Jonah’s Sixth Month

five months

to

six months

(November 1 - December 1)

Jonah got his first small hair buzz/trim, by Daddy. His hair is just so fluffy and sticks straight up! It is like a baby bird with downy feathers.

Jonah tried his first real food! It was pureed sweet potatoes! He gobbled it right up and really seemed to love it! After three days of that, we tried bananas.

Here are Jonah's six month measurements:

Height: 2 ft 3 in - 56%
Weight: 14 lbs 11 oz - 4%
Head Circumference: 17.32 inches - 63%

Sadly, Jonah is still really struggling with teething pain.

He is constantly kicking like a maniac!

By now, I have given up on my previous self-soothing strategies for naps. He was just crying way too long and seemed like a constantly unhappy baby. He was just crying tons and still not getting rest. So I backed off and decided I would give him three hours of wakefulness and nurse him to sleep. I hated getting into the nursing-to-sleep habit, but I just wanted to get him back to some good rest before trying again in another month. It feels like that is working better for him. A couple of his naps are starting to get longer and he does seem happier. I think the previous two hour strategy was just too short a time for him. At night he still wakes up, usually twice. The goal is to make him cry it out if he wakes up within two to three hours and force him to self-soothe back to sleep. That often works fine; he will stop crying within an hour (that is when I turn off the monitor, set an alarm for an hour, go back to sleep, and then when the alarm goes off I will check to see if he has fallen asleep). There have been a couple of times that I have needed to go in at the one hour alarm, but generally it works and he is already asleep.

He got his first cold. Right now it is strictly stuffiness. He has a lot of mucus. Poor guy. You can tell it is really bothering him. That has also affected his night time sleeping. He needs more than nursing to sleep. He needs lots of swaying in my arms to help him fall to sleep in the night. It is brutal. He wakes up more frequently, unfortunately, but we are just letting this sickness play out and hope to improve things when he gets better.

My milk supply has already drastically decreased! Jonah is mostly just nursing down for naps and for bedtime. Sometimes when he wakes up from his nap, I will nurse him just to help soothe him until he fully wakes up or falls back to sleep. Other than that, he is drinking formula from a bottle. I am so grateful that he is able to happily take either nursing or a bottle.

By the end of the month, his night sleeping was just getting even more horrible. During the Thanksgiving Break while staying with my family, I had to go to him every time he was crying because we were all sharing a room. He would wake up every one and a half to two hours and it was a struggle to keep getting him back to sleep because eventually he stopped being hungry and just needed to be held and rocked until he would fall back asleep.

Here are some more pictures from the last month:

Jonah's Six Month "Photo Shoot" with Tess Thackeray:

Such a cutie!