5 months is awfully close to 6 months. How did this happen? I am not ready for this. And yet when I hold her in my arms and she laughs and slobbers on my shirt and grins at me I think, damn, she’s perfect. So I guess 5 months is okay.

Yesterday Denis was out late. At 10pm Kate was snuggling me on the couch so I figured I’d try to put her to sleep. I laid down with her on our bed and nursed her peacefully. Just when I thought she was going down and getting sleepy there’s a loud, “PFFFFBBBTTTTT!!” She started blowing raspberries on my nipple.

There was a moment of, “Gah!” but then I just started laughing at her because she was being so silly. She laughed at me. I kissed her cheek and she shrieked happily. We played for the next 20 minutes.

I decided there are more important things than bedtime, even at 10pm.

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I have worked for several hours the last two days, and then this evening I went out for some scrapbooking with friends. Den stayed home with Kate. They did just fine together; each time I came home to a tired husband and happy baby. Coming home is awesome because Kate gets so excited and she just wants to babble and climb and kick and blow raspberries. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter if I come home at 4pm or 10pm, she still wants to do all of those things. So 10pm tonight again she really didn’t want to sleep.

First she started suckling, but apparently she was bored and not hungry (and my boobs were pretty empty after pumping) so she started babbling and grabbing at my face. She sucked, let go, sucked, let go, sucked… chomped down and pulled until there was a “pop.” Can you say “Ow”?? Glad she doesn’t have teeth yet!

Then she started looking around, saw my pillow up above my head, and reached up for it. She rolled away from me. Then rolled back. Suckled. Rolled away, back. Away, back. Away, back. Away… rolled fully onto her stomach. Looked around, grinned. Looked at me, put her head down, and POP! Rolled from her front to her back, rashed into me, and grinned at me. She’s never done that one before. Once upon a time when she was 3 months old she would roll front-to-back, but it was always accidental and when she stabilized she stopped doing it. Apparently that just clicked. I admit, I laughed and kissed her and said, “Wow, good job!!” She shrieked happily and did it again. And again. I woke up the husband to show him her new trick.

Quite obviously there was no sleeping going on, I was laying beside a little monkey. I’m not so sure I’ll be getting much sleep the next week as she masters this new skill of hers! (Of course when I did get her to fall asleep I got up to write this. Brilliant!)

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Unfortunately because of all the time I’ve spent away from Kate the last two days has caused my supply to dip, despite my pumping the exact amount she eats while I’m out. I know I need to pump more frequently, but that is difficult – especially when I forget my pump, like I did yesterday (duh).

Straight breastfeeding is pretty easy, I never have to think about ounces or frequency, I just nurse when she wants to and everything maintains itself, no intervention required. I imagine straight pumping would be a pain in the ever-loving ass, but once you figure out how much you need and how often at least it would be kind of predictable. But this mostly-breastfeeding-sometimes-pumping thing is annoying. I’m annoyed that now I have to actually think about how much she’s eating, so I can pump the right amount. I’m annoyed I have to remind myself to go pump on a schedule. I’m annoyed I have to sit hooked up to a machine and waste time for 10 minutes while it makes funny noises at me. But it is a necessary thing if I want to continue actually leaving the house without Kate! Not that I like being away from her, but having a few hours a week to myself is pretty awesome.

Plus I think both Kate and Den benefit from their time together. He’s figured out how to get her to sleep in her swing, or on his lap or chest. I still get a little worried that she’ll refuse to sleep and scream at him, but I’m getting more confident that everything will be good while I’m gone. She still has no issues taking the bottle and then breastfeeding when I get home. She’s also having a lot of fun interacting with her daddy, now that she’s at a fun age where she babbles and plays. I’m really happy that they figure out their own way of doing things while I’m out, which is not something they readily do when I’m home.

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Did I mention that last night she only woke up once? She refused to go to sleep at 10pm, dozed on my chest between 11 and midnight, then we went to bed and she nursed to sleep. She woke me up at 4am to nurse. The next time I remember her rousing is right around 8am when she starts waking up. (I refused to become conscious until closer to 9, so I nurse her back to sleep several times until she’s fully awake and grabbing me in the face, lol!) I’m so impressed. I certainly don’t expect this to become the norm, although she typically only wakes up 2 times a night.

What is the opposite of a growth spurt? Because Kate is in one of those right now.

I was right in that my supply is down, but I think wrong as to the cause – it wasn’t my time away. Kate is just not eating much. Today I was kind of in the mindset of Have to have her nurse frequently to get my supply up! It was so not happening. I’d offer her the breast and she’d suck twice then start playing and grinning. And when she is hungry she’ll nurse for a while and empty my breast and then be totally happy. So obviously she has no problem with this.

She is also not sleeping much. Today she had 2 naps. TWO. This is utterly bizarre for a baby who as late as last week was taking 5-6 naps a day. Right up until and during her last little cold she was only going typically an hour before needing to nap again, max hour and a half before melting down. She got healthy and bam she’s going 3 hour stretches. What the hell? When she gets cranky I would try putting her to sleep like usual but she nurses briefly and starts playing and babbling happily, clearly NOT tired.

This could explain why she’s been fighting naps and not sleeping very long.

At 10pm she was ready for bed, we cuddled for a little bit, she nursed and straight to sleep. And then, after she was sound asleep, I rolled over and scooted to the other side of the bed to cuddle with my husband and talk for a while just like we used to. I missed that. We still talk after we go to bed, but it’s typically with a large gap between us as I could never move away from Kate – or when I could roll away we couldn’t talk or we’d wake her. It was so nice.

I feel like I’m trying to get my life in order. Does that ever actually work?

I bought Creative Memories’ Memory Manager – it’s a digital photo organizing program, $40. It is awesome! It has a timeline along the bottom so everything is arranged by date – and you can adjust it to select photos on one day, week, month, year, etc. Then it has a nesting folder structure so you can index photos according to subject/event/whatever. So I have all of Kate’s photos under one folder for easy access – and photos can be under multiple categories, so it can be under Kate, Natalie, and Halloween 2010. You label all photos on a 5-star system, so I have all photo rejects as 0 stars, all good want-to-keep photos as 4 stars and the select best ones I want to share with family as 5-stars (since no one really wants to see all 40 pictures I took in one sitting, ha). It exports, which is far cooler than it sounds: it exports those photos based on my search criteria. So say I want to print out all photos of Kate from September and October that are of 4-stars or more, but I only want them to be 1200 pixels or smaller (instead of my GINORMOUS photo files). Done! Easy as pie. Oh, plus the program can create separate Vaults, which means I can have one for my personal stuff and one for all the photos of adoptable cats I take for work. It also includes some pretty nice editing tools – crop, rotate, color, hue, brightness, red-eye correction (and that’s not all)… that’s more than I’d expect for the price. Plus all of it is really well designed and easy to use even for people who are not complete computer geeks like I am. I think I am in love with this program. I will be buying a copy for my mother.

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We did not go to DC this weekend, but we watched the Rally to Restore Sanity on TV. We love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. The performances were pretty good, it was fun to watch. But Jon’s closing speech totally kicked ass. One of my favorite quotes: