Our Story

Dear little Dahlia,

I want to take advantage of calling you that, as I don’t think it will apply for too much longer! Daddy was looking at you just the other day and thinking you are starting to look less like a baby and more like a little girl! How exciting to welcome your “new personhood”, and sad to say goodbye to our little baby. Half of a year is a long time. You are so old! This has been a long month, partly because I decided to switch over to lunar months, and so it is now Sept. 30th as opposed to Sept. 16th. So you are truly 6 months old now, and not just 24 weeks old.

You have changed so much this month. Compared to what you were like last month, your motor skills have developed so much more that you almost seem like an acrobat! You no longer do any contortions when I lay you down. You simply decide whether you want to be on you back or stomach, and make it so. Most of the time, you like to be on your stomach, because that is where the action is at! You can play on your stomach comfortably for such long periods of time now! You regularly get up on all fours and rock, or lunge toward a desired toy. It seems as if you are practically crawling. I joke that I need to get a tether for you soon if you begin to crawl. As it is, if I put you down in one place, you will be completely turned around and a couple feet away in a few minutes. I can imagine how much you will get into things when you begin to crawl!

You can sit up for a few minutes unattended before you fall into your preferred belly position. We borrowed the Excersaucer from cousin Evan and you enjoy being in there too. However, you quickly become bored with the same old safe baby toys, and constantly search for your favorite choking and laceration hazards like: boxes, pens, nail clippers, silverware, power cords, CD jewel cases, and paper. Now paper doesn’t seem that dangerous, right? Since it is really one of your favorites, sometimes I indulge you and let you nosh on a piece. However, the other day you started making gagging noises, and I was able to sweep a piece of macerated paper pulp from your mouth. I think you swallowed another piece. Yikes, I didn’t think you would try to EAT it!! Needless to say, I no longer give you paper.

At 24 weeks old, we introduced you to “solid food”. At least, thats what everyone else calls it. It really isn’t very solid, though, it is more like a liquid. Technicalities, I know. Anyway, I thought I’d be this wonderful mom and make your food for you instead of investing in the baby food making machines like Gerber or Beechnut. However, that lasted for about one meal! I did make you some organic carrots for your first food, though. You enjoying playing with them a bit, but didn’t eat much. Next, I ended up buying Gerber organic food (I wonder how long the organic thing will last. So far it has lasted longer than the “making your food” phase). You liked sweet potato better, and green peas the most. You actually open your mouth and beg for sweet peas now! Pears weren’t a huge hit. I don’t know whether it was the flavor or the temperature (I served them at room temp). They tasted too sweet to me anyway. So while it hasn’t cut into your nursing at all, or changed your sleep habits significantly, you are pretty regularly eating grown up food, as I like to call it. I haven’t completely given up on making your food, either, so we will see how that ends up.

We have been putting you in the church nursery this month, too. You are so well behaved in church, but you love to talk to the stained glass, and whine about not being able to be on the floor or eat the bulletin. Your verbal skills are getting so much better lately. You like to play at talking, and sometimes we hear mamamama or dadadada, and it inspires a thrill in our selfish parent hearts to imagine you are thinking of us. Anyway, we thought it was the right time to transition to the nursery. Well, sometimes it is OK, and sometimes you decide it is definitely NOT OK. We will keep working on it, though, because I think it is important for you to feel comfortable with other people. And since you don’t know what daycare is, church nursery is a good start.

Daddy and I are hoping to teach you a little sign language, and we signed us up for a class in November. We have started with bye-bye. You actually do this one already on your own. You are enjoying moving your wrist to bash the toys in your hand, and sometimes you do this cute wrist movement in the air when you don’t have a toy. It looks like you are waving, so every time you do it, we mimic you and say bye-bye. I really think you did it back to me one day, but I might have been imagining it. You definitely think it is funny when we do it, though. Although we can elicit smiles from you occasionally, the dog is still the best one to get you to laugh consistently. We knew she was good for something.

We went up to Ithaca last weekend to visit Uncle Russell, Aunt Sarah, and cousin Evan. We had a lot of fun walking around town at the apple festival, and doing some hiking. We always enjoy our visits with them, and wish we lived closer. We bought you your first pair of shoes at a little store there, too! They are an oh-so-stylish pair of Robeez, but you would rather suck on them than wear them. You are just too cute sometimes. You’ve also acquired two other nicknames this month: Daddy calls you Boo, and your cousin Evan calls you Yah-Yah.

