Nicholas just turned four months old yesterday. I took him to the doctor’s about a week ago and he weighed 16 pounds and 1 ounce. He’s really growing fast. We’ve been extremely busy this past month. Two weeks ago, we went down to visit mom and Richard. We also saw Uncle Don, Aunt Bernice, Grandma, Aunt Irma, and Uncle Ron. It was a really nice little get together with everyone.
Well, Nicholas has been learning a lot of new stuff lately. For one, he always cries whenever he wants to go to sleep now. It’s kinda funny because he will be crying that he wants to sleep but then he won’t go to sleep. After a while of crying and complaining, then he will slowly go to sleep. I have to walk around with him. Sometimes, I even put him on my back. It really takes a long time for him to actually start calming down and going to sleep, but once he gets to that point, he’ll fall right asleep. The best way of knocking him out is with milk. As long as he’s willing to take the milk bottle, he’ll probably fall asleep. The hard part is to get him to actually take the bottle. Sometimes, he’ll take it for about a second or two and then suddenly cry and reject the bottle. Sometimes, I really don’t know what he wants. I have tried everything I know of to calm him down but he just won’t. I guess that part of the job of being a parent is trying to figure out what your baby boy wants when he’s crying. We have a walker for him, but we haven't started putting him in yet. He likes to kick around a lot so I think that he’ll like the walker. His new habit of trying to jam both of his fists into his hand still has not changed. It actually has gotten more frequent. If you play with him and make him laugh, you’ll see him give you this big gigantic smile and the next thing you’ll see him do is jam one of his fists right into his mouth. He uses his right hand mostly. (There goes Michael’s dream of a left-handed pitcher.) He’s slowly learning how to completely turn over on his stomach. He knows how to turn on his side already. (He’s always on his side when he’s sleeping.) We’ve placed him on his stomach a few times now and he’s learning how to use his legs and hands to push himself forward. He’s pretty good with the legs, but it would really help if he would stop putting one of his hands in his mouth at the same time he’s doing this. It was in his mouth the whole time that he was trying to push himself forward. Oh, well. I’m sure, someday, he’ll learn not to do that. He’s also very good at grabbing things and sticking it in his mouth. When he’s in the car, he has a blanket on top of him and no matter how low I place the blanket, he seems to be able to grab it and pull it up into his mouth. Sometimes, he’ll pull it up so high that the blanket covers his whole face. Then he’ll gradually pull it back down into his mouth. He doesn’t seem to do that talking routine when he’s falling asleep anymore. It was like a few day thing. Don’t know where it went but he’s pretty quiet now when he’s falling asleep. (Besides crying and whining right before the stage of falling asleep.) Lately, he’s been getting up pretty early in the morning and not going back to sleep until 8 or 9 in the morning. It’s okay on the weekends, but it’s really tiresome when he and I are awake at 4 or 5 in the morning and I have to work in 3 more hours or so. Maybe it’s because he’s sleeping too much during the daytime or something like that. I can’t wait until he truly sleeps through the night. Right now, I still get up about every three hours or so to feed him milk and change his diapers, but sometimes he’ll wake up a lot more often than that. Like last night, he woke up at 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7. You can imagine how much sleep I get from that. The good news is that this type of pattern is very rare with him.