Saturday was Lydia’s two month birthday.  Happy birthday, Baby Girl!

We went to the doctor yesterday morning and Lydia’s current stats are: height – 22.5 inches, weight – 13 lbs 15 oz, head circumference – 41 cm.  That puts her in the 57th percentile for height, the 98th for weight and the 92nd for head circumference.  She’s an adorably chubby baby!

Besides gaining several pounds, Lydia’s other achievements over this past month include learning to hold her head up and look around, getting her hand into her mouth whenever she’s not swaddled, and smiling at Mommy and Daddy, Alethea, the globes over her crib, and at nothing in particular.  Most of the time she’s a sweet, happy, easy baby.

Our biggest struggle this month has been bed time.  Lydia will go to sleep easily, on her own, for 90% of her daytime naps, but 6:00pm rolls around and suddenly we have a cranky baby who wants to be held constantly and won’t go to sleep.  If we’re lucky, we’ll get her to sleep in her bed by 8:00 or 9:00pm.  If it’s a particularly bad night, one of us will still be holding a wide awake baby when her late night feeding comes around at 10:30.  We’re a little mystified by this, but hope she’ll outgrow it soon.

Although we have a hard time getting her to sleep at bedtime, once she’s out after her late night feeding, she’s usually sound asleep until she wants to eat again at 4-5am.  A few times she’s made it until 6 or 7am and one night (after a particularly busy day when she didn’t get all her naps in) she actually slept until 9am, at which point I decided to go in and wake her up to feed her since she had been asleep for almost 10 hours!  Yay for a baby who sleeps at night!

Although Lydia still sleeps an average of 18 hours a day, she has increased her morning awake time to around 1 hour, which gives us more time to play after her feeding.  We enjoy talking together (she’s starting to coo back), smiling at each other, and occasionally I can even coax a little chuckle out of her.  She hasn’t full out laughed yet, but those little throaty noises are just as fun and always make my day so much brighter.

Lydia’s current favorite things include: eating, watching the globe mobile over her bed, being swaddled, looking at faces and staring at the ceiling fan in her room, which is what she is doing in the photo above.  (For a picture of big sister Alethea staring at the same ceiling fan at about the same age, click here.)

Although they are predicting another 3 to 5 inches snow tonight, we are holding fast to our hope that with a baby who eats and sleeps well, a summer full of delights is right around the corner.