The Higgins Family: Embry: 19 Weeks

This week has been a week of a lot of changes! As I posted earlier, Embry learned to roll from her back to her tummy, and does it every single time you lay her down. Also, we started giving her "solids" this week! Oh boy!

Rolling Saga...

So as I posted last week, last Sunday Embry learned to roll from her back to tummy...sounds fun right? Wrong. My happy, content girl who I could lay on the floor for 30+ minutes without a peep from is now flipping like crazy and gets mad on her tummy. She seems to have forgotten that she can roll from her tummy to back.

Also, it's created quite the sleeping problem. Our first night home, Monday, was awful! She broke out of her swaddle ALL NIGHT LONG, then would roll to her tummy and get mad. Finally at 4:00 am I watched in the video monitor as she rolled IN her swaddle (dangerous!!!) I went in and ditched the blankets and got her Halo Sleep Sack out of her closet. We went cold turkey on breaking the swaddle. I'm not swaddling just her legs, etc. I figure the rolling itself will take some time to get her sleep back adjusted, so we're doing it all at once. (Another reason I went ahead and started rice cereal this week! I hear it can mess with their sleep for a little, so we're getting all this bad sleep over at once!!!!)

She has done OKAY since then. She wakes up every few hours and can't always put herself back to sleep, which means, I'm going in and soothing her. (Honestly means just plugging her with a paci, but still). Luckily she can only roll over her left shoulder, so on the second night I realized, duh and placed her up against the side of the crib where she can't roll. That has helped, but she can kinda move around in the crib. She seems to be most comfortable on her side. I am thinking of buying those sleep wedges, which of course are not SIDS approved, but if they prevent her from rolling and waking herself up, I'm in.

I also found that giving her a "lovey" to hold onto helps. I think since she's used to having her arms literally tied down, straight jacket style, having something to do with her hands is soothing. It does make for some awfully cute sleep snuggle pics.

She seems to have nap times down and last night only woke up twice, one of which was to eat at 4:30 am. The other time I waited for her to fall back asleep for about 10 min but she just couldn't, so I went in and put her paci in and moved her back up against the crib and she went right to sleep.

We just had one sleep sack that I got when I was pregnant (neutral, puppy dogs) and it's a small, fits up to 18 lbs. I ran out and got two more this week! I had remembered I'd seen them at Marshall's and luckily they had their Medium ones on clearance for $5!

Rice Cereal and Bananas

Embry had a special Valentine's Day and got to try rice cereal for the first time! She wasn't quite sure what to think of it, as expected! We're doing Earth's Best Organic Whole Grain Rice Cereal mixed with breast milk.

Day One...

Day Two... (definitely funnier than Day One!)

Blowing bubbles with rice cereal in her mouth!

Day Three....Bananas!

I swung by Natural Grocer's in search of bananas or avocado, two of the three things my pediatrician suggested as a "first food". Their organic bananas were ripe and avocados weren't, so I bought one of each and decided to do bananas first.

I've found a ton of great websites on how to make and store your own baby food, but this is the best one by far. So much great info! It was so simple. I just put one banana in the food processor and added about an ounce of breast milk. To be honest once she started eating it was too runny, so I thickened it up with a little cereal and Embry liked it so much more that way.

One banana made seven servings. I just put the extra puree in ice cube trays, freeze, pop the cube out and place in a freezer bag. Each "cube" is approx. 1 oz. Easy and SO much cheaper! (The organic banana was $0.40 and made seven servings. One jar of organic baby food is around $1.00)

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day was low key around here. Our big excitement was Embry trying rice cereal! Hah!

I remember last year we had just found out we were pregnant (February 6) and I in February I just kept envisioning how we'd have a four month old next Valentine's Day. Crazy! =)

She got lots of sweet cards and gifts! She wore one of her gifts from her Great Aunt Jamie, who she shares a birthday with!