Samantha at 31 Weeks

This past week marked the last week of school before Christmas Break.  Yay!  We were SO looking forward to time to relax, unwind, spend time staying up late and sleeping in, and spending time with our adorable little Samantha.  Ben had to give finals this week and grade them, but other than that, was all done with the semester.  He even brought Samantha to our 4th grade Christmas party on Friday afternoon at school.  I thought this day would never come!


Samantha loves to sit on the floor on her blanket and play with her toys.  (Sometimes Roscoe even tries to get involved.)  She sits up and plays, rolls around, and is really good at entertaining herself.

On Friday, December 16th, Samantha turned 7 months old.  It is really hard to believe that she is that old already, and that she has been in our lives that long, but also it feels like a short time, like just yesterday she was born.  Time does go by so fast.  We also had her six month doctor's appointment today.  It was supposed to be a couple weeks ago, but our doctor was sick that day so we had to reschedule our appointment.  She weighed in at exactly 20 pounds in the 90-95th percentile.  Her height was 28 inches in the 95th percentile.  She got her next round of scheduled shots, including a flu shot (which we were so grateful we decided to get her this then, you will read more about this later).  Samantha is doing really well, developing great, and is a healthy, happy girl!  We really enjoy our doctor.  He loves being with kids, and will just sit there and watch Samantha play and make noise, which she was making quite a lot of in the office that day.  She, of course, didn't like the shots in her legs, but she stopped crying pretty quickly and seemed to do well afterwards.  She did not get a fever like she did after her last round of shots at 4 months.


Here are some of our attempt at pictures with her seven month sign.  It continues to be difficult to take pictures of her with her sign without her eating it!

We tried again the next day to get some pictures when it wasn't almost bedtime and when she wasn't hungry enough to eat paper.  :)

The start to our Christmas break did not go quite as planned.  Ben woke up Saturday morning not feeling well, his stomach was very upset.  It continued to get worse throughout the day, and he had definitely caught a serious stomach bug.  Samantha was also having a rough time because she was teething.  Her right, top, front tooth was starting to come in and was giving her lots of trouble. She had several very bad diapers in a row that caused us to have to do some laundry.  Those bad diapers gave her a pretty bad diaper rash, and she was just more fussy than normal.  She was not acting like normal Samantha.


While Ben tried to recover and rest in between trips to the bathroom, Samantha took 3 hour afternoon naps on both Saturday and Sunday.  It could have been a combination of getting the shots on Friday and also working on teething, but she was definitely way more tired than normal.  You could tell she really needed the extra rest and relaxation.


Ben was starting to feel a little more back to normal on Monday, but Samantha was still having a hard time with teething.  We gave her teethers to chew on and she seemed to like that.  We continued to give her Tylenol to help the pain, but her gums seemed to still be tender and sore.  Especially when I would nurse her at night before bedtime, she would not nurse well and I would try to lay her down, but she would just scream bloody murder.  You could tell something was wrong, and we couldn't let that last for very long; however, we didn't quite know what was going on.  Ben suggested that she might still be hungry and that it might be hurting her to nurse for some reason.  So we got a small bottle together and Ben took it upstairs to Samantha.  She gobbled it down and was asleep in less than 5 minutes, so that must have been what was wrong.  Nursing was putting too much pressure on the tooth that was trying to poke its way through her gums.  It was causing her to stop nursing even though she still was hungry, which made her unhappy when I laid her down and she realized her belly was not full yet! We were so glad to find something to help her fall asleep happy.


Nevertheless, it was an interesting weekend of dealing with sickness for Ben and a baby recovering from shots and suffering from teething pain that changed her from her normal, happy, easygoing self. However, it was a blessing that Samantha did not show any signs of catching Ben's stomach bug.  We were very grateful for that, and like I referenced earlier, maybe the flu shot we got for her on Friday protected her from getting sick.  It's interesting with babies, it seems like just as you get into the swing of a good routine, something changes like teething or a growth spurt, and everything is thrown off kilter!