Seth 21 Weeks

Dear Seth,

You are 21 weeks old today, almost officially 5 months!

So now that I'm back at work we finally have something loosely resembling a routine. So at long last, here's a little run down of a day in your life: You start your day around 8am most mornings - occasionally at 7am or rarely at 9am if you're feeling especially generous, but interestingly almost always at the top of the hour. You and daddy hang out and have breakfast and then usually take an hour and a half long nap starting at around 9:30-10am (or about an hour and a half after you get up). After that you wait patiently for me to get home from work so you can eat again, and by then you are pretty grumpy and frantic. But you give me the biggest gummy smile when I walk in the door. Maybe you're just thinking "yay, lunch is here" but it still makes me feel pretty good. After you eat you go down for your afternoon nap almost right away and sleep for about 45 minutes usually, sometimes more. While you're napping I try to get the diaper bag and car seat ready so that we can leave the house fairly quickly after you wake up (if we happen to be getting out of that house that day). After your nap we go run errands or go on a walk, or just play and sing songs at home. You still love your play mat and will lay there batting and grabbing stuff for like an hour on your own. If you seem to be bored with that I sit you in the high chair and we listen to music while I cook or tidy up the kitchen. You seem to prefer staring out the window at the trees to watching me do stuff, which is fine with me. Around 5pm you take another nap, usually a pretty short one. When you wake up you either get a bath or you hang out in the kitchen with me some more as I scramble to try and get dinner ready. You only get a bath about twice a week at the moment because I'm doing some experimenting to address the rashy rash you get on the backs of your knees. Bathing seems to make it much, much worse, so I don't know if it's the soap or what. You're still going to bed anywhere from about 6:30-8pm, depending on your mood and how your afternoon naps played out. Then you usually wake up once or twice over the next couple of hours, and then on a good night another once or twice before morning. On a bad night it's every hour and a half, uggghhh. That happens more often than I'd like. Daddy and I roughly take turns going to tend to you at night. The way it works usually is if I don't think you ought to be hungry I give your dad a shove and he stumbles in to shush you.

That's a typical weekday... weekends are still pretty random and unstructured. And it's summertime, so I don't expect that to change any time soon. You seem to be rolling with it pretty well though, so I'm not worried.

Feeding you is still pretty enjoyable for the most part. You love your food and you're so cute with your satisfied little sigh you make with every swallow. If I had to describe our style it would be more "on demand" than anything else, which I know isn't very Baby Wise/Whisperer of us. But it's working and I don't think either of us has any complaints. You often eat just before nap time or bed time, although you never fall asleep *while* eating (except during the night), which to me is the important thing. And you sleep better that way, so experts be darned.

You love music. The Itsy Bitsy Spider always gets a big smile out of you. Even daddy sings that one for you almost every day. I sing to you out of our lullaby book every night and you love it. I sing to you during the day as often as I remember.

Your grabbing skills have improved greatly the last couple of weeks, I'm sure because you get lots of practice. You grab your toys, my lips, the cats' fur/ears/tail, Natalie's hair, my boobs, to name a few of your favorite targets. You're also starting to bang on things. When you're in the high chair with a rattle in your hand, watch out! Bang, bang, bang! The best part is you flinch every time you hear the bang, like "ugh, what was that??" You also flinch on the clapping when I sing "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" (*clap clap*).

You frequently roll onto your side now if there is a toy over there that you want. It's only a matter of time before you end up on your tummy by accident. Once you get on your tummy you do some pretty serious scooting. Today you pushed yourself backwards a good 6 inches or so. You also do some army crawling from side to side if you're motivated. Yikes, I am not looking forward to baby proofing. Way too many stairs and sharp edges in this house!

Mmmkay, well I think I've more than made up for my short post last week. I'm sure you'll be waking up from your evening nap any minute now so I better go start dinner.

Love ya!

Love, Mama