becoming a carter: fifth month

This is my last official day of Christmas break. These past three weeks have flown by! It's Friday. I go back on Monday, so the weekend is all I really have left. One of my goals over break was to attempt to catch up on the posts about Bridgette on this blog. I know some of my family ganders at this and appreciates updates on our little one since we don't all live in the same town or even the same state as some of them!

I need to remember back to end of October/early November to be able to tell you about Bridgette at five months. Good thing I have kept up with her baby book better than this blog!

We didn't have a well doctor visit at five months, so I couldn't tell you how big she was exactly. My guess is that she was between 15 and 16 pounds during this time.

By five months, Bridgette was still on a pretty good schedule due to daycare, and she was finally sleeping in until after 6:00 a.m.! Woo! Hoo! No more 4 or 5 a.m. feedings! I know we had already come a long way from feeding every three hours through the night, but this stretch to me mean't that I finally got a full night's sleep! Praise the Lord. What a blessing this was for me! I could finally function more normally at work. This brought her down to only 6 feedings a day. I just had to increase her daycare bottles by an ounce or so to make sure she was still staying satisfied, getting enough milk. She was good to go!

This is what her schedule looked like around five months:

Sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. nurse before we leave for work/day care
9:30 a.m. bottle at day care
12:30 p.m. I leave work to nurse at day care on my lunch break
3:30 p.m. bottle at day care
Sometime between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. nurse
After 6:30 p.m. or 7:00 she would fall asleep for the evening until I would wake her up to nurse one more time and get her ready for bed
Sometime between 8:30 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. nurse for the last time of the day
10:00 or 10:30 p.m. get ready for bed, read with Daddy, bed for the night!

Some special memories for the fifth month were:

She began to study and recognize faces. She would get really excited if she would recognize you and babble/smile.
She started cracking up at people were cracking up at her. By this point, she was giving really good belly laughs!
She spent her last month sleeping in the pack n play in our room! The risk for SIDS goes way down at 6 months, so we kept her close until then! We were ready to kick her butt out of our room at this point.
She mastered rolling from back to belly. She began learning at four months, but got very efficient at five months. She was finally able to really get her arm completely out of the way to accomplish this task.
She learned how to put her pacifier back into her mouth unassisted.
Began to practice sitting up unassisted for short periods of time before falling over.
She made several visits with grandparents in Elizabethtown and Henderson.
She had some adorable pictures taken with photographer Jenniel Harbert, photographybyjenneil.net and facebook.com/PhotographybyJenneil! (See below)
She enjoyed the WKU Homecoming parade and overnight visit from her Aunt Jamie, Uncle Kenny and cousins: Genevieve, Lola and Fiona.
She went as an adorable leopard (her Aunt Elizabeth's costume from when she was a baby nearly 17 years ago that Grandma Lolo let her borrow) to our friend's, the Bailey's Harvest Fest Halloween Party!