Baby State of Affairs: 4 months

Max turned 4 months yesterday. Here's a quick update on what he's been up to lately.

Sleep: This last week, Max seems to have dropped his early morning (4 or 5am) feeding. He now sleeps 10-11 hours, usually from 8-9pm to 6-7am. Amazing. Day time naps are still fairly unpredictable, and he still needs to be rocked to sleep. Strangely enough he fell asleep sitting on my aunt's lap yesterday when we took him out to eat at the Cheesecake Factory. That was definitely a first, but it makes me hopefully that one day you can just put him down and he'll fall asleep (fingers crossed).

Eating: When I'm at work, Max eats three 6.5oz bottles. Then I feed him twice when I get home. Since we've been on Christmas break, I've been strictly nursing so I have no idea how much he's been eating. It seems like a lot but lately he's been very distracted at the breast and will pop off often and look around. So who knows how much he's really drinking.

Social: Max is a very happy baby. He pretty much smiles as soon as you smile at him and he loves to talk and giggle (esp if you tickle him). It's the cutest thing ever.

Mobility: He seems to have much better head control these days (thank goodness). He now frequently flips over from his stomach to his back and enjoys semi standing when you hold him up supported. He also scrunches forward a lot more now when in your lap so I think he's wanting to sit up more and more.

Breastfeeding: I still have a lot of milk which appears to be problematic given how much Max sleeps at night. In the mornings, I'm pretty engorged and must race to the pump to relieve it. Unfortunately this makes me susceptible to clogged ducts which I just had a couple days ago. It took two days of vigorous (read: painful) squeezing, massaging, pumping, hand expression, frequent nursing, warm compresses, warm showers, etc to get it out. What emerged was a small hard ball of dried milk. Crazy.

Teething? We took a look at his gums yesterday and think he's starting to teeth. He's certainly been drooling a lot (since the 3 month mark really) and he's got two small lumps on his bottom gums.

Hair: A lot of his hair fell out this past month. There are random bald spots on the top of his head and in a circle around the back of his head. Max has a major comb over. However, there does seem to be a light at the end of tunnel. I examined his front hair line yesterday and there appears to be some new hair growing back. Whoo hoo!.

Last night, to celebrate Max's 4th month mark, we made him a cookie necklace. Apparently, this a chinese tradition where each person eats a cookie off of a necklace that the baby wears. Supposedly, this will cause the baby to drool less. Well, we ended up improvising by making chocolate chip cookies, which of course turned out to be too big. Max ended up wearing an enormous necklace, but I think he was ok with it since he was trying to take a bite.


That is, until he got angry when everyone started taking his cookies away.


Till next month!