Mason - 5 Months

My big Five Month Old!

Can you believe we're a month away from Mason being half a year old? Nooooooo!!! Time is going so quickly! 

My sweet Mason keeps growing and growing - bigger, cuter, stronger, and sweeter :)

We actually took Mason in to see a pediatrician here the day after his 5 month birthday....just one month late on his 4 month check up. Oops. If you know how complicated it is to go see a doctor in India though, you'll sympathize.  But we did finally take him in, and according to the nurse he weighed 17 lbs. 1 oz., and was 26 inches long! I have no idea what his percentiles are like on the American scale, but he's a giant compared to little Indian babies on the India growth charts :)

Mason is so SO active. I've been looking back at Landon's and Layla's Five Month posts to compare what they were doing around this age. Mason had already rolled over from tummy to back at 4 months, and soon after that he was rolling back to tummy as well. Now he is all over the place. He's not crawling yet, but somehow he manages to roll and scoot and inch his way all over - I have no idea how he moves around so much! Just this week I packed the jungle away because he wasn't actually playing with it anymore - anytime I lay him down on the floor he immediately flips over to his tummy and starts scooting around in circles looking for toys to play with or older siblings to watch. He'll get his knees up under him and then push himself forward, which means he frequently scoots his way off the edge of his playmat - thankfully we got a second set to make it a little bigger!

Mason still loves standing in his jumperoo, and loves having little rattles and toys to play with when he's laying on the ground. Everything goes in his mouth, of course, most frequently his fingers.

Can't even take his fingers out of his mouth long enough for a pic with his siblings!

One thing Mason started doing a lot this month that I LOVE, is laying his head down on your shoulder when he starts to get tired.

He'll lay his head down for a minute, then suddenly look up like he needs to check something out, then decide he's still tired and lay it back down, repeat. It's just so sweet and I love it!

The most significant "milestone" this month was our great nap battle.

Mason has NOT been a good sleeper at night, and this month it reached a point where not only was he not sleeping well at night, he was not initially FALLING asleep at night. It would sometimes take over an hour to get him to go to sleep, feeding him multiple times trying to get him to fall asleep - it was driving me crazy! I realized that probably a big part of him not falling asleep was the fact that ever since we got back to India, he's taken every single nap in his swing, so he's not used to soothing himself to sleep for naps. So I decided to buck up and train him to nap in his bed. Add on top of that the fact that he was still trying to decide whether he wanted to be swaddled to sleep or not...it was a terrible combo!

Boy was it a battle! It took about 5 days for him to start consistently falling asleep for naps in bed (and staying asleep longer than 30 minutes). I spent lots of time staring at his monitor - and taking pictures of the times he slept