Katherine is 2 months old!

Wow how the time flies!! She is already 2 months old. I kind of feel like since we came back from the hospital till just recently I've been living in a parallel universe of feeding, changing, fussing, baby gas etc... One day I realized that all my pregnant friends already had their babies and that life was moving on FAST!

So anyway, here are the updates. What a difference 1 month makes! She now weighs  and measures   .

Stats:
Weight: 5.4 kg = 11.9 lbs (75th percentile)
Height: 57.5 cm = 23.5 inches (75th percentile) - Just want to point out that it is 3 INCHES IN 1 MONTH!!
Eyes: still gorgeous blue with a dark ring around the edge of the iris. Hope they stay that way.
Hair: still has it all, male pattern baldness on top, mullet in the back, but has a bit of a bald spot in the back from turning her head to the sides all the time.

She got her first round of vaccinations at her 2 month appointment and it has been pretty rough...

Eating:
She is on a pretty good 3 hour schedule during the day. We start the day at 7:30, then 10:30, 1-1:30, 4-4:30, 7-7:30. The afternoons can get a bit irregular depending on activities. If we go for a walk and come home early she might decide she's not going to wait and wants to eat right away. Or if she has a bad day of gas and screams all her energy out, she wants to eat sooner too. Or if we stay out longer, we may push it to 3.5 hours. We try not to go over that so that she sticks to her routine. The pediatrician agreed with that.

Late in the evening we try to do a "dream feed", kind of a half asleep feeding around 11pm-midnight. Still trying to figure out what works for us. Ideally I would like to feed her around 10-10:30 then go to sleep but a lot of the time I end up going to bed at 9-9:30 because I'm so tired so I have to set my alarm clock for the dreamfeed anyway.

After that on a good day she'll sleep till 3- 3:30, eat, then sleep till morning. On a bad day she'll wake twice during the night, aroud 2 then 4. Not bad at all though.

Since even when she wakes at night she does not cry, just kind of fusses and flails her arms and grunts, at her appointment, her doctor told me to try to not get up and go feed. She told me to wait till she actually starts crying. Being over 5 kilos, she's supposed to have enough energy to go the entire night without replenishing calories. We are going to attempt that going forward. I might start with dropping the late night wake up and see what happens.
Sleeping:
Following the daytime feeding schedule, she will take shorter or longer naps. It all depends on a day.
***I do not have a good way of putting her down for daytime naps so if anyone can recommend something, that would be great.***
Right now, she won't be forced into a nap if she does not want one. She sleeps really well during walks so if I want to make sure she gets some sleep, I take her on a looooong walk around the city.

She is very gassy though - borderline colicky - so sleeping longer stretches during the day is a challenge. She will fall asleep and then wake up all of a sudden and start screaming like someone is poking her in the belly with a hot poker. It was really bad earlier on. She seems to be growing out of it slowly.
We've tried a ton of different remedies American gripe water which we brought here from home, English gripe water purchased here, InfaCol (English version of Mylicon), dill seed tea, belly massage, bicycling legs etc, and nothing really works. No surprise though. If there was an effective remedy for baby colic there would be no colic anymore.

Of the things we've tried the English gripe water and dill tea seem to work the best. I knew from before that dill seed is typically used to relieve gas so I was glad it worked. She had a bad reaction to Infacol and was spitting up and crying a bunch after it so I threw it out. Our pediatrician also said that she just has to grow out of it so we're crossing our fingers and waiting.

As far as night time sleep - she has gone 6 hours between feeds a few times, but it is not consistent. Once she went 7 but I think that was a complete fluke. Most of the time it's about 4.5 hours and she goes into her grunt, flail arms routine. As I said before, she never really cries at night either just grunts, tosses around and flails her arms. Which according to her doctor is most likely just a sleep stage and I should leave her alone, not feed her, unless she actually cries... We shall see...

So anyways, when she starts her routine I wake up and start questioning is she hungry is she not, am I being a bad mother and starving her if I don't feed her...  So a few times I've gone and fed her and she only ate a small amount and then woke up 1:30-2 hours later grunting and smacking her lips like she wanted more so I went and fed her again. Maybe her doc is right after all...
And then on a good night I will guess it right, feed her enough and she sleeps till it's time to get up.
I guess these are all the kinks I need to work out. She sleeps pretty good at night though once she successfully falls asleep.

Activities:

During the day she will play on her activity mat several times. She loves it! We have a Skip Hop Funky Farmyard mat and she loves looking at the animals and listening to their jingling, squeaking and music. She will kick around and laugh. So cute!

Of course after a while she gets overstimulated and gets hiccups and starts crying so I have to carry her around and soothe her. She is a major crier and wants to be carried around A LOT.
She now follows us with her eyes and "talks" to us a lot. Love it!

Milestones:
Around week 6 she started smiling. Very sporadically at first, and I questioned if it was just gas, but now she does it all the time and even laughs out loud and lets out these adorable squeals huh's and agoo's. Love it! I don't have any pictures of her smiling though because every time I whip out my camera he gets distracted and just stares. And daddy is not around to take a picture of us being silly. Maybe soon. This is the best I've got I guess but it's hard to tell that it's a smile.

Randoms:
She started HATING the guts of the Boppy pretty much right after I posted the 1 month update haha... And she is totally fine being on her back now.

After completing week 5 she went through a growth spurt which basically meant she wanted to eat every 2 hours or less, and the rest of the time she slept. After that all of a sudden she did not fit into the Newborn clothes anymore. She has gotten so big! Now after the doc appointment we know that the growth spurt resulted in growing 3 inches! Whoa!!

Just before she turned 8 weeks old we started putting her in her crib in the nursery to sleep the night and she took to it right away!! There was no transition period or trying to get her used to it. I attribute this success to the VTech musical and luminary toy we got from one of CJ's co-workers. I will post about it separately because it is just so darn cute how she likes it. Watching the lights and listening to the music became our bedtime routine and we've been doing it in her room from the beginning. At first, after the musical toy time, we would transfer her to our room into the pack'n play after she fell asleep, but then one evening I just put her in the crib and she slept just fine. So now that's what we do! Yea! Next step - get her to sleep longer stretches at night.

But the best thing so far - and I might be deluding myself in thinking this - she seems to recognize me and smiles and talks to me a lot. Sometimes when I leave her on the activity mat or in her crib or p'n p just hanging out she will be entertain herself for a while and then she starts calling after me. At first it's a nice soft 'Mom!' (I swear that's what it sounds like!!). Then it gets louder 'MOM!', then it's "MOM MOM!!' and if don't come back she does one more cry and then goes into meltdown mode... haha. But when I show up she will quiet down and start showing off. She wants me to watch her play. Too funny. Also, sometimes when she gets frantic from crying I am the only person who can soothe her. Mommy powers I guess...

Here are her 2 month pictures. Looking fairly content...

And then I wanted one where you could see her body (and with a head band...) so I took her PJ's and this is what happened... HILARIOUS!!!

Silly Mommy... what were you thinking... I set off a 30 minute screaming fit. I must have touched the tender spots on her thighs where she got her shots today. After this she would not let me put her down for a second until she went to sleep for the night. That's what I get got messing with her... haha...

We love this little girl so much!