Four Months

Josiah turned four months old over a week ago, but I wanted to save my blog entry until we had his pediatrician stats. The pictures are from the right date though.

18 lbs. (90 percentile)
26.5 inches (50-75 percentile)
17 inches around the head (75 percentile)

Observations Interspersed with Pictures:
+For the most part, Josiah seems to be content and happy. He grins and laughs at us all the time, which makes it very rewarding to tickle him.


+I don't know when exactly it happened, but he definitely distinguishes Jonathan and I as his parents. He had a phase at the beginning of the month where he freaked out around strangers, but he seems to be over that now. He and Jonathan have a sweet relationship. I can tell Josiah is already looking to him for guidance and fun.

+Our nicknames for him: Chunk, Super Chunk, Boy, Jo-Mo, Muffin Boy
+He's rolling onto his side pretty regularly, but hasn't really pulled a 180 yet.


+The child puts everything in his mouth. Everything. He also tries to grab whatever is in my hands when I'm holding him.
+Despite the desire to taste everything, he's never really taken to a bottle. We can get him to take one at home when he's not upset, but the nursery workers haven't had any success.
+He's into high-pitched squealing and back to making the motorboat/raspberry-blowing noise. And sticking out the tongue...

+He's on a pretty consistent three-hour pattern: eat, play, nap, play, eat. I know all the experts say that babies should nap for at least 1.5 hours, but for the life of me, I cannot get him to sleep more than 30-45 minutes unless he's in the car. But he seems content and not cranky with that amount of sleep, so I'm fine with it.


+No, he's not totally sleeping through the night yet. Although technically the experts consider sleeping "through the night" to be five or six hours, so I guess normally he sleeps through the night twice because we normally aim for bedtime around 7-8 p.m. He normally just wakes up once. His pediatrician seemed to think this was really quite fine.
+We seem to have been able to get him to sleep on his own though. We've been doing a bedtime routine for a while and trying to put him in the crib awake so he can try to go to sleep on his own. It hadn't worked that well. We let him cry for a little bit, but then go in and help him, normally by nursing. But the past few nights we've started playing soft music on the iPod for him and giving him his favorite stuffed monkey. It really helps. I think part of the reason he didn't want to sleep before was that he could hear us and didn't want to be alone. Probably more than you wanted to know, unless you're a mother in this phase right now.