Summer is here, after all that rain! We’ve had a hot and sunny week now; apparently yesterday temperatures were 30+ in places. The lack of rain has meant plenty of opportunity to spend time in our little garden. The gazebo has not come down since last Monday and Jessica and I have spent a good few hours on a blanket underneath it.
Jessica loves being in the garden. She’ll roll around and shriek happily for ages, not needing much in way of toys to keep her occupied. Just the sounds and sights of her surroundings must be enough. And I take her point completely – lying on the blanket next to her and staring at that lovely blue August sky is a pretty fabulous thing…!
She naps very well in our garden, too. A couple of afternoons now she has slept on a blanket underneath the gazebo or in her push chair for 1-2 hours at the time. I’m thinking maybe the fresh air has something to do with it. She’s in an even happier mood for the last bit of the day after one of those naps, and I do wish she could get in the habit of having them every day but, alas, it does vary greatly… I can see how she forces herself to stay awake at times, as if sleeping is a bad thing.
She’s much better at sleeping at night. She settles quite nicely after her last milk feed, still around 6.30/7pm. I became braver about a month ago about whether Jessica would throw up in her cot or not from not settling straight away and nowadays put her in her cot straight away after her last feed, whether she’s dozing off or is wide awake still. (Though more often than not she’s close to going to sleep – she still doesn’t nap very well during the day and is pretty shattered by the end of it.) As long as she’s burped and full she doesn’t mind being put to bed. I kiss her goodnight and leave her to it. Sometimes she’ll be very alert when I do, but she just kicks her legs and fiddles with the bumper guard for a bit before she drifts off to sleep.
As I mentioned in my last entry, she’s started waking up again early morning. After some advice from my sister (thanks, Malin!) I’ve now introduced a portion of porridge during the evening to hopefully keep her going for longer during the night. For the last three evenings I’ve given her this about an hour before her last milk feed and at the weekend she woke up at 5.30am on Sunday and 6.30am today, so by all accounts it did make some difference. She was restless during the night, though – I’m not sure whether the heat had anything to do with that. I left one of the small top windows open and didn’t put any pyjama bottoms on her. She did her bit to keep cool, too, by promptly kicking her blanket off, seemingly in her sleep, the couple of times towards the morning when I thought it was getting a bit cooler and put a blanket over her legs as I didn’t want her to wake up from feeling cold.
Jessica has started to suck her thumb, very possibly a result of us not giving her a dummy. She doesn’t suck her thumb to go to sleep first thing at night but now and then I wake up during the night to hear a sucking sound from the cot: Jessica sucking her thumb, presumably as a way to help send herself back to sleep. Some of those times I’ve noticed that as she drifts off to sleep the thumb slides out of her mouth and she stirs again. On a couple of occasions – when that’s happened a few times preventing her from going back to sleep – I’ve got up, folded a muslin square and pushed it in under her arm and hand to prop them up just enough for her hand to stay in place when she nods off again…
I forgot to mention that we went to the health visitor clinic in Horley last Wednesday (1st August). At the surgery we are registered they only have the weighing clinic every fortnight during the summer, presumably because it’s a smaller clinic with less resources and/or with fewer babies on its books. They don’t have any self-weigh service but either the health visitor or the nurse that she works with has a chat with you and weigh the baby. It was the nurse that saw us; a very friendly and fairly young girl. She immediately commented on Jessica’s eyes, saying they were beautiful and throughout our visit she kept being distracted by Jessica’s excited, happy behaviour, interrupting herself halfway through sentences in order to say “hello there, gorgeous!” and “aren’t you a lovely, happy baby!”. (In general, Jessica is so ready to communicate and interact with people that it seems they just can’t help themselves but stop in their tracks to smile back and talk to her.)
Jessica was exactly 9 kilos this time (19 lb 13 oz), which is still on that higher curve. “She’s a tall girl, though”, the nurse said. “Shall we measure her?” (Which they never offered at the Redhill clinic, so of course I jumped at the chance…!) She made Jessica’s length 66.5 cm and seemed to feel she had to reassure me a couple of times that Jessica was “in proportion” and the higher weight curve was nothing to worry about. The next big health check-up for Jessica is at 10 months age at the clinic we’re with (in other places I’ve heard it’s 8 or 9 months) but the nurse asked me to come back to the weighing clinic in a couple of weeks time, when Jessica’s 6 months, to check her weight again then.
I lingered at the clinic for a bit before I put Jessica in her push chair to leave. I could tell she was excited about being there: she was waving her arms and legs, her head turning everywhere and she was looking at some of the babies waiting to be weighed trying to talk to them. I felt almost nasty taking Jessica away from there, as it had only been her and me that morning and would be so for the afternoon too and she wanted to make friends… But if she was disappointed as we left she didn’t let on. She’s very good to me, you know.
Gabriella