Throughout my entire pregnancy I used Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Stretch Mark Cream to try to prevent stretch marks. It worked, because to this day I still don’t really know what one looks like. The closest I’ve come to seeing one is on my husband’s bicep. Weird right? He has them right where the bicep meets the armpit. Anyway, after my daughter was born I was psyched and thought I would still be able to wear a bikini since I had no stretch marks and since the C-section scar was too low for anyone to see. I was wrong. Little did I know that even 3 months after she was born I still had that dark vertical line (linea negra) going from above my belly button all the way down to my pelvic area. That line didn’t even show up until I was like 8 months pregnant. (Even now, almost 9 mths after she was born, I still have traces of that line.)  Another pregnancy battle scar I have is from my navel piercing. I had it since I was 18, and from months 7-9 of my pregnancy I wore a maternity piercing that I got at maternitypiercings.com that was really pretty. But during month 10 of my pregnancy I was getting so many ultrasounds that I just took it out because I had to keep removing it anyway. Well, once the baby was born I pretty much forgot to put the belly button ring back in. (I was forgetting to eat, so there was no way I’d remember about my accessories.) Even though I had that piercing for 13 years, it closed up after 3 months. But I didn’t realize it closed at first because it LOOKED like it was still open, with a hole above my navel. So one day when I remembered to finally put the ring in, I tried and realized that it had closed inside and underneath. So now I have a scar there that looks like I have a hole - an ugly brownish hole since the pregnancy also made it turn brown, along with that line. Gross! All that work I put into preventing stretch marks and I got other marks instead. Not cool. I guess I’ll have to wear a Tankini next year.

Around 3-4 months old, my daughter’s colic FINALLY started to chill out a bit. Like I’ve said in earlier posts, without the swing and the 5 S’s I would have collapsed, so they helped a lot with the crying when it would start up, but I was thrilled that it was happening less and less. She was now letting her true personality show though, and it was pretty apparent that she really was a Diva. She has a nasty temper and is very vocal when you take away something she wants or if you don’t meet her immediate need (and she isn’t even in the Terrible 2’s yet!). She still does the banshee scream at the top of her lungs that turns a crowded room silent. But the positive side of this personality is that she’s really excitable, so when she’s happy that same crowded room will also know it. She literally squeals with delight. And she has the machine-gun/dolphin laugh that babies have, and it cracks me up. To sum up her personality, she’s either insanely upset and screaming OR  ridiculously happy.

Right when the colic started to end, she began having early teething symptoms:  drooling, gumming her hands, and crying a lot. Since she’s a really fussy baby, there was no question that she’d be one of those babies who doesn’t handle teething well. The one upside of having a colicky baby is that I was already used to all the crying, so it wasn’t really different for me. I didn’t want to use medications on her yet since she was only 3 months old, so we just stuck it out.

Another issue that was going on simultaneously was naps, or lack thereof. I began to try a very loose schedule with her of when I could expect her to nap in her bouncy seat, but it didn’t really work. She was pretty predictable of when she would get tired, but no matter how tired she was, she’d only nap 30 minutes. Oh, and at night she still was up to eat like every 2 hours. Fun times. Thirty minute naps meant that I had no free time whatsoever, so I still barely had time to cook, eat, or shower. I ran around the house like a mad woman the second she fell asleep, trying to get little things done here and there. According to Dr. Harvey Karp, the author of The Happiest Baby On The Block and founder of the 5 S’s, babies have a “4th trimester” which is actually their first 3 months of life. Now that my daughter was past the 4th trimester, I hoped that the eating, sleeping, & crying thing would work itself out.