And another month goes by....

Yeah, I suck at blog posts now that I am back at work. But an ice day and a napping baby mean I might have 10 minutes to update!

We are working on a few skills these days. The biggest one is sleep-training. I know, she's nearly months old. We should have tackled this one months ago. Well, the truth is, I tried. We were going to do it over Thanksgiving so we had a few days off to get Jocelyn on a schedule. I researched sleep-training techniques, chose one and bought a book. But guess which other grown ups in the house read the book - if you guessed NONE of them, you are correct! So I was trying to implement these techniques in the book and had hubby-poo and MIL telling me all about the things I was doing wrong. So since I had no support, sleep-training never happened. I'm pretty sure that HP regrets not having my back before, because whenever he complains about our baby who won't sleep he has the knowledge that he wouldn't support the sleep-training.

Anyway, he's on board (MIL still isn't, and still kindly offers to do things to help Jocelyn sleep that are counter to the sleep-training protocol). So we have been trying again. We are using the Baby Whisperer technique, which is a bit gentler than some of the others. And we are being gentler with it even still. Because I don't see a reason to traumatize my baby any more than I have to. Some nights she wakes up every hour, others she sleeps for 3 or 4 hour stretches, and others still she gives us 7 or 8 hours in a row. She CAN do it. She will start to do it more consistently.

Which brings me to my next milestone. Jocelyn has 2 teeth popping in. This could explain (at least in part) why sleep has become so awful lately. Poor kid. She's being a champ, though, and only fussing about it at night. She hasn't bit me during nursing yet, either, although she has lost some interest in nursing (I suspect that the sucking doesn't help). I can't wait for them to finish coming in, though. The poor kid is just unhappy (relatively speaking, of course, because she's still not actually unhappy by baby standards, just Jocelyn standards).

We are also working on expanding her diet. I think I mentioned that rice was only barely passing, oatmeal was a total failure and carrots were pretty much a failure. Since then we have tried a few other things. She will tolerate butternut squash. She hated Hated HATED zucchini. Avocado might as well have been poison. Pears were the GREATEST thing ever. Whole wheat cereal is pretty good. And apples are about as good as pears. And bananas will do, but preferred when the bits come from Mommy's banana rather than a bowl of mashed up fresh bananas or pureed banana baby food. Sweet potato will also do in a pinch. Other than the cereals I am still making everything, which is hard but not that hard. Oh, and we have started her on those Gerber puffs. She identified them as food immediately, but can't quite get them into her mouth. She likes them (mostly) after we put one in her mouth. She tends to drop them a lot, so Dakota hovers around when Jocelyn is eating them. It's funny.

My girl is also a dancing fool. This child LOVES music. Her mode of going down for a daytime nap is to listen to music and have one of us dance her around. She gets the biggest smiles on her face and just giggles, kicks and bounces until she falls asleep. It's adorable.

Jocelyn is still sitting. She is working on her reaching range while seated. She's really stable now, and can reach pretty far to get what she wants. A few times she will fall and roll onto her tummy. I keep on waiting for that to turn into crawling, but it usually results in crying. I shouldn't rush the crawling, though, because it would mean we need to get on the horn with the whole baby-proofing thing. She has pretty much lost all interest in lying down. She even cries and fusses when getting dressed on her back. She wants to SIT UP!

She has also been into her reflection lately. Well, to be fair, she is just as interested in other babies. But we don't have many other babies around, at least not as readily as mirrors. so she will stare at herself for as long as we will hold her to the mirror. Her play mat has a mirror, and she will grab it and kiss it. It's about the cutest thing ever.

The vocabulary has grown significantly as well. She is now saying 'ba-ba', 'la-la' and a whole slew of other words. The things that make her laugh has also grown quite a bit. She is ticklish on her thighs now, which is fun. She is getting good at holding weight up on her legs (and loves to dance on the bar - just like her mommy!), and giggles at herself when she does that. She's big into grabbing glasses (the kind on your face, and the kind that hold water), and when she grabs water-glasses she brings it to her lips to drink (which she has gotten really good at).

Jocelyn is also getting very expressive. She is getting really good at asking for what she wants. Sometimes it's with moans and grunts accompanied by hands reaching towards it. But other times she does a charming little flirtatious thing involving giggles, coos and smiles as she reaches for what she wants. It's really, really hard to say no to that one. Flirting has been her new thing. She will stare and smile until she catches your eye, and then turn her face away, and then turn back. It's SO freakin' cute!

Well, my goal is to update this a bit more often, that way I can add actual content and not just a log of the things that Jocelyn does. Because while I find all of this stuff fascinating, I am sure that I am the only one (well, and Hubby poo, but he doesn't read my blog).