Margaret at Three Months

The children made this foil hat for Margaret (at the crack of dawn when I was pouring my coffee). It reminded me of some foil hat with which to tune in to alien messages, which made me laugh--but as I said, I hadn't had my coffee yet, so maybe "you had to be there."

Margaret will be three months old tomorrow. Being the third child, I have stopped being able to keep track of how many weeks old she is (whereas with John, I probably could have answered someone off the top of my head, 'Oh yes, my baby is 43 weeks 5 days today.")

The newborn chaos is starting to fade. Margaret is woken every morning by her siblings and I haven't figured out yet how to prevent that, so she falls asleep again about 45 minutes later (probably a continuation of her night sleep). She has consolidated her morning nap, which seems to start around 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. and lasts three and a half to four hours. If everything goes right, I can get her to sleep in her bassinet for that extended period. Do you know how productive I can be when not carrying a baby for four hours? Then during the afternoon she takes a series of one-hour naps (often in her bassinet!), and I imagine her afternoon nap will consolidate in the coming weeks. She's usually asleep for the night by eight and her wakings are erratic: might be twice, might be five times.

Margaret weights about fourteen and a half pounds now, which is a nice gain of two pounds in the last month.

She is basically calm now during her quiet, wakeful periods, which is so much appreciated by me. It seems like her extended crying periods happen if she wants to fall asleep, but we're at a period of activity in which I can't go sit and nurse her down (e.g., smack in the middle of making dinner, or driving down the road), or if she's having ouchie reflux.

Other than that, she now reclines and watches her hands float or her siblings do antics. She smiles and coos back and forth with us. I feel like I'm starting to breathe a sigh of relief and have some order to my days!