The junior member of the family.........

Giselle 0.4 is quickly coming out of her eat/sleep stage and starting to open up a personality. This is always an interesting time to watch when you're a dad and I'm able to understand that the second time around. Up to now, the mom is used to cuddling and breast feeding the baby every time it fusses. The baby figures that out and uses it to their advantage. As a dad who is often taking care of the baby on my own, you have to figure out a way to cope with that issue since breast feeding to put them to sleep isn't an option. You become aware of a lot of things that the mom doesn't always get to see.

First off, Giselle is less and less happy with staying up later. Not sure if it's because she's more active while playing or if she's taking less naps. But when 8:30 PM rolls around, she's ready to implode. That used to be more like 10:00 PM a month ago, so her sleeping habits are definitely changing (and for the better too).

She has also started eating rice cereal this week. We learned from Kali 3.2 that there's a point a baby reaches where milk doesn't hold them over and Giselle has reached that point. She had been waking up a couple times a night for a few weeks previous to our vacation. The last two nights I've given her rice cereal around 6:30-7:00 PM and a bottle before she goes to bed. She's been sleeping like a ROCK ever since then.

I've also started weaning Mrs. Lime off the baby monitor like I did with Kali. She's ultra-reactive to any sound that is made. As a result, I turn the monitor down to the lowest setting without telling her. You can still hear the baby cry quite easily, but Mrs. Lime doesn't wake up when the baby turns over or is talking to herself in the crib. Mrs. Lime asked yesterday if Giselle was sleeping really well of late, so I had to fess up to what was actually happening.

Giselle is also talking quite a bit now. I called up my parents on Skype last night with the girls. Kali and I could hardly get a word in without Giselle jabbering at the screen. I felt like I was being constantly interrupted, but I don't think that you can tell a four month old baby that they're being rude. Grandma did complain that the baby wasn't getting enough attention on the blog, yet she continues to act like Facebook is a foreign planet, where a lot of baby pictures are being posted. We're going to have to work on that skill with Grandma since she's likely the only one who thinks Giselle isn't all over the internet.

Giselle is really starting to get some excellent strength. She likes to rock a lot in your lap, which means you're getting a workout just trying to hold on to her while she's doing baby sit-ups. Once she can use her arms a bit more to support herself in a month or two, she'll be able to play with a lot of the baby toys that we have where the baby can sit, bounce, reach for things, etc. You can tell right now that she's very frustrated that she can't do anything. I think it's worse for her than Kali because she sees Kali playing and really wants to do the same things. But soon enough, she'll be doing so. It's only a matter of time.