Kate seems like she's growing up all in a hurry. The 4month mark was pretty significant for her. It seems like she gained a pound in a week (which really can't be true!) and her steadiness also improved dramatically in the two weeks spanning her 4 month birthday. I put her in the ExerSaucer a couple of days ago and she LOVED it! I snapped a pic, but haven't downloaded it yet. She can spin around and play with all the toys and gets a little frustrated that she can't personally put one of the flowers IN HER MOUTH. She is really communicating a lot, too. The tooth sighting may have been a bit premature. I can see a white speck darker than the rest of the gum, but it has made no progress. She has much more control over her hands and arms. She grabs her toys and likes to gum them up.
Last week I looked in our freezer at the milk I had stored up and saw that some of it was about to expire, so I thought I'd see if Kate would take her first bottle. No way! She did not like the flow or the feel of the Dr. Brown's bottle. We stuck with it for 10 minutes or so, and she only drank 1 oz (and not much of that actually ended up in her tummy). I decided to try another shape of bottle thanks to a tip from Amy. I picked up the AVENT Tempo, and we tried again that evening -- No Problem. Their nipples come in various speeds/sizes (I bought the slow 0-3 mo. one) and they are also much wider. On the packaging it says that it's made for combining with breastfeeding. Well, it certainly worked for us.
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One thing that makes me quite sad is that when I was trying to pump extra trying to save up for a rainy day I could only get like 2 oz at a time, but Kate probably drinks 6 oz or so, so it's roughly 3 pumping times to one feeding time. I don't pump anymore, so I might get more out if I tried these days, but there has really been no need. I thought I would need to do that with working, but it has worked out so perectly with the nursing! It's a good thing because in all my plannings, I didn't ever think about needing to pump AT WORK! That would have been weird -- sequestering myself in the ladies' bathroom with the hum of the pump!
Speaking of breastfeeding, I recently saw the weirdest segment on the morning news show about cross breast feeding and wetnursing. Apparently this is a movement in the U.S. There's two varieties: the professional and the informal or casual sharing. One of the ladies had been a wetnurse to 40 kids or something, but she did it for FREE!!! Think about how much time that takes? Apparently the women who do this professionally charge something like $1000/ week. Some of the issues that were brought up were the health of the wetnurse and what they are doing for their own child. The two panelists they had on seemed to be really against the professional type but they differed on this whole cross breastfeeding among friends. They didn't go into a lot of details about how people actually do it. All in all, I just thought WEIRD!
