What’s New
We’ve got a lot of new things going on with Archer this past month, even more so because I forgot to write his five month update. He’s been hitting new milestones and has also started eating food.
During month five, Archer got to explore the UK (you can read a recap of that trip here). Right after we got back from England Archer figured out how to roll from back to belly, so now he can roll in both directions. Once he figured it out he never stopped moving again. If you lay him on the ground with some toys, he will be a good ten feet away in thirty seconds.
Just after five months is when he really got the hang of sitting unassisted. He can sit for such a long period of time now without falling over. It’s nice because it gives him a new outlook on things and makes playing with toys a bit easier. He loves any kind of toy where he can sit up and look around now, so his current favorites are this Ring stack toy
I thought Arch would be an early teether because he got so drooly around 3.5 months, and his bottom two teeth finally popped through right after he turned five months. He looks so cute with his two tiny little teeth showing.
We started taking Arch to swim lessons and just like older brother, he loves the water. He’s comfortable being submerged now and kicks his legs and arms so hard as if he thinks he’s actually swimming.
He’s been giggling more lately and is still such a smiley little man. He is 17.5 pounds and 25.5in.
We also introduced solids this month, which I will cover more on in the eating section below, but so far it’s been going great.
Sleep
Sleep has been all over the place these past two months. Right after we got back from England he had a week or so of poor night sleep which is understandable with the time change. That was followed by a week or two of great sleep where he only woke up once per night. Then the week before his teeth popped through he was up 2-3 times a night and it would take a good thirty minutes to get him back down. The same thing happened when he started eating solids. The nights where he would consume a decent amount of food he just didn’t sleep good. Needless to say I was a bit exhausted. We are back to waking 1-2 times again, usually around 1a and 5a and then he’s up for the day around 7a.
Eating
We started introducing solids right around 5.5 months. He no longer had his tongue thrust reflex and he was sitting up really well unassisted so I felt confident that he was ready. Just like with Theo, we are doing baby-led feeding. If you are interested, you can read more about what that is in this blog post.
We have started with introducing one meal a day and so far Archer loves it. It took him two or three days before he really started ingesting anything, but now he wants to eat everything. He wants to be involved in all meals which is so time consuming and messy, so I usually just stick with one or two meals for him.
So far he’s liked pretty much everything he’s tried. He’s really getting the hang of using a preloaded spoon and is also getting better at holding slippery foods like avocado with two hands so that he doesn’t drop it. It’s been amazing watching him explore new tastes and textures, I forgot how fun this process is.
Archer is still nursing somewhere around 6-8 times per day. So far his little teeth haven’t affected nursing yet fortunately. He takes a bottle really well on the days that I work or am just not available. He eats quite a bit so his bottles tend to be between 4-6 ounces. Even though he is eating solids, he is still nursing the same amount as before because as mentioned in this post, breastmilk of formula should be the primary source of nutrition until 12 months.
I can’t wait to see what new things this next month brings us.
