Monday was Sara's six-month well-baby appointment. She weighs 14 pounds 10 ounces. Hooray! This puts her in the 20th percentile. Hooray, hooray! (David and Mary have lived their lives on the 20th percentile weight curve. Now Sara has joined them as a 20th percentiler too.)
Sweet Sara is a dream baby. I owe that girl a thousand posts about what a sweet, mellow, content, easy-going, normal baby she is. But right now I am instead going to briefly mention one of the few challenges we've had.
Due to a number of factors, by the time she was about three months old Sara was not gaining weight like she should. Normally I wouldn't worry myself about a silly growth chart. But this time I knew deep in my heart, with my "mother's intuition," that she wasn't getting all the calories she needed. I spent a month pumping to try to increase my milk supply, giving her lots of extra feedings, and trying to supplement with bottles of breast milk and formula. It was stressful adding the feedings and finding time to pump, and it was all made even more difficult because Sara could not figure out the bottle. (Sara is such a normal baby in so many ways. I guess her quirk is being like "What the heck is this???" anytime we tried any kind of bottle.) But she was gaining weight a little faster with all that effort. But it seemed like a lot of stress and work ...
Finally, when she was five months old I packed up the pump and the bottles and we started cereal. I definitely think solids are overrated, and age five months was early for me to take on that endeavor. (I loved Mary--she refused to eat anything she couldn't feed herself. So we skipped the whole pureed baby food stage. She just had breast milk until she was nine or ten months old. It was awesome.) But it felt like the right thing to do, feeding Sara solids. (I believe strongly in "mother's intuition.") So with reluctance, I fed her cereal and formula. And she LOVED it. She's gaining weight like a champ now.
So that's the story of our sweet, super normal Sara--who is not so normal, after all. (She can't handle a bottle--too complicated?--but she's a champ with the spoon.) Oh, Sara, we love you.
(These pictures were taken on Monday, the day of her appointment.)
