5 months

when ryan turned 5 months, we were in LA for a wedding! it was his first time on a airplane and he did great, but the flight is only one hour =). we were only there for a weekend so i had one outfit for myself and everything else was for the baby! he needed so much stuff and we had to bring his carseat and stroller. southwest doesn't let families board first anymore unless you are in the A group. family boarding is now in between the A and B groups, i wonder why they changed it.

so, ryan is doing well. we are on a semi-regular schedule now, yay! it took a lot of work but he's finally *almost* there. the most regular thing right now are his first 2 naps, both lasting around 2 hours. his bedtime is between 7-8pm but his wake-up time in the morning is still very irregular, sometimes it's 6am other times it's 8am! and he's still waking up at least 2 times at night, if i'm unlucky 3 times. He's only woken up once at night 2 times this whole month. i think the problem is that during the day, he gets reallly distracted when eating. the only times he eats really well is at night =/. when he was getting distracted during the day time, i thought i should feed him more often, but that doesn't seem to be working. So now i'm going to only feed him every 3-4 hours as opposed to every 2 hours and see if when he's hungrier he'll eat more. I think now that we are on a pretty good schedule, I can now put him down awake and he'll fall sleep (but usually with a little fussing. now it's usually less than 5 minutes - when it first started it was around 15 minutes or so)! OMG! it's such a breakthrough. we were still rocking him and putting him down totally asleep up until 3/4 months and i never thought i would see the day I could do this! i also didn't think i would be able to handle doing cry it out, but it's actually not too bad. i usually don't let him cry longer than 15 minutes. and i can usually tell by his cry if he'll be able to fall sleep/go back to sleep.

oh, and ryan is sleeping in his own crib and in his own room now! it was bittersweet moving him to his own room at 4 months, but when we moved his bedtime earlier, when we went to bed a few hours later, it would disturb him and he would wake up. It took a few days for him to get adjusted to his crib and room, but now he's fine in there. He's growing up!

So I am back to work now, it's great that Ryan sleeps about 4 hours during the day time because it gives me time to work. While he's awake he's pretty content in his jumper or playing on his playmat, so it hasn't been too bad. I think my next door neighbor has found a nanny that we'll be sharing starting in March. We haven't really worked out the details yet though.

Ryan still has not rolled over and I think it's going to be a looong while before he ever does. He doesn't twist his body at all, he kicks his feet, that's about it. He's really into his hands and stares at them a lot. He can hold stuff now, but isn't really that interested in grabbing things that you put in front of him. He'll look at it and kind of give you this look like "Cool, there's this thing in front of me" but won't try to grab it. However, if you put something next to his hand, he'll grab it. He's weird. He alo likes to put anything that is near the vicinity of his mouth into his mouth. So he'll put toys, your hand, his hand, your shoulder, etc into his mouth. He smiles alot, and giggles and "talks" more often than before.

Oh yeah, we also started trying to feed him rice cereal. We've only done it a few times so far. I don't think he really likes it that much, most of it ends up on his bib because his tongue still pushes everything out. We are just going to keep on trying every few days until he "gets" it or likes it. then we can move onto oatmeal. Once he is 6 months we can start baby food and I think I'm going to attempt making it myself =O

So for next month, we need to buy a high chair and I think he's ready for a real stroller. We also need to get a new car seat. Ahhh...my little baby is growing up!!