Our First Tooth!

We’ve had a few more milestones! Montgomery has her first tooth! After many weeks of excessive drooling and intense teething that would put a new puppy to shame, we finally have a tooth making an appearance on the bottom front of her mouth. If you stick your finger in there to feel it, she chomps down on your finger and makes an adorable angry-looking chewing face. Right now, the tooth is so small that it doesn’t hurt when she bites you, but soon I am sure it wont feel so “cute”!

Montgomery is also “dangerously” close to crawling. She can now get her body up on her hands and knees, and she can even press up on her hands and feet (no knees) but from there she’s not quite sure what to do. She rocks back and forth, and sometimes puts her head on the ground to brace herself, as if her head is a 5th appendage. If she were in yoga class it might be considered a pretty good “downward dog”. Yesterday I watched her as she managed to get up on her hands and knees and then sit there for a bit while she contemplated her next move. She then managed to pull her knees up under her. From there, she leaned over to her left and put her weight mostly on her left leg and her knee – somewhat sitting on that leg. She extended her right leg and gave a good solid push and she propelled herself forward about two inches! Hallelujah! We’re crawling! The whole process took about five minutes and she was completely exhausted, so she gave up after that. We’ll try again tomorrow. She can also push herself in reverse with her arms, which means we can’t leave her on the bed surrounded by pillows anymore! She can push enough to push the pillows off the bed.

On Saturday we went to the Houston Arboretum Halloween festival, which was lots of fun. We walked around for a little bit and checked out all the cool events. I will post photos from that soon. On Sunday morning we went to the grocery store and she sat in the front of the cart for the first time (as opposed to being in her car seat placed on top of the front of the cart). The grocery store is apparently filled with many exciting sights and sounds if you are six months old!!

Our First Temper Tantrum

I forgot to post the photos from Montgomery’s 5-month birthday so here they are, even though she is turning six months old this week!

I am not 100% sure, but I think Montgomery had her first temper tantrum on Saturday night. Let me preface the story by saying she’s usually a pretty easy-going happy baby and she really only cries when she’s hungry or if something is hurting her. She’s also put herself on somewhat of her own routine: morning nap around 10am, afternoon nap around 2pm, bedtime between 8pm and 9pm, nighttime bottles at around 11:30pm, bottle #2 at around 3:30am, and wakes around 6:30am or 7am.

On Saturday night I was getting her ready for bed at about 8pm. The typical routine usually entails a bath (although we didn’t give her one that night), turn down the lights in the living room, turn off TV, relax in the glider and listen to a compilation of soothing songs by Sarah McLachlan. There is usually a bedtime bottle of milk too. This combination of things usually triggers sleep mode in this child within five minutes, but on Saturday night, she continued to cry and even SCREAM loudly, despite the routine and my usual efforts. I thought that something must be wrong! Is she hungry again? Is she hurting? Teething? Have gas pains? Or heaven forbid – something worse? She had just taken a full bottle so she refused any more. She burped just fine so gas didn’t seem to be the problem. I gave her a little bit of Tylenol in case it was her teething. There was no fever so I didn’t think she was sick in any other way. Still no change.

Anyway, I got out of the glider and tried gently bouncing her lightly in my arms or over my shoulder in the dim lights of the living room, trying to sing to her calmly over her piercing screams. After 10 minutes of that and my arms and legs exhausted, I tried getting back in the glider. No improvement – still crying and screaming. So I said what the heck, I’ll just tire her out by keeping her up so I kicked on the lights and the TV and sat back down in the glider, but 15 minutes later she’s still crying and squirming. So we played with some toys – I put her in her play pen with her toys but she immediately started crying. She’s bored with the play pen toys. I put her in her bouncy jumperoo. Same reaction. Not liking it. So we went outside – crying stops! Nighttime is fascinating – dogs are barking, horses are moving slowly in the pasture, strange sounds are coming out of the trees. She is mesmerized and the crying has stopped. Well, only for about five minutes and she got bored with that. Back inside. No signs of sleepiness at all.

OK, maybe a bath will help. I pull out the sink bath tub and start running the water while holder her on my hip. The sound of the running water quickly turns her head and the crying stops. She wants to play in the water. I pull her jammies off and in the tub she goes. She loves this – wants to hold the water sprayer and wants to lick the water. I let her play in the water for awhile since she’s not crying. I pull her out and dry her off. No crying but I’m dreading putting her jammies back on because she hates putting her arms through sleeves and this might trigger crying again. I manage to get the jammies on with minimal resistance. It’s almost 11pm at this point and I think her battery is losing steam. She starts to cry but now it’s a more labored cry – slow and intentional. I take advantage of the lack of resistance and kicky feet I am feeling from her and grab a bottle of formula. I shut off the TV and the lights and get back into the glider with bottle, which she takes eagerly and falls asleep.

My assessment the next day – she stopped crying whenever we did something she liked… This child has learned how to cry to get what she wants! OK call me naïve for not figuring that out that night (ok, I kinda knew in the back of my head but didn’t want to think she was already growing up that fast!). That night, Montgomery was fine when we were doing something SHE wanted to do – like go outside or take a bath. So, crying used to be limited to only hunger and pain, but those days are over. The game has changed to now include using crying to manipulate her parents! This is a new whole new chapter….

We also had our first attempts at eating baby food – which didn’t work out very well! I will write more about that later and post those photos.