Alethea had her two-month well baby check up today.  Her current stats are: Height – 23.25 inches, Weight – 13 lbs 7 oz, Head Circumference – 41cm.  That puts her in the 90th percentile for height, 97th for weight and 95th for head circumference.

On the developmental front, she continues to “talk” more each day, adding new sounds and she grins and laughs if I make the same sound back to her.  Just in the past few days she has started rolling over deliberately.  Yesterday, she rolled over from her tummy to her back four times in a row.  When I put her back on her stomach the fifth time, she started fussing at me, so I figured the game was over at that point.

She also found her hands this month and will sometimes bring them up to her face just to stare at them.  A few times she has managed to get her hand around a toy and bring it up to her mouth to taste it, although the action seems to be mostly a reflex.

We’ve had a major breakthrough on the sleep front.  Alethea had been sleeping pretty well at night, but getting her down for naps during the day was nearly impossible and I was fairly certain that the only reason she was sleeping well at night was because she was exhausted after not sleeping at all during the day.  I tried everything to get her down for naps, swaddling, rocking, bouncing, singing, shushing, back patting, but none of it made her fall asleep and the longer we went into the day without a nap, the crankier she’d get.  Just late last week, I finally put two and two together and realized that since she gets over-stimulated so easily, perhaps all my “get the baby to sleep” efforts were actually keeping her awake.  Now at nap time I swaddle her up, give her the pacifier and put her on my bed with the lights down low and don’t talk to her or touch her.  She’ll look over from time to time just to make sure that I’m still there, but it seems as though when she’s had enough, even rocking or holding is too much for her to handle.  About 90 percent of the time she’ll just fall asleep like that with little or no fussing.  Now I’ve been testing it out in her crib and it seems with the swaddle/pacifier/low light combo, she’ll sometimes even go to sleep without my having to be there at all.  It’s like having a whole different baby.  She’s so much happier and so am I!  I’m just sorry it took me so long to figure it out, but it never occurred to me that I could have a baby who didn’t like being cuddled to sleep.  I’ve never heard of such a thing.

All in all, it’s been a challenging, but good, month.