Four Months

I was just sitting down to write Ivy's four-month post last night when she started crying. It was less than an hour after I'd put her to bed, but she was very much awake. And fussy. She cried and complained and carried on, on-and-off, for an hour and a half, which is not like her at all. 

"Does she ever cry?" Westley's teacher asked me Thursday afternoon. And, like a dope, I said something on the order of, "Oh, she has her fussy times, but she's not much of a crier."

And then last night Ivy cried every couple of hours until I looked at the clock and it was 6:30 AM, and I said, Fine, you win, baby. We'll get up now.


Ivy's been a good sleeper from the start; this new craziness is almost certainly related to teething. There is drool everywhere. When I massage her gums, I feel the little dimples where her first teeth will be, and there are two white lines just barely visible below the surface of the gum...maybe. (I might be seeing things.) In any case, Ivy's mouth is clearly driving her insane. Getting her hands in there helps a little, as does sucking on the baby carrier or an adult shoulder, but mostly she just has to tell us how much she hates everything about it, using her own signature baby-dinosaur language.

At her four-month well-visit on Friday, Ivy weighed in at almost 15 lbs. She's still average for head circumference and weight, and way above average for height. Despite being tall, however, she still manages to look very "plush"—partly because of the chubby pink ounces she's packing on, and partly because we only ever dress her in pajamas.


I had all these noble, good, fashion-conscious intentions of dressing my babies in cute-but-practical outfits. But it didn't work out with Westley, and it doesn't seem to be panning out with Ivy, either. Of course, it's perfectly acceptable to be wearing footie pajamas (or a fuzzy one-piece with animal ears) in public in the middle of the day when your age is measured in months.


Nighttime crabbiness aside, Ivy still loves life. She's very happy to be here, and she's ready to take it all in. If only she could take it all in faster. She loves to watch Westley and his preschool classmates run around the playground, and I can see the wheels turning in her little mind: How do they do that? She seems genuinely annoyed to realize she's just too tired to stay awake and watch the Westley show even one more minute. She usually has to holler about that.

Ivy still talks up a storm, and continues to comment on life even when she's nursing. "Ay-yay-yay," she says with her mouth full.

She rolls over from her back to her tummy easily (though she hasn't done it in the past few days) and immediately gets her knees under her and squirms. It's like she understands the theory of crawling even though her body isn't quite there yet. Which, naturally, makes her crazy and the baby-dinosaur noises come out full-force.


She's crazy-delicious, this soft, fluffy baby of mine. It's hard to believe she's a third of a year old already.


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