Busy girl

Molly's stuffy nose improved in a dramatic way at the end of last week, and wow is she full of energy! She took some solid naps Saturday, which allowed us to get a ton of stuff done around the house. (Jim's staining the deck, we both worked on the garden).

Sunday she was all smiles at Lex's birthday party. I let an older boy hold her for the group photo (see the photo on Lex and Eve's blog) -- that was a first. (He was so cute! I told me very solemnly that he would be good at holding her because he has a cat). She also wore her cloth diapers for most of the day, including the 2-hour drive home. Yay!

Her sleep has gotten better this week, too. Like magic, yesterday she remembered how to nap and last night she went to bed really early, around 7:45, and slept straight through to until 6:15 this morning.

The sleep is probably helping her mood more than anything (I know it's helping mine). When she's awake, she's so busy. She smiles at strangers at the supermarket and at the car dealer, especially strangers who don't look at her right away -- she smiles really hard at them until they smile back.

Here's a video of her doing nothing, just sitting and smiling. I think I was eating at the beginning, so this is her "feed me" smile.

I love this job

This morning Molly and I bumped into our neighbor at the grocery store. She was on her way to Kimball's for ice cream for lunch (at, oh, 10 a.m.) and invited us to join her. Um, yes!! It was fantastic. We were the only ones in line (obviously). It's so bizarre to be able to do things like that with no planning. I'm still getting used to this stay-at-home-mom schedule. It almost makes up for the fact that I haven't slept a full night in two weeks because Molly still has a stuffed up nose.

Speaking of which ... I took the baby to the doctor Wednesday morning because she was doing this scary, noisy inhale thing once in a while. It sounded like a goose honking. She was doing it all morning but of course she didn't do it once in the presence of the nurse or the doctor. Doctor says she's fine, probably just a virus.

On the up side, we got new growth stats. She weighed 17 lbs, 3 oz. I measured her length at home last Friday on her 5-month birthday and it was around 26 1/2 or 27.

In other news, we've been cloth diapering for a week and it's going OK. The diapers I bought are so bulky. Here's a picture highlighting what we've come to call Molly's cloth diaper "front butt." Poor baby can hardly sit up.


The problem is the diaper covers, I think. I got Proraps cheap as seconds. Online reviews said they were super good at containing leaks. They neglected to say that they puff out like balloons and the elastic seems a little rough against the skin.

I'm making my own out of fleece that are much more trim, not to mention super soft and breathable. If only the baby would nap, I could make more.

I'm afraid our bigger problem is going to be diaper rash. She got rashy within a couple days of switching to cloth. I'm playing around with fleece liners and other things to keep her skin dry and to protect her diapers from diaper cream. I hope the homemade covers will help, too. In the meantime she's spending a lot of time without diapers on at all -- she seems pretty happy about that.

Oh, one last thing. Molly's getting good at pushing herself up when she's on her belly. She can lift her tummy off the floor now and if you push her knees forward so they're under her hips, she can stay in that positions for a few seconds. Crawling, here we come!

Kissy baby

One of the cute things Molly's been doing lately is giving baby "kisses." She grabs my cheeks and pulls my face right up to hers and plants her cold, wet, open lips. Typically she goes for my nose, but yesterday she got me on the mouth when I wasn't expecting it.

She was trying again last night (and I was trying to direct her away). Daddy got the camera, but we didn't quite get the evidence.


She still hasn't repeated the rolling over trick on the floor yet, so I wonder if she used her crib bars for help. She scoots around so much in her crib now that often I find her on her side with a foot hanging out through the bars or totally reversed from where I put her down. In the first few days of her cold we put towels under one end of her mattress to help her breathe but we had to take them out again because I kept finding her rotated 180 degrees with her feet higher than her head!

Here she is wearing Lucy's outfit and playing in Lucy's exersaucer. She loves this thing and it's a very handy to have next to the computer for a few minutes of paying bills, checking e-mail or blogging. ;)

She rolled!

This is how I found my baby girl in her crib this morning!!!

At long last she rolled over. I've been trying to get her to do it again this morning so I can see it, but no luck.

What she would rather do is walk backwards. I hold her by her hands standing up, and she steps backwards, to the point where my arms arm fully outstretched and I have to scoot forward so she can keep going.