Oh Little One. Thats what I call you when we have our most tender moments together. I know that things will change as you grow older, and we will have different sweet times, but this name brings to mind those snapshots we share now when my heart just overflows with love for you: your peaceful little face right after you are done nursing, you laying on your back, grabbing your feet and giggling at me, your sleepy groan that finally extinguishes as you lay your head on my chest and succumb to sleep, your radiant, squinty-eyed, McTernan smile when you see me first thing in the morning(I don’t even know how to smile with my whole face like that!), the way your tiny hands gently explore my face as you nurse contentedly. These things are so precious to me!

Well, I will wrap things up by saying that there is still nothing to report in terms of teeth, so there have been several false alarms in that area. Thats OK, although it seems that every stranger feels they have to comment about you “teething” when they see you chewing on something. Maybe it just tastes good. You are also sleeping like a champ from 7PM-7AM with one feeding around 4AM and some minor wake-ups in between occasionally. Naps are getting more consistent, but overall, I really feel like you are getting plenty of good quality sleep. I am so grateful for this. It is hard work to rearrange schedules for bed times and nap times, but I think it is worth it.

Little girl, YOU are worth it. We love you lots,
Mommy

This post is for you loyal readers who have noticed that 4 more weeks have passed, and I haven’t posted Dear Dahlia, Month 6 yet. Well, I finally decided that I would switch over to lunar month counting. Although Dahlia is 24 weeks old, she won’t be 6 months old until Sept. 30th. If I keep counting calendar weeks, I will get to month 12 when she is still only 11 months old!

I had this same dilemma when I was pregnant. OK, pregnancy lasts 9 months, right? But it is also 40 weeks long. And if there are 4 weeks in a month, that means it is really 10 months long. I know most pregnant women feel that way, regardless.

Anyway…look for my next letter near Sept. 30th.

I just really enjoyed my daughter today. She is getting to be a lot more fun lately! She was laughing a lot today, and sweet as anything. She fell asleep on me in her Ergo carrier when we were out shopping for groceries. We had fun playing today, and I love trying to figure out what makes her giggle. When she got a bit grumpy this evening, Daddy came home with renewed energy to entertain her and spend time with her. Yay! So I finished making the soup for dinner while he gave her a bath and played with her. We then did a smooth trade-off and I nursed her to sleep within minutes. She was ready for bed! I was loving the feeling of a sleepy baby draped on my shoulder before I put her in her crib. She is so rarely sleepy on us anymore. Too much to see and do! I put her down in her crib and she groggily groped for her blankie. I put it on her chest and she clutched it close, rolled over and went to sleep. How amazing. I left the room and sent Ken off to Bible Study with the soup. As he was walking out the door I stopped him by saying,

“You have a spoon in your pants!”.

He took it out of his back pocket and dropped it off on the table. “Yeah, that was Dahlia’s toy.”

Just thought that was too cute.

Yesterday Dahlia went to the Doctor for a check-up. Much to all of our surprise (including the doctor — when he picked her up he said she was heavier than she looked) she wasn’t over 20 lbs. She was a mere 19 lb. 12 oz. What a lightweight! Of course, that is off the charts for her age. It’s somewhere around 105 percentile. Her height, at 26 in., is only the 90 percentile, whatever that means!

We are convinced she weighed more a few weeks ago and lost some weight along the way. Her strict regimen of rolling and sitting up exercises could easily account for that loss!

Dearest Dahlia,

Another month has passed us by. This has been a tough one for both of us. This was the month that we decided to allow you to fall asleep on your own. Dahlia, I’m not sure if this topic will be so loaded when you get around to reading these letters, but people have made enemies and fought battles over how to manage the sleep patterns of their children. There are two large theories: “Attachment Parenting” and “Cry it Out”. Now, just from the names, you know which theory is best, right? I mean, who wants to allow their child to cry, and be identified as a “detached parent”? However, there is more to this issue than what appears on the surface labels. From what I have learned in books and by observing the parenting of others, It seems these two camps pan out this way: either you soothe your child to sleep (usually in your own bed) for the rest of their childhood, or you allow your child to cry at some point as they learn to fall asleep on their own. There are excellent parents on both sides of the argument. I tell you all this only to let you know how Daddy and I have agonized over this decision. No parent wants to let their child cry for any reason — this is instinctual. However, despite this very strong reflex, we decided that we would begin to let you cry so that you can learn how to soothe yourself to sleep.

There are several things that helped us with this decision. It has become very clear to us what certain cries mean: shrill screaming is pain or fear, cough-like insistent crying is hunger, wailing and moaning is tiredness or boredom, sporadic bouts of crying at varying levels is protest, etc. Based on this, it was clear to us that you did not need anything, other than sleep, when we put you down to sleep, but instead you wanted us to hang around and soothe or play with you. As one book I read described it, “This may be the first time you ignore protest crying, but it won’t be the last time.”

Also, knowing that learning how to put yourself to sleep is a crucial skill, and since you would have to learn it sooner or later, we figured now was as good a time as any. You are old enough to be comfortable alone, but you aren’t old enough to be able to stand up or move around which I think would have given you more opportunities to protest instead of just fall asleep. I know that I am grateful to my parents for teaching me this skill every time I am able to lay down and fall asleep so easily. I hope to provide that for you, my sweet baby.

Even with all these reasons and more staring me in the face, I still felt it nearly unbearable to take this step and let you cry until you fell asleep. I kept putting it off: after this growth spurt, after vacation, after this teething episode (no teeth yet, by the way), etc. Finally, the necessary impetus forced the decision: YOU. When we returned from vacation, you began to have more and more trouble falling asleep despite our best efforts at soothing you. You became crankier and crankier as it took longer for us to get you to sleep and you woke up more frequently. You started clawing at your head and ears and screaming like a banshee a lot of the time during the day. Monday night it took 3 hours to put you to sleep. Finally, Wednesday night, you began screaming after I started soothing you to sleep by our usual pattern: nursing and rocking. The screaming only became more insistent and loud as Daddy and I alternatively tried to calm you down. You were flailing and wild, out of control. Finally, we decided that we weren’t helping things, and we hesitantly put you in your crib. As we stood there in the dark, you screamed like someone was pulling your toenails out. Of course, that’s how you were screaming when we were holding you, too, so that wasn’t because we put you down. Although it was difficult, it wasn’t as hard as I thought because you were screaming, not crying. You were having a full blown temper tantrum, and I couldn’t help you solve it. You needed to work it out on your own. We huddled quietly in the corner, just waiting and making sure you didn’t hurt yourself! Finally, after 26 long minutes you lay there quietly, kicking the mattress pensively, and then you just fell asleep! You slept through the night, which is something you had stopped doing a while ago, and we all woke up VERY happy!

So, to make a long story longer, it only took about a week of crying until you stopped crying when we put you in your crib to sleep at night. Amazing, but true. You are sleeping much better and your mood is so improved. You are taking better, more consolidated naps during the day. It also makes it much easier to leave you with babysitters so Daddy and I can enjoy some time alone and miss you the whole evening we are away from you! It is so wonderful that you are able to calm yourself now. Sometimes when you are napping, I go in when you are making noises, and you are just hanging out playing with your blankie! So cool.

You seem so much more interactive in general lately. Your grabbing has become dangerous. We have to make sure that we keep a sufficient distance between your hands and anything we don’t want in your mouth. Basically, if it is a choking hazard, it is practically guaranteed that you will be reaching for it, eyes wide and mouth half open in an excited grin of expectation. “Oh what, oh what does that plastic bag taste like?!?”

You also have learned new and interesting ways to contort your body. You can lay down and crane your neck all the way backwards to see things behind you, while pushing with your feet. You accomplished rolling over from your back to your stomach at Grandma’s one day last week with those contortions. Sometimes when I’ve went to get you from your crib, you have turned sideways. I’m not sure how you do that! You are pushing up so much with your hands and feet when we put you on your belly, I practically expect you to crawl away! You haven’t done that yet, but you can hike your rear end up in the air by pushing with your feet. It’s pretty cute

We went on our first family vacation together this month. We headed down to North Carolina on a 10-hour-long road trip. Since we left at 2AM, we were able to keep you asleep most of the way, and happy for the rest of the way. We are so proud of your traveling skills! Of course, the trip home in the daytime was a lot harder, so we stopped a lot more frequently. Everything is harder with a baby. We discovered that when we were trying to get from our house to the beach every morning. So many more things to think about and take with us. And then when you got there, you might not even be happy. Either it was too windy or hot or boring or wet, and you just got cranky. It’s hard to enjoy the beach when you have a cranky baby. But you started to enjoy the beach more as the week went on. You even took a nap on a towel one afternoon. I have to admit, the ocean provides the best white noise! Everyone in the family enjoyed passing you around. You were so amazingly cute in your little bathing suit!! We let you sit in the surf a bit and you enjoyed it. The pool was a bit chilly for you, though. Daddy thought I was crazy when I tried to think of ways to keep you from getting covered in sand. He was right, it’s impossible. But you sure enjoyed squishing it with your toes and grabbing handfuls of it (which were always quickly blocked by Mommy or Daddy before entering your mouth).

