Aaron is 4 months old

It's been a pretty eventful week. First, Aaron reached the 4-month mark, the point where most babies start to make associations with patterns and sleep (this will be important later). Then there was Thanksgiving, and finally there was the start of the holiday season.

Let's start with Aaron. Unfortunately, he's been morphing into the type of baby Mudgie was when he was that age...difficult. For a while, Aaron would only cry when hungry or tired. These days, the crying seems to be happening more often, and when he is tired, it's becoming harder to get him to fall asleep for a nap. But the daytime crankiness is really only the beginning. It's the nights where the biggest changes have happened. There was a time when Aaron was only waking up twice a night, but for the past few weeks, those night wakings have become more and more frequent. Last night he never slept for longer than an hour at a time, often less than that, and he had several long periods of being awake (from 11-12, and then from 2:30-4:30). I even tried giving him some Tylenol, but that didn't seem to help.

We actually had his 4-month check-up this morning, so at least I could ask the doctor what she thought was going on. Her answer...teething! I can't feel anything ready to pop through, and Mudgie went through 6 months of chewing on everything and drooling before he cut his first tooth, but I'm hopeful this won't last as long with Aaron (mostly because I can't imagine either one of us surviving for another 6 months this way). In other news, he now weights 14 lbs 8 oz and is 25.75 inches long. He's still in the 75th percentile for height, but his weight is now only in the 45th percentile. The doctor said this is probably nothing to worry about, but she does want us to go back in a month for a height and weight check.

In other Aaron news, he has started rolling from his belly to his back on a somewhat regular basis. I have yet to see him even come close to going from his back to his belly, however. He has also been sleeping with only 1 arm swaddled. He really likes chewing on and sucking his thumb, and since his sleep has been so poor anyway, I figured it was as good a time as any to start the swaddle weaning process. It hasn't helped the sleeping, but I don't think it's made it any worse either.

Both the boys had a great Thanksgiving. We went to my aunt's place in Connecticut, and Mudgie had a lot of fun playing with our family. He played the shy card for a while, but by the end of the night he had warmed up to everyone and was really enjoying all of his new playmates. Aaron did pretty well also, tolerating being passed around like a sack of potatoes unless he was hungry or tired. I was surprised by how content he was with the large crowd. We spent Thursday night out in Western Mass and came home on Friday. On Sunday, Dave put the holiday lights on our house, and Mudgie seemed mildly interested in them. We also went to the tree lighting event on our town common, and Mudgie seemed to like that as well, but was far more excited about the fire truck that drove by at the end of the lighting than he was about Santa, who was in the fire truck, or the lighting of the tree!