5 Months Old - Punky

So much has happened this last month that it's hard to keep track of it all in my head.

The aftermath of Mia trying a strawberry
for the first time

There's been a lot of firsts for my little munchkin, including her first Easter and first try of 'real' food!

Her first go at 'real' food was a month ago today. We were at yoga (I go to a weekly yoga session where you take your bub with you and after an hour of yoga we have all have morning tea together) and sitting around eating morning tea and Punky was watching me eat a strawberry very intently. So I grabbed another piece and held it out to her and she had a couple of licks and then bang! She was chomping down on it and sucking away like nothing else! She would have sucked the bloody thing straight out of my hand if I'd let her! She loved it! So now whenever there are strawberries around I let her have a little chew on one. I've also given her some rice cereal once which went ok, I think she managed to eat maybe half of it (she wore the other half!) but she hasn't quite lost the tongue thrust action so I haven't been pushing it. We'll probably give it another go next week when we don't have so much on and see how we go. I'm in no rush.

Meeting Aunty N at the airport

Punky also met her Aunty N for the first time just before Easter. N had been living in Canada since last May so she missed out on just about the entire pregnancy and Punky's first 4 months but she's been making up for lost time since. 

Easter was lovely, we went to my Mum's for lunch on Good Friday and Dave's Mum's for lunch on Easter Sunday and both days were excellent. Punky had a great time with her aunties and uncles and even had a lick of chocolate (Grandma's doing!) which she definitely seemed to like (no surprises there!).

We spent a week getting Punky out of the habit of waking up twice in the night for a feed, something she started doing after a few unsettled nights not long after she was three months. I knew that she didn't need to be having a feed more than once during the night because she had only been having one feed prior to her unsettled nights and after about 5 nights of Dave going in to re-settle her the first time she woke, she went back to only waking once, between about 4-5am for a feed then going back to sleep till about 8. She was waking much earlier the first week or two after daylight savings finished, which was no fun at all, but thankfully her body clock has now adjusted to the time change and she's sleeping beyond 5:30am again!

Easter morning with her first ever Easter gift

Last night though was a trial. It took an hour to get her to sleep and then she woke about 1:30am and just would not go back to sleep, so finally at about quarter past three, when I just couldn't take the screaming and cold of sitting beside her cot I took her in to my bed and gave her a big feed, to which she fell back into such a deep sleep I was able to put her down a couple of times to get an extra blanket for her bed before I carried her back to her room, something that doesn't happen very often (she usually just wakes up the minute you put her down).

5 months old - 23.04.12

The night before last she also woke up about the same time, screaming, but I was able to get her straight back to sleep. It's a little frustrating because we were finally getting to a point where she was able to settle herself and I could pop her down in the cot and she would nod off herself after a few minutes without me having to pat her or anything, but now these last two days she has been so unsettled. I think it may have something to do with the fact that she has suddenly started to roll from her tummy to her back, something she couldn't do three days ago (she could only roll from her back to her tummy) and she is also starting to get up on her knees while on her tummy and move herself around a bit. She's not crawling yet but I reckon she might start over the next month or so.

I read somewhere that when babies are learning a new skill or hit a new stage of development they tend to have unsettled sleeping patterns, so I hope that is the case here and things will go back to normal soon. Mummy loves her sleep too much to have too many nights like last night. If she was sick it wouldn't be so bad, I could understand, but when there is nothing wrong and she is just grizzling and crying for no reason (she is even half asleep while doing it, her eyes are closed!) and I can't get her to settle, it can be frustrating.

So that has been our last month. It's amazing and scary at the same time, how quickly things are happening now, how fast she is learning new things, but it's so exciting to watch and I feel so lucky and privileged that I have been blessed with my little munchkin.

Oh how I love that face!