Six Months!

Harper is six months old! When I think about how much she has learned in order to change from a baby burrito in a blanket into a tiny human with a personality, it seems like it must have been more than just six months. But when I think about the fact that I still don't have any ab muscles, it seems like half a year can't possibly have gone by already.

I think the first three months seemed to go by slowly, because the nights and days were pretty much all the same: feed the baby, hold the baby while she looks around for 45 minutes, baby sleeps (or you try to get her to sleep) for an hour and a half, change baby's diaper, repeat. I still have a hard time staying up past 8pm because I'm operating on a sleep deficit from the first few months. These last three months, though, Harper has been sleeping through the night and we've established a new "normal" routine, which helps eliminate some of the clock-watching. More than that, though, she learns something new every day, and it's amazing to see her find her toes for the first time, recognize you and smile when you walk into the room, or work to get a toy that's out of reach instead of thinking that it just disappeared. Watching her progress has definitely made the time go by faster.


We had her six month appointment this morning, where the doctor confirmed what everyone who meets her says: she's little. She's in the 25th percentile for both weight and height. But 25th percentile is still normal, so there's no concerns. She'll just be wearing some of her 3-6 month clothes a little longer than some other babies.

Part of the reason she's small could be that she's still eating only breastmilk (formula often makes bigger babies). However, she recently started drinking six ounces per bottle at day care, and I'm having a pretty hard time pumping enough to keep up with that demand. When the ladies at day care told me they wanted to increase her bottles to six ounces, they knew they were delivering bad news.

"So, Margo and I were talking..." the afternoon lady told me. "We ah...well, we were just thinking...um, well, we thought that maybe, since Harper will be eating solids soon...ah, we thought that it might be good if, um, if you could increase her bottles to, ah, six ounces." She avoided eye contact when actually saying the number of ounces.

I found the delivery of this news rather amusing, but my honest reaction was about as bad as she was expecting. Outwardly all I said was, "You're killing me!" and I dutifully brought in six ounces the next day. I've had to tap into the store of frozen milk to make that happen, though, so we'll see how long this lasts. My hope is that Harper will be able to go a little longer between bottles once she starts adding solid food to her daily meals next week, and maybe I'll only need to bring two bottles instead of three.

Pumping is definitely the hardest part of being a working mom. Besides being time consuming and difficult to schedule around, it means that all of my dress shirts don't fit. I put on one of my button-down shirts last week hoping to wear it to a meeting, and I couldn't even get the two sides of my shirt to touch over my boobs. A coworker of mine thinks this sounds like a dream and looks forward to the chance to have such "sexy" boobs, but let me just tell you, it gets old pretty darn quick. I actually weigh less now than I did when I got pregnant, but I still can't wear any of my old shirts. By the time I can they'll probably be out of style! Thinking about having to keep up pumping and wearing the same three T-shirts for another six months is definitely one of those times when six months seems like a very long time. Hopefully the milestones we have waiting for us in that time (crawling, babbling, walking!) will make it go by quickly--and hopefully no one will comment if I'm wearing the same shirt in every photo of me between now and then.