At five months, Avery has hit the happy-baby phase. Unless she’s tired or hungry, she’s almost always smiling – or happily observing the world around her. While she’s still content just sitting and watching people, she recently started showing an interest in toys. She enjoys the various animals dangling from her ExerSaucer, and she has shown a fondness for a red kangaroo that crunches and rattles. I have yet to see her laugh really hard, but she does giggle a lot – especially when her dad tickles her tummy or under her chin or when I brush her face with my hair. And last week I was sounding out words for Zoe (“Bbbbbb is for bear”), and Avery started to laugh.

Another fun development: she now recognizes her name, and she’ll turn her head and give a curious look when she hears it.

As for physical milestones, she rolled over (back to stomach) for the first time a few weeks ago, and now she’s almost constantly on her stomach with head held high – like below. If she leans forward and places her hands on the floor, she’s able to sit unassisted for a few minutes. (When sitting straight up with no hands, though, she topples right over.) She has more than doubled her birth-weight; at her last doctor’s appointment (on 11.6), she was just over 17 pounds.

In terms of sleep, Avery typically takes 3-4 naps around the same time each day. After a month-plus of some bad nights, Q and I changed her night-time schedule and did a bit of “sleep training” a few weeks ago. (Zoe was such a good sleeper, that we never had to do that with her. As I told a girlfriend recently, I didn’t even know what “sleep training” was!) We now feed her at 7:30 or 8 PM and put her to bed at 8 or 8:15, and no longer wake her for a feeding at 10 or feed her if she wakes up in the middle of the night. It seems we’ve trained her body into *not* waking up for milk – because she now routinely sleeps straight through to 5:30 or 6:30 AM. I hope it sticks, because we’re all much happier!

-M

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under 40.Two kids-November 09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.