Five amazing months!

It’s hard to believe that Eleanor is five months old already. Somehow five months sounds so much older than four. To me five is practically six, which is half a year old and the time for all sorts of leaps and bounds of development out of the itty-bitty stage. Sigh!

But five months old she is, and she’s been learning a number of new skills leaving no confusion with a newborn here. However, she has held onto her pretty blue eyes with a touch of green. Luke’s turned brown like Erik’s after only a couple months, so we’re hopeful that her color sticks so the girls and guys each have their own eye color in our little family!

 

Recent Milestones

Engaging with the world has kicked into gear and this time there’s a whole list of milestones to report! Elzabel has adopted a variety of non-traditional means of locomotion. First there’s pushing herself in her swing, which I’ll soon post in video. By swaying back and forth she revvs that swing up to a pretty fast clip!

There’s also bumbo punting. She leans over to one side of the bumbo, sticks the opposite leg out to the other side and then uses it to push herself across a surface. What a trickster!

Since around three months she could roll over both ways and around four months she mastered rolling at will either way. She seems to prefer to be on her stomach, turning over immediately if set down on her back. Then she pushes up to survey the action.

She recently became much more interested in playing with toys. She’ll hold onto toys of choice for quite a while, banging them on a tray and examining them.

Her exersaucer is clearly a hub for fun toys and a favorite hang-out spot. Eleanor makes it look so exciting that Luke has been known to climb in to play for a while too. The bumbo is also a favorite because it allows her to be on Luke’s level when he plays on the floor, or on our level when we sit at the dinner table and install her as its centerpiece. Erik and I have become much more comfortable with the bumbo since we bought the accessory tray to help contain her squirmy self within it. Here she is bumbo-bound with a poolside view of the Luke show.

Even more than her seats, she likes to sit up on her own on the carpet. Of course this requires parental assistance as she is still very prone to toppling, but we all enjoy seeing her learning to master self-sitting. Here she is smiling big because Luke is coming in to say hi.

Likes/Dislikes

At her four-month check-up at her pediatrician’s office, she made it clear that she remembered her two-month visit. And her recollections were not favorable! In the waiting room she was her usual charming self, but as soon as she was brought into the examining room she began to scream hysterically and would not calm down until we left. The doctor and nurse agreed that there was no mistaking that she remembered the shots that were administered last time she went to that room, and they thought it was quite precocious for her to recall the experience at such a young age.

Sibling Report

Now that she’s more engaged with her surroundings, Ella is absolutely enamored with the Luke-channel. She lights up when she spots her big brother and she and Mommy both miss Luke when he’s down for his nap and Ellie is much fussier!

Luke sweetly requests that Ellie sleep in the crib in his, wait I mean their room. He also is always willing to share toys with his little sis and enjoys having her smile and laugh at him. Unfortunately he seems to also enjoy testing how far he can go in throwing items near her or waving them near her head. The fact that we established those boundaries several times already that day doesn’t seem to be sufficient for the Luke-boy. So we have regular discipline over that issue in our house. But we also have more and more times when both kiddos are happily engaged in the same activity. Bedtime stories are especially precious!

Our Routine

She’s settled into taking a morning and an afternoon nap each day, plus an occasional early evening catnap. My goal is to get both children’s afternoon naps to line up, but for the moment they seem to be tag-teaming nappers. The lack of nap overlap plus an escalation of two-year-old power struggles can make getting out the door each day a herculean task, but we try. Lately the lunch hour has been the easiest time, so we’ve been enjoying picnics in parks.

We still haven’t made any progress in Ellie’s number of night wakings. Feeding at 12p, 3:30a and 6:30a seemed pretty good for a newborn, but it’s not so impressive when you’re five months old. Maybe this next milestone will soon help to change that…

She recently started solid food! I hope to write another post on this soon, but here’s a little teaser pic until then. Ellie, you’re so cute you could make facial food a new trend. We love you precious girlie!