Status report: Maia, Month 3

And so we come to the end of the fourth trimester. I've heard the newborn stage described this way, and it feels pretty accurate; in the first three months babies are still doing pretty much what they were doing in the womb--eating, sleeping, eliminating, hiccuping, and sucking on their hands. But in the last few weeks, Maia has started becoming less of a lump and more of a baby. Hooray!


She likes the swing better than she did, and she also likes sitting in the carrier or the Boppy or the booster seat (propped up with a blanket), watching while I peel carrots or Chloë plays with her balloon or we eat dinner. There's a teddy bear I got when Chloë was born that Chloe never really took to, and Maia loves looking at it. We put it in the little tray on her swing and she sways back and forth, back and forth, staring. In the booster seat, we put toys on the tray, and she's started batting at them a little.


She coos sometimes, and if she's a little more agitated--if she's been left alone a while or it's getting on toward feeding time--the coos get louder and more raucous, and then turn into bird trills.

She's starting to drool some, and she's snorfly almost every morning, though it doesn't seem to be sickness. I don't think she can have gotten allergies this early. Chloë is amused when I drop saline into her nose and then use the big blue bulb on her; Maia, not so much so. We're going longer between feedings now, two and a half hours or so, though it varies, and sometimes she wants to stop after twenty-five or thirty minutes instead of the full forty. It's odd, at least compared to Chloë's utter ravenousness at this age, but as long as she's happy, I certainly don't have a problem with it.


Oh, Dad. You're not going to play that one, are you?
The crankiness of last month has gone away. We've been giving her baby Zantac, which has helped, but recently she's also been scream-free a couple of nights we forgot or had no chance to give her the evening dose, so I'm thinking she's outgrowing the reflux. She still wakes up frequently in the night; I think the most we've gone is five hours between feedings, and only the once. Once I'm over the cold I've got and a little caught up on sleep I'm going to do my best to try taking her into the nursery for night feedings instead of nursing her in bed. (I keep saying this.) She's moving toward regular napping, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, though she's not at the stage where we can put her down for a nap yet.


She adores her baths. She seems to know when we're undressing her for one; if she was fussy or agitated she calms down and waits for her onesie and her diaper to come off. I take advantage of these times to tell her about all her baby parts and kiss them, or deliver raspberries. She grins and moves around in a way that suggests she would be laughing if only she knew how. She's an awful cutie. I think we'll keep her.