Seriously, she’s 6 months old today. How did that happen? I’ve given up trying to post regularly, but I’ll try to make up for lost time. I’m trying to cut down on facebook anyway, and I am still under the delusion that I really will archive this for the girls’ later viewing.
Sarah has hit a magic age. Ahh, 6 months. She is much happier. But so big! I look back at those early pictures of her first few weeks and I want to cry. One one hand, life is much better now than it was then. But she is getting too big!!!
We have her 6 month appointment this week, so I’ll get her stats. But I know she weighs about 18 pounds because when we took Jenna to the doctor last week, we stuck her on the scale. We took Jenna on a Sunday because she had swollen tonsils, but it turns out it wasn’t the strep she’d had a few weeks before that. It took a $12 triage phone call and a $35 “urgent care” co-pay to figure out there was nothing wrong with her. Anyway.
It took a good 5 months for Sarah to quit crying every.single.evening for no apparent reason. So exhausting. But now the colic is done and she is like a new baby. She did find her thumb, and routinely uses it to soothe herself. It’s good because she can soothe herself, but I don’t know how we’ll break that. Jenna never sucked her thumb, but she had a paci till she was 3.
Sarah is not drooling quite as much as she was in the few previous months, but she now has a tooth! Her very own bottom tooth poking through the gum. I am still breastfeeding, but when those top teeth come in, I may need to rethink that. We started giving her rice cereal about a month ago, and now I have started mixing baby food fruit in it. I am making most of her baby food, but now comes the fun part when I actually get to start feeding it to her.
Sarah rolled over for the first time July 2. She now loves to roll from back to front, but can’t seem to get back over. 
She loves to bounce in her johnny jumper thing, and also she loves to hang out in the bumbo. I love it, too! Her thighs are getting too chunky for it though. She won’t last too much longer in it, I think, but she’ll be sitting up on her own and we can sit her in a booster seat. She sits pretty well now, but falls over. She probably has another month or so before she’ll be able to sit unassisted. I am loving this pre-mobile time right now! Bath time is another fun time of day. She really likes her bath. She got a little too big for the infant tub though, so now she gets her bath in the kitchen sink.
I don’t remember this baby time flying by so fast with Jenna. I also don’t remember loving it so much. I just don’t get tired of holding Sarah. Ever. And I am with her all day long. I guess I just know it goes by fast and she’s our last one. I do get tired of her waking us up in her middle-of-the night I’m-not-happy-and-I-need-you-to-feed-me-so-I-can-go-back-to-sleep fits, but hey, you take the good with the bad. It’s easier for me to nurse her back to sleep than to deal with her crying and waking up Jenna. It’s a recipe for disaster later, I’m sure, but I’ll deal with that when I need to. It doesn’t happen every night.
On to Jenna. What to say about Jenna? She has got to be the most stubborn kid on the planet. People always told me 3 was worse than 2. When Jenna was 2, I remember thinking no, that can’t be. But now I know that it really is worse. People with 2-year-olds ask me how is it worse? I can’t really explain it. I guess she is just smarter about her defiance now. She makes me crazy. Sometimes, in a matter of 30 seconds, I can go from wanting to lock myself in a room in the fetal position with my fingers in my ears to hugging her and telling her how much I love her.
She is non-stop all day. One of our friends (incidentally, the father of a 3-year-old), recently told her “Jenna, your energy level is through the roof.” She just smiled and said “Oh, thank you.” She does crack me up. Sometimes Jay & I have to keep from laughing. Like the other day when I asked if she was done eating. She looked at her plate and said “Does it LOOK like I’m done eating?” The girl does love to eat, but only if it’s something good. Veggies, not so much. Chocolate? She goes ape for chocolate. She has a certain way of saying “chocolate.” She smiles, scrunches her nose, and drags it out. I wish I could get it on video…I’ll have to make that a goal.
Jenna has to do everything herself. EVERYTHING. She insists, and if she can’t do whatever it is that she insists on doing herself, she gets frustrated and cries. But she won’t ask for help, and if I try to help her, she throws a fit. Ahhhh, 3. The upside of that is that by now, she has learned how to open the car door, get in, close the door, and buckle herself in the car seat. She can also unbuckle herself, but I won’t go into that. She loves to do new things. She loves her gymnastics class, her Mother’s Day out (so do I!), her playdates, parks, going for walks, picking flowers, running aimlessly anywhere and everywhere, climbing, and swimming.
We got an above-ground pool in our back yard and it has been wonderful. We have great family time in there, and with the temps above 100 almost every day, it’s so refreshing. It’s so cold, in fact, that Jenna hasn’t wanted to get in lately. That’s kind of surprising, but the girl is full of surprises. She still likes bath time, and I look forward to the day she & Sarah can take baths together.
Jenna continues to be clumsy, just like her mama. Poor kid is always falling down. Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t even notice that she has just fallen on her face. It happens several times a day. Several times an hour. She can fall down when she’s just standing there. That takes talent, doesn’t it? I hate to laugh, but sometimes I can’t help it. She does make me laugh a lot. It’s fun to have conversations with her because she has quite the imagination. And I can see her mind working when I ask her questions. She does talk a lot. A LOT. Like, all the time. Jay & I can’t have a conversation because she’s always interrupting. We’ve been working on that. So instead of interrupting, she’ll just sing really loud or something. One thing that makes me really happy is that she has taken an interest in TV. Is that supposed to make a mom happy? She has gone through her phases, but overall she just hasn’t been interested. Even on road trips, she wants nothing to do with the DVD player in the car. In fact, last trip, we had it positioned so Sarah could watch Baby Einstein on it. Anyway, lately Jenna is really into the Backyardigans. She would watch 6 episodes in a row if I would let her. I haven’t gone that far, but I have let her watch 3. Then the guilt sets in. As much as I love having some time without her attached to my heels, I’m still her mom.
