Hattie is somewhere between seven and eight months old, which is clearly the perfect time for an update. Or maybe it’s just because both of them are napping and I’m all caught up on Pretty Little Liars and Downton Abbey, which might sound like an odd combination. {Yes, I watch PLL alongside every other 12-year-old girl across the nation}.
So Hattie Jo is… nuts. She is sweet and cuddly and pleasant and adorable. Until she’s not.
Charlee was hard for the first few months. She was colic-y and had undiagnosed acid reflux. She recovered from those months eventually and fell into a fairly predictable schedule. She was still hard sometimes, because she was still a baby, but at least I knew what to expect.
Hattie. Oh Hattie. Hattie is an enigma. Can.not.figure.her.out.
Exhibit A.
Here is her schedule from a couple of days ago:
9:00 – wake up and nurse
10:30 – eat solids
11:00 – attempt to get her down for a nap. fail.
11:30 – attempt to get her down for a nap. fail.
12:00 – Success! Nap.
1:00 – wake up and nurse
1:30-3:00 – cry, refuse to be put down, cry, take medicine, eat a tiny bit of solids, burp a lot
3:00-4:00 – nap
4:00-10:00 – AWAKE. Like… what the heck kind of baby voodoo is that? How is that even possible?
Annnd… HERE is her schedule the very next day:
6:30 – wake up and nurse
7:45-9:45 – nap
9:45 – eat solids
10:30 – nurse
12:00-1:30 – nap
1:45 – eat solids
2:45 – nurse
3:45-4:15 – nap AGAIN!
4:15-8:00 – fussy time
4:45 – solids
6:30 – nurse
8:00 – bedtime
8:30 – SIKE. wake up for some more fussy time.
9:00 – nurse? I guess?
9:30 – attempt to get back to sleep
10:00 – finally asleep. for now.
And that’s what is so frustrating. EVERY SINGLE DAY is different. I have tried and tried to force her into a routine for the sake of my sanity, so that MAYBE I can figure out what is wrong with her when she’s crying. teething? yep. gassy? yep. constipated? yep. tired? yep. all the above? who the H knows. Now I just grab a bottle of something, anything and pray that it will relieve her of whatever it is that’s paining her at the moment.
When she’s happy, she’s a little ball of yumminess and sugar and I could just kiss her sweet chubby cheeks till their raw. But when she’s not happy, she looks like a newborn baby bird and sounds like a small dinosaur. She gets extremely red-faced and bug-eyed and screams like I’m biting her toes. It’s very disturbing. Three minutes of a Hattie-cry is the equivalent of twenty regular-baby crying minutes.
And now, the ol’ separation anxiety madness has presented itself. No one else can hold her now, much less soothe her. Not Clark. Not JoJo. Not no one. That’s right. One ticket to Crazyland please.
Maybe in the next few weeks, I’ll attempt to write something about these months that’s poetic and deep and weepy. But right now, I’m just venting. You’re welcome.
Hattie, someday you will read this and might doubt my love for the baby-you. Please don’t. It’s not a matter of me loving you any less, I’m just so frustrated that I can’t fix it. This will get better. I know it will. There are so many good moments mixed in with the tough. The tough ones are just louder at the end of the day. They scream in my ears, stomp on my soul, and lay down on top of my eyelids, trying to force them shut, even though they know I have 59,345 things to do before I can sleep. I need to focus on your sweet smile, your deep, guttural chuckle, the way you nuzzle your head into my shoulder. I know I’m lucky to have you. I promise. But I’m a little bit ready for you to be content. I think the phrase should be, “When baby is happy, momma is happy, and then everybody is happy.” I love you so much. I kiss you a lot. I hope you always let me kiss you a lot.
Here’s your stats and milestones my love:
At 7 months, you weighed 13 pounds, 5 ounces and measured 25 1/4 inches (we think… the nurse botched your measurement).
You love…
sweet potatoes, fruit, Charlee, playing peekaboo, being outside, water bottles, eating paper, banging things, bags of wet wipes, the bath, medicine, baby chicks, to pinch the fire out of my chest and mouth while I put you to sleep.
You don’t love…
riding in the car, strangers, vacuum cleaners, strangers with vacuum cleaners, when I try to keep you from pinching me while putting you to sleep.
You can…
roll both ways and sit up (for a couple of months now), pick up finger foods and put them in your mouth, put everything in your mouth for that matter, pass toys back and forth between hands, hold yourself up in a crawling position for a while before diving head first into the carpet.
A BUSHEL AND A PECK 
I love how you have a schedule 🙂
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