She has also gotten super squirmy on the change table. She cranes her neck to see the door knob behind her head and nearly rolls herself over. She also likes to arch her back, lift her butt, dig her heals in and scooch herself back until her head hangs off the edge of the changing pad -- not good on top of a dresser!

She also seems to be getting more aggressive with her toys. She threw her linked plastic rings yesterday and got some good distance. I don't thing I'd ever seen her throw anything before.

OK, she's squirming now so I'd better go!

Diaper sewing

I got my diaper kits Saturday and had them all sewn up within a couple days. They weren't too hard. I went through two sewing machine needles on the yellow one (one bent, one snapped) because I was trying to sew through about 8 layers of fabric at once. That was wild. Otherwise it went pretty smoothly.

Here's a fitted diaper made out of flannel:


Here's the same diaper covered with a PUL diaper cover I made from a kit:


This is the other diaper, an all-in-one with hemp/cotton on the inside and PUL on the outside.


They all fit perfectly. They seem to work, too. Each one had a messy test round yesterday and there were no leaks. We can't decide if it's an endorsement or a protest, but Molly immediately soils cloth diapers as soon as I put them on her. :)

So I'm going ahead with the cloth diaper experiment (knowing full well that Molly's dad may never change a diaper again). I figure we spend about $60 a month on Pampers, so I budgeted two month's worth of diaper money to try cloth. For $120 I got two dozen prefold diapers (the basic old-fashioned kind), a couple fasteners, six diaper covers and the two diapers from the kits. If I spend another $10 to buy the pattern, I can make tons more of the fitted diapers from cheap flannel at JoAnn's or even old sheets.

We'll try it for two months and if we go back to disposable, we're back where we started (plus we'll have a lot of dish rags). And if we like it we'll be saving a ton of money, even after the laundry costs are factored in.

I'm having way too much fun with this. I hacked my Diaper Genie II to make it into a pail for cloth diapers -- I put in a washable laundry bag instead of the plastic cartridge. The prefold diapers should be here in the next day or two, then we're off!

Sleepless nights

Molly has a mysterious congested nose that only seems to bother her when she lies down to sleep. So we're having a flash back to the newborn days, waking up a couple times a night to nurse her back to sleep. At least now these episodes last about 15 minutes and it's easy to put her back to bed. Newborn night wakings always lasted at least an hour and I'd usually have to put her down two or three times before she'd stay.

Anyway, Molly has been her silly self when she's awake. We had a great time this weekend with Oma, Grandpa and the doggie.










The weather was beautiful, Oma changed some super poopy diapers, Molly had a blast and I got to spend time spinning yarn for diaper covers.




Molly loved all her gifts, especially this doll from Great-Gram K. We might name her Lucy. ;)

Sitting

Molly has gotten very good at sitting on her own. She sat for a long time watching Eve on Saturday.

At playgroup Monday she sat by herself with all the kids running around her. I sat behind her, mostly just blocking the incoming toys and children from colliding with her head.

At one point I picked her up from lying on the floor and sat her on my lap. She immediately pushed up on my hands and stood up. I've never seen her do it that fast before. She really wants to run around with those kids.

So here's a picture of her sitting and NOT tipping over while Mommy holds the camera.


This one's not exactly independent sitting, but I couldn't resist ...

Good times

I don't know if I say it often enough, but I'm having a really good time being a mom. I think Molly's having a good time, too.

Here's a photo from last week when I got out her huge teddy bear (she seemed a little bored with her usual toys so I'm rotating in some new ones). The cutest thing, which I couldn't photograph because I was holding her, was when she lunged at the teddy bear's chest with her mouth open and tried to nurse.


This is Molly in one of the many, many wonderful outfits she's borrowing from cousin Lucy. We love these clothes! It seems like every time somebody compliments her outfit I say, "it's a hand-me-down from her cousin."


And here's just one shot from the weekend, playing with Lex.

Lex and Eve are so cute in their cloth diapers, I think I might try them on Molly. If I could sew some decent ones myself it would be a real money saver ... and more importantly, a super fun craft project! Imagine all the wool soakers I could knit in cute little designs. Molly might be out of diapers by the time I get around to making them, but it doesn't matter. It's the planning phase that's the most fun of any craft project.