5 Months

Georgia will be 5 months old on the 24th. We decided to go ahead and try out the rice cereal. I was planning to wait a few more weeks but she has seemed very curious about our food and how we eat. She watches me eat and then moves her mouth around mimicking me when I chew. She's also been eating more, bigger appetite, so I thought we should start teaching her how to eat from a spoon so we can supplement with real food. She did very well. I expected to have more of the cereal on the bib but she seemed to eat most of what I fed her.

I've been reading about how to get babies to fall asleep on their own. I've been nursing Georgia to sleep at night and putting her to bed when she falls asleep but I know that I'm setting a bad habit and need to teach her to go to sleep on her own. So tonight we tried out the new routine. I gave her bath to get her calm, nursed her, sang to her a little and then put her to bed awake. I turned on her Celtic lullabye CD from Ben's aunt and let her cry. I knew she would cry because she always does if I leave her in her bed. The good news is she cried for about 10 minutes and fell asleep and never cried hard enough that I felt bad about doing this. This is a big relief and I hope it will work this well every night. The next step is to get her sleeping in her crib in her own room. I read that she should be doing this before she's 6 months old because that's when separation anxiety sets in and it will be much more difficult to make the transition. I was hoping to wait till winter was over because her room is the coldest room in the house but I guess we'll just have to turn up the heat at night.