LizaWasHere

Dear Josie,

Tomorrow, you will be 7 months old.

Your biggest change this month was a HUGE one — you’ve started sitting up independently. And you LOVE it.

You want to sit up and look at everything. There are only 2 times that you don’t want to be sitting: First, when you first see me after some time of being apart — then you greet me like I’m a rock star, and demand to be picked up so we can kiss all over each other. And second, when you’ve been sitting for a long time and you want a break to lie on your back and kick your legs like a soccer star.

You are also experiementing with the noises you can make — babbles, giggles, singing, growling, cooing, and word-like sounds such as “hi.”

This month, we’ve started trying to feed you solid food. So far, you’re just not that interested. You liked carrots, and put up with rice cereal, mixed fruit, and peas. Applesauce, pears, and sweet potatoes might as well be poison as far as you’re concerned. What you really want are glasses of pretty yellow apple juice. Or beer.

What you haven’t done well this month, is sleep. I think you wake up between every sleep cycle, and you have a really hard time soothing yourself back to sleep. You and I have been up together 3 and 4 times per night most nights the last few weeks, and sometimes you’ve even gotten This Mommy up too.

When you get over this nasty cold you’ve had for the last week, we are going to have to start you on some kind of sleeping boot camp, where you will learn how to soothe yourself back to sleep in the night. We love you, but the sleep deprivation is making your Mommies crazy.

Josie, you are a sweet, engaging, loving, adorable baby girl. Your whole face lights up when Noah comes over to talk to you or give you a toy or a hug and kiss. You give me and This Mommy the same treatment when we’ve been apart for a couple of hours. And it melts our hearts and lifts our spirits like nothing else.

Thank you for being our baby girl. We couldn’t have asked for a more wonderful newest member of our family.

love,

That Mommy

Dear Josie,

You turned 4 months old today.

Of the entire family, I think you are handling the chaos the best. Thank God that stranger anxiety hasn’t hit you yet. You happily grin and coo at all the new faces you’ve encountered this month, from old friends of your mommies’, to relatives, to day care providers, to airline personnel and fellow passengers.

The best thing that happened in the last month is that we finalized your legal adoption. You now have two legally recongized parents, forever and irrevokably.

We could not be more thrilled. Unfortunately, by picture taking time, you were a little hungry and tired, so you don’t look all that excited about it.

You’ve become a social delight this month, not just smiling, but laughing and “chatting” with cute conversational babble while sitting up and looking at other people. You haven’t decided to roll over yet, but you like sitting up and being part of the action. We big people inevitibly find this charming, and you could probably get some of your friends and relatives to buy you a pony, just for being so cute and sweet. Even your big brother thinks you are “soooooo cute!”

At the moment, you’ve just begun crying, so I need to end this and go pick you up.

I love you.

That Mommy
The only thing that makes you cranky seems to be the food situation at day care. You are not thrilled by this business of drinking from a bottle, and some days, you reject it almost entirely.

Dear Josie,

Today you are one month old. You came home from the hospital 4 weeks ago today, and you and I moved upstairs from sleeping on the couch the day before yesterday. (It isn’t that we dislike being near This Mommy or your big brother Noah — at first I was recovering from the c-section, and then we were painting upstairs.)

So far, you are a mostly wonderful baby. Developmentally, you’ve mostly unfolded from the tiny little fetal position you preferred in the first couple of weeks. You open your eyes and look around quite about when you’re awake. You have the strongest neck I’ve ever seen on a newborn, and I love to carry you such that while you lift your head to look over my shoulder, I can whisper in your ear about what a strong, healthy girl you are. You also make lots of very funny noises, including seemingly random squeaks and gurgles.

You passionately dislike both waking up and going to sleep. Both of those transitions are usually accompanied by cries and drama. This Mommy thinks you love music and hate having clothes on that cover your feet. I think she might be right about the music, but I think you don’t mind wearing clothes, you just don’t like the process of getting dressed or undressed.

Unless you’re asleep, you seem to hate your car seat.

Noah loves to tell us what you want. We can’t wait to find out if he’s got a good read of your desires or not. So far, we think he might be on track when he suggests that you want to eat or to cuddle, but maybe not so much when he tells us that you want to play with his fishing rod or to play baseball. But he loves you very very much — that part is completely clear to everyone who sees the two of you together.

Although you have no idea what this means right now, your mommies will be putting our house on the market tomorrow. It’s been a crazy, chaotic month in our family, full of crazy debates about what diapers and diaper containers are least smelly, and the frantic cleaning of the house. But the up side of this drama is that we hope you will never even remember living far away from your Milwaukee grandparents.

We love you, Josie. And we are so glad you’ve been in our family for a month already.

love,

That Mommy