You continue to grow at a rapid rate. You are now in size three diapers, which, by the way is the same size that your 16 month old cousin wears! We had to change you over to the convertible car seat this past week sine you have reached the height and weight limits on the infant seat. You now have a large cushy throne in the car. You are almost done with 6 month clothes too. You fit much better in the 6-9 month or 9 month. Daddy and I both think that you are growing into your baby fat well, though!

Well, my little one, this has been a very long letter. Of course, I can go on indefinitely with interesting details of how you brighten our lives every day, but I should end this now. That way we can both get some sleep!

Love Always,
Mommy

Dearest Dahlia,

This month has been a continuation of that common theme in your life–growth. So much change! We estimate that you have been growing at about a pound a week. Your hair is getting longer now too. I have to trim your fingernails frequently (that is so much fun, by the way, especially when you flail your hands while I’m doing it). And those are just your physical changes.

Your motor skills seem the most developed. At the beginning of this month, your grip was a lot like that claw drop game: random grabs that hardly seem to fall where you want them to, and even when they do, they never grasp and pull what you intended them to. Now, however, your hands are very effective tools. I can see you thinking about what you want to grab before you make a move. Most of the time you connect with the desired object, and a large percentage of the time you actually get a hold of it too! This is, of course, immediately followed by shoving the object into your mouth. How exciting! Sometimes you just quietly contemplate the world by staring into space and licking whatever is closest to your mouth at the moment: our hands, the Bjorn, toys, or blankets. I was reading a book last night, and you spent about 20 seconds grabbing at the cover of it, trying to get the letters off. That is a long time of focused attention for you.

You are also using your hands to grab at your mouth and gums. This is more often associated with whining, crying and whinging in general. Pair this with the rivers of drool that you now produce daily, and Daddy and I are pretty sure that you are experiencing the beginning of what will most likely be years of mouth pain. Hurrah! As necessary as those little pearly whites are, they can be the source of so much discomfort. Ask anyone who has experienced wisdom teeth, chipped teeth, cavities, braces, retainers, or even just a cold ice cream cone straight on. That pretty much covers anyone currently alive. However, stay strong my little one. At least they only attack your gums from underneath one or two at at time. We can only grimace in pain right along with you, cuddle you close and tell you that it will all be OK. I bought some homeopathic teething tablets, which I have used once or twice with you. You do seem a bit calmer afterwards, so we will keep using the sugar pills, if only for the placebo affect they have on Mommy.

You have perfected a cute little high pitched squeal that we love, although your vocalizations haven’t been as frequent this month. Perhaps you are busy concentrating on moving instead of talking now! You are moving a lot more in general. When we lay you down, you flail your legs and arms a lot. You also do “sit-ups” quite a bit. Although you are learning that bringing toys to your mouth with your hands it a lot easier than bringing your mouth to the toy with your stomach muscles. I joked with you that we should both do a sit-up exercise program every morning. You have been much more faithful at it than I have!

That is probably why you took me by complete surprise last week when you pulled yourself all the way forward and off the couch. I cringe to write to you that I let you fall. I still feel like such a horrible mother because of it. I think that I was more traumatized than you were, though. I definitely cried a lot longer. You were done crying in 2 minutes, cuddled for 2 more minutes, then slept for about 4 hours. Meanwhile, I was fairly hysterical, calling the doctor and my mom to make sure you were OK. They must get calls like that fairly regularly at the doctor’s office. Looking back on it, I realize that this is just the first (OK, maybe not even the first!) of many times that I will fail you as a mother. I know that I will worry about you for the rest of my life, since I love you so dearly, but I am also relieved that your welfare is not trusted to my incompetent hands alone. I know that God cares so much more about you than even Daddy or I do. This is such a relief, because I know that He is watching over you, and that He trusted you to our care in the first place. So I can’t promise that you won’t ever fall and skin your knee, but I can promise that I will always be there to cuddle you and tell you it is alright. And it is alright, as long as we both realize that God is watching over your every move, and that He cared enough to give us each other.

Love,
Mommy