaaate spooning mush into babies, it’s so tedious (does that make me a bad person? WHATEVER IDC).

She hasn’t figured out rolling from her front onto her back yet, which can be very frustrating for both of us. Sometimes I worry that I’m not giving her enough floor time to learn and practice this skill, but she is so prone to spitting up when she’s on her belly, and she’s always on her belly! I always hold her upright for a long time after she eats to try to prevent it, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference; I could hold her up for an hour and a half after eating and a soon as I put her on the floor she’ll immediately roll onto her belly, get frustrated, spit up and then rub her face in the spit up. I’m clean her up, put down a new blanket and lay her on her back again, just for the whole process to repeat. Yesterday her whole face, both ears and the front of her hair all reeked of spit up by noon. GROSS. Hopefully she develops this new skill sooner rather than later.

She still hasn’t got anything teeth. Her two bottom front teeth are chilling right below the surface of her gums. You can feel & see them, but they haven’t broken through yet. Soon, I hope. She is drooling and gnawing on things constantly from teething, but she’s weaned herself off of soothers and spits them out whenever I try to give her one. She does sometimes suck her thumb (mostly when she’s tired), but not nearly as often as she used to, and a lot of the time she just hooks her thumb or fingers into her mouth, rather than sucking on them.

Some favourites:
Her favourite toy right now is this Haba Perlina clutching toy . I am OB.SESSED. with Haba toys, so if anyone is looking for ideas for what to buy as gifts for Gwen for her birthday or Christmas (they are coming up okay!) you can’t really go wrong with something from Haba (I’m especially into their block sets).

I’ve tried putting on baby shows for her and I have that visual development iPad app, but Gwen’s favourite thing to watch BY FAR is screensavers. Taylor has one on his computer that has constantly changing swoops and arcs of colour on a black background and she could literally watch it for hours (not that we’d leave her to watch a screensaver for hours, we just could).

More than toys, more that screensavers, her absolute #1 favourite thing in the entire world that she loves more than anything is dogs. She is always watching Georgie and laughs and crows with delight at anything she does. Of course the only thing better than one dog is two dogs, so if Kichou is also around her happiness goes into overdrive. She sometimes laughs so hard at the dogs that she almost starts crying. She also really likes when the dogs lay or sit near her, but she’s still in the hair-pulling stage, which the dogs have learned, so they don’t get too close too often.