Three Months

Victoria is now three months old. She is growing strong and fast. She went to the doctors today for her 3-month immunisations which she handled very well, only crying a little bit. They weighed her and she is exactly 5kg. On the smaller side for her age, but she has always been small.

But she is growing quickly both physically and developmentally. Touch wood I think the worst of the newborn stage is over with now, and we're coming in to the cute learning and discovery phase.

She’s a pretty happy girl most of the time now, no longer the screaming newborn who would scream for hours at a time (ok that's a slight exaggeration). Now if she’s crying I’ve got a pretty good idea of why – she’s either hungry or tired or wants attention.

She is so much more interactive nowadays. She’ll lie there and talk to you and smile up at you. Or sometimes she’ll just ignore you completely and stare and smile off into space.

She’s also very settled too, happy to lie under her play gym by herself for ages, and even if you try and interact with her she will ignore you and keep staring at the toys. Sometimes this can be a good thing because Kathleen still takes up an awful lot of my time and attention, but I feel guilty that I don't pay enough attention to Victoria at times.

She's sleeping pretty well at night now, waking up once during the night for a feed. During the day she will protest having a nap quite strongly, but once in bed will generally go off to sleep on her own ok. She tends to have one big nap and a few short naps during they day, unless we're out.

I think managing both Kathleen and Victoria is starting to get a little easier. Victoria is no longer as constantly needy as she was in the beginning, and Kathleen is getting used to having to share mummy. I’ll put Vicky down under the play gym and often Kathleen will climb in there with her and give her kisses and cuddles. I’m so pleased she still seems to like her little sister. Victoria seems to absolutely adore her big sister and is always happy to be on the receiving end of all the cuddles and kisses.

I think Victoria is starting to teethe. She has her hands in her mouth a lot of the time now and really chomps on them. she even tries to put her hands so far into her mouth that she makes herself gag! She also likes to bite things, including me, OUCH! She's not quite at the stage of being able to pick things up yet, but if you put something into her hand she'll hold onto it for a short while.

It's interesting raising a second child. While we're not raising Victoria any differently from Kathleen, there are subtle differences re things I learned the first time round. Such as not trying to force Victoria to sleep if she wakes up. With Kathleen I spent hours trying to rock her to sleep. Now with Victoria if she wakes up after half an hour, I will get her up and she's usually pretty happy with this. I also don't stress about getting her back to bed quite so much as I used to. I wait for her to tell me she's tired rather than watching the clock.

I also expect that she will be learning a lot through osmosis, as she is often in the room when I am reading Kathleen bedtime stories, so she is hearing a lot more language than Kathleen ever did (Well it was just Kat and I at home alone so who was I going to talk to - myself?). Plus Kathleen and I are often singing songs from nursery rhymes or TV so I expect Victoria will grow up always knowing these songs. It will be interesting to see if this is the case.

Cheers,
Megz