Changes for Laurel

Laurel turned six months old on July 8th, she learned how to sit a few days later, and just yesterday she had her first solid food*: applesauce. Oh, she was ready for it! For about the past month she had been watching with great interest as we put food into our mouths. Recently she had even begun mimicking chewing motions.

And how did she like it? She liked it a lot. She ate many spoonfuls, opened her mouth wide for more, and even grabbed the handle of the spoon to bring it to her mouth. The suggestion is to wait a few days after introducing a new food in case there are any adverse reactions, but pretty soon she'll be ready to move on to the second course. Maybe banana. Or iron-fortified rice cereal.

What else is new for Laurel? She has her own bedtime routine now, which she seems to enjoy. It has made getting her to bed easier, but unfortunately it has not improved the increased night-waking I mentioned in a post two weeks ago. Sadly, I can no longer say that she sleeps through the night. Is it strange that this child slept better at three months than she does at six months? Her pediatrician suggested that it is due to hunger -- she is bigger, she needs more calories, and she'll go back to sleeping through the night when she gets two good meals of solids every day. I don't know if I buy this theory -- a small bowl of applesauce can't possibly be as filling as a quart of rich, fatty milk.

She has awoken at night all but one of the previous 30 nights. Sometimes when she wakes at night she nurses once and then falls right back to sleep, but this has been happening less frequently. On ten of the previous 14 nights, in fact, she has been awake for a stretch greater than 30 minutes; five times she was awake for more than an hour. And, unfairly to me, several times she has been asleep, but her moaning and thrashing has kept me awake. (Yes, she still sleeps swaddled in the co-sleeper bassinet by my bed. We'll probably move her into her own room once she learns to sit up on her own.) Why so much waking? Why the moaning? Could be teeth, I suppose, although giving her Tylenol doesn't seem to make a difference.

But, you know, I can't complain too much about Laurel's sleep. At her age, Isaac was a much, much worse sleeper. He woke up at night more frequently, stayed awake for longer stretches of time, literally could not fall asleep on his own, and had to be gotten back to sleep repeatedly because he woke up nearly every time he was set down! The difference is so dramatic, in fact, that I really should devote an entire post to it. Let's just say this: at six months of age, Isaac slept an average of 11 hours and 45 minutes per 24-hour period. Laurel sleeps 13 hours and 15 minutes. Folks, that's a difference of an hour and a half.

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*If you visit the solid food tracking section of our baby-tracking site, Trixie Tracker, you may need to toggle back and forth between the two kids by clicking on "Switch Child" right under the kid's name. Obviously we're no longer tracking solid foods for Isaac!

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We didn't give Isaac solid food until he was seven months old. I waited so long because I wasn't ready to let go of his infancy, and because I was waiting for him to be a solid sitter. His first food was mashed avocado, fed to him on my fingertip, and he didn't like it. He spit it out and cried.