At 6 months old, my daughter was starting to sleep pretty well at night, for about 5 hours straight (this was good to me). She was going strong with that pattern for about 2 weeks and then she went back to waking up 2 or 3 times at night. I didn’t know why this was happening, but I figured it was just her crazy ways.  Well, one night I distinctly remember her waking up EVERY 20 minutes all through the night. I’d go into her room, give her a pacifier, pat her belly, and she’d calm down and go to sleep. Twenty minutes later she’d be up and screaming again. I thought that maybe her teeth were finally ready to cut through, even though she’s been working on that since she was 3 months old (LOTS of drool; gumming everything). The next day I went out to buy some sort of pain reliever for her, and I had no idea which one to choose. Since I prefer natural things most of the time, I first tried the Humphrey’s Teething Tablets. I was a little confused on how to apply it because it says to dissolve the tablets in water and then apply it to the baby’s gums, but when I mixed it up it wasn’t thick enough to form any sort of paste (and I followed the directions) so it was more like trying to rub water on her gums, and it kept trickling down my hand. My daughter liked the taste, but it didn’t seem to help at all with her pain or crying.

I was really nervous about trying Orajel because I read somewhere about how the numbing sensation can close up a baby’s throat and make them stop breathing. I caved in and bought some Infant Tylenol, and the doctor assured me that I can use it. Well, the next night when she started screaming I gave her some and she instantly fell asleep. It was heaven! Normally I am not a medicine person. In fact I hate taking medicine and almost always refuse it. I barely took any pain meds in the hospital after my C-section and the nurses kept yelling at me to take it, but I didn’t want to because I really wasn’t in any pain, and even if I was, I prefer to work through the pain. BUT, in this case with my daughter, I was saying hallelujah to Tylenol and used it almost every night for a week.

After giving Tylenol to my daughter for a week straight, I felt uneasy about using it so often and took the risk and bought Orajel. To test it I gave her the tiniest little drop ever (to make sure her throat didn’t close up), and she was fine. Well, by week 2 of her crazy screaming teething nights, we were all fed up so she was getting Tylenol AND Orajel. It gave her the peace we all needed, so I was happy about that. Finally, a bottom center tooth popped through and one week later the other bottom center tooth came through. YAY!

Once that “first tooth” fiasco was done with, I really enjoyed my daughter at 6 months old. It was my favorite age so far because she was always laughing and a lot of fun to be around. This is the age when I finally was able to sit back and enjoy motherhood. I even talked with my husband about maybe having a second kid (gasp!). I totally understand now how easily you can forget about how hard it was that first month of having a baby, and how it’s a good thing you forget because some people wouldn’t ever have a second child if they remembered!

I think I finally started to enjoy being a mom, at least a little bit, when my daughter was about 1 month old. Before then, I confess it was the most stressed I’ve ever been in my life. She cried non-stop from colic, I was severely sleep deprived, and I actually weighed less than I did before I was pregnant because I didn’t have any time to eat.  But once she was 1 month old I finally was rewarded with that first “real” smile, you know, the non-gas kind, which made it seem worth it. She has two huge dimples and a really wide face so she truly looked like a Gerber baby; a cherub. Where that cherub was from remains a question because she definitely wasn’t an angel baby. Haha.

My husband and I would sing to her almost daily, everything from nursery songs to Stone Temple Pilots. One morning I was singing to her and she just started babbling back. But it wasn’t her normal babbling that she did throughout the day. This was a specific babble that she does while being sung to, like a trill almost, and she would go up and down the scale. It’s really funny to watch because she’d belt out an off-key note and hold it while her eyebrows came together, like she’s REALLY concentrating on the note, or maybe she was just trying to poop, who knows. She would always “sing” whenever my husband or I would sing to her. But she also would babble a lot throughout the day, like she was talking to you about everyday stuff. Some of my friends’ babies weren’t really babbling much yet, so this was one area which she seemed to do early.

As a parent of a baby, my newest interest became baby poop. The amount, the frequency, the consistency, the color, etc. When they send you home from the hospital with your baby they want you to pay attention to poop, and I don’t think you ever stop paying attention to it!  If you were to put two very new mothers together, especially breastfeeding mothers, the conversation would quickly turn to this subject. Her poop was mostly the standard watery, yellow, mustard-seed poop that breastfed babies produce. But every now and then she’d have dark green, mucousy poop, and there would be tiny (and I do mean tiny) streaks of blood in it. It scared me to death! The doctor said that babies sometimes can have a little tearing from pooping so frequently, or that it could be a sensitivity to something I was eating. They said that dairy is usually the culprit, so I cut back on my dairy intake again. It seemed to help.

Unfortunately, she still didn’t sleep. She was sleeping a little at night, but naps were pretty much non-existent. I didn’t know about schedules or anything at the time, so I wasn’t aware about trying to put her on one. She fell asleep in her bouncy seat when she was tired during the day, and when she did sleep it was only for maybe 20-30 minutes. I always thought that the only thing young babies did mostly was sleep, at least that’s what everybody told me and what was portrayed on some episodes of the TV show Bringing Home Baby, but not my daughter. She never slept. That’s why I never had time to eat, cook, clean, or do anything else. This was another area where I tended to get a little jealous of my friends’ “easy” babies, versus my little diva.

I was still successfully breastfeeding, which I was really proud about considering how hard it was for me. I think it paid off because when she went to her 1st month check-up at the doctor, she was in the 95th percentile in height/weight at 11 lbs and 23 inches. I didn’t realize how big she was until the doctor laughed and said that she’s considered a huge baby, but not to worry about her being an Amazon Woman when she’s older because they can’t tell that until children are about 2 years old. That didn’t  reassure me much, but at least she wasn’t overly small. I’d rather her be a big baby than an overly small baby. The only issue that her height/weight presented to me was clothing. It killed me inside that she was only able to wear some items once, or not at all, because she quickly outgrew everything. This child had gorgeous outfits that people had given her, but she couldn’t wear a lot of them. I’m dealing with the mental torture of that by holding onto them and hoping that if I ever have another child that it will be a girl. This way I’ll feel like the clothing was used more.