Still very much unpacking in-between work and baby-care, which unfortunately has made the blog suffer. Jessica seems to have settled in well at our new home though – for three nights in a row now she has slept through until 4.30/5am and after a feed she’s gone back to sleep again for another hour or two.
Have a few bits of news since last. When put on her tummy this week, we noticed that Jessica’s started to lift her bottom up and bending her legs to try to get forward. She doesn’t seem to be able to hold her head up much while doing this, so we’re guessing her arms aren’t strong enough just yet, or maybe she hasn’t quite got the hang of what to do with them. (Alas, we have not seen her do a full roll yet, though she still enjoys rolling over on her side when having her nappy changed, which sometimes complicates things slightly. We probably should put her on her back more often than we do, to give her enough opportunity and motivation to try to roll over and ‘escape’…)
A few days ago when on her tummy she reached out and grabbed a bundle of plastic teething rings that I’d put just within reach and started chomping on them, so I guess we can now say that she’s ‘played’ on her tummy. But the really good news is that this morning she managed to ‘shuffle’ her way forward on her tummy to reach and grab a toy that Ian had put just that little bit out of reach – so even if she certainly isn’t crawling yet, she’s getting the hang of moving herself forward!
Each day this week I’ve also given her a few small teaspoons of pureed vegetables – carrot for three days and then sweet potato. (Very clever of me to choose orange – we’ve got some very interestingly coloured muslin squares about the place now, as ‘recycled’ orange-fleshed root veg stains apparently don’t really go out in the normal wash…) Jessica’s been very keen, frowning initially but happily trying another mouthful. She’s been watching us eat our food more and more intently in the last couple of weeks, so I guess she wants to find out what all the fuss is about. She seemed quite interested in the spoon itself too and wanted to grab it off me to try and feed herself (although, at this stage, I’m assuming that it was more a result of her interest in putting objects in her mouth, rather than her thinking she could feed herself). I let her take the spoon and the results were a bit messy – Ian discovered some carrot in her eyebrows still that afternoon…!
We had our first visit from a Horley Health Visitor last Friday (13 July). She told me about a new approach to weaning, which it seems NHS are recently introducing, called ‘baby-led’ weaning. Apparently the general gist of it is that you give your baby finger foods – such as pieces of carrot, broccoli, etc. – that they can grab, touch and put in their mouth to explore to their hearts content. As they develop the ability to chew and swallow, one will notice more and more bits of those foods in their poo as they gradually start to eat. The theory is that babies can find parent-controlled weaning very frustrating – from having themselves decided how much food they’re having when breastfeeding (might be worth remembering here that the NHS also promotes the ‘feed on demand’ approach rather than structured, time-tabled feeding…), suddenly they’re allotted specific amounts from someone else with a spoon. According to the Health Visitor, links have been found between traditional weaning and speech problems… Well, can’t imagine there could be any harm in letting Jessica play around with a few carrot sticks, for example (as long as she doesn’t poke an eye out or chokes on them, of course).
Speaking of food, I have now stopped breastfeeding. We’d thought before that I would do that as we started to wean Jessica. I guess as we’ve already used formula to ‘top her up’ in the evenings and as an ’emergency’ food when out and about, she hasn’t seemed to mind going over to a formula-only diet. I’ve done it gradually over a couple of weeks, both for my own sake and for hers. The Health Visitor had brought scales with her Friday and as we’d not been able to weigh Jessica since before our holiday in Sweden we checked her weight then. She’s now 8.6 kilos (19 lbs), which in fact is on the next curve up on the centile chart. The Health Visitor advised me that it’s fairly common that babies put on a bit extra as they’re changing over from breastmilk to formula milk – as milk tends to flow more easily from a teat, they gulp as eagerly as before and end up eating more. This should, however, sort itself out after a while as Jessica’s getting used to exclusively bottle-feeding and the Health Visitor said not to do anything to try to control Jessica’s feeding at this stage.
Jessica really enjoyed playing with a ‘control panel’-style, battery-driven toy of Isac’s when we were in Sweden, so Ian and I found what we thought looked like a similar toy for her. As she’s got bored with her baby gym now – presumably because she has to lie flat on her back to use it and she can’t even grab the toys properly as they’re attached – she can now play with this one whilst sitting in her baby bouncer. She seems to quite enjoy it but sometimes when she’s tired it can get a bit too much for her – when she whacks one of the buttons which are the easiest to reach, it plays a whole tune, rather than just a sound, which we would have thought maybe would have been more suitable. A bit to intense for her when she’s not feeling too energetic…
Our garden is pretty ‘basic’ – a long and narrow bit of grass with a few rose bushes and other shrubs on the sides and a shed down the far end. Jessica still seems fascinated with it. We’ve taken her for a stroll around the garden on a more or less daily basis (some days actually more than once) and can spend a good 45 minutes there walking around and stopping every so often to look a bit closer at a few leaves or a flower. She likes to reach out and touch things and most of the time tries to put them in her mouth too – I guess it’s quite handy that as she grabs things she very often turns her hand around so that what actually goes into her mouth is the back of her hand or fingers rather than whatever she’s holding…
View of our ‘new’ house and garden from the shed:
Gabriella