Any life taken by the hands of another human is a horrible and tragic loss, but the death of so many children is unspeakable. As a parent it shakes me to my core. It's a scary realization that this little life that we have created and love so unimaginably will be set out upon this world and have to navigate her own way. I suppose this is one of the hardest things parents ever have to do. It makes you just want to keep your children locked up and never let them leave your side. Of course this is unrealistic, and creepy, but it doesn't stop me from holding my daughter a little closer today. My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of Sandy Hook Elementary and for the innocence lost to those school children who had to witness such a violent crime. I only hope that there is enough good leftover in this world to heal their souls.
In other news, our little Ellie is five months old today. She continues to amaze me everyday by how much she changes and grows. I'm pretty sure she has decided that she is going to skip learning how to sit up on her own. All she wants to do is stand up and lunge at things. She can hold herself up for several seconds at a time now. Instead of trying to learn how to roll over, she tries to sit up straight like a full on situp. I am sure pretty soon she'll be doing both. I have noticed that she is started to be interested in the things that we are doing like eating or wanting to hold whatever it is we are holding. She babbles constantly and loudly. She loves technology! If it has buttons and lights up, she is all over it. Tom even gave her her own remote that she can play with and she loves it. So I've pretty much lost that battle already. She has also started putting everything in her mouth and is drooling like a St. Bernard, so I'm wondering if teething is just around the corner.
I weighed her the other day and she is almost 14lbs now. This is still a little underweight for where she should be. She is eating much better than she was before, so that's as good as we can hope for. She has great days, but she also has days when she doesn't want to eat or barfs everything back up. Luckily, those are getting to be farther in between and overall it is much improved from when she was having such a hard time. I am hoping that when we start solids it will give her the extra calories she needs. Perhaps we'll start with something fatty, like avocados. Here are her 5 month stats:
Head circumference: 40.6 cm
Height: 25 1/2"
Weight: 13lbs 15oz
We have started to sleep train her because it seemed as though our usual bedtime tactics were taking longer and longer to work on her. It just got to the point where she was waking up, not needing to eat, but not able to fall back asleep on her own. We've been doing it for about two weeks now and so far it's gone pretty well. She is able to put herself to sleep after only a few minutes of crying. Nap times still continue to be harder for her and over the last couple of days she has really resisted going down without a fight. She still needs to get up in the middle of the night to eat at least once, and because of her eating issues it's not something I am willing to wean her off of just yet. Of course, all this will probably get thrown to the wind when we go on vacation here in a few days. I'm hoping *fingers crossed* that we can keep some resemblance of a schedule but I know it will be hard to do amongst the chaos of the holidays, traveling and sleeping in a new place.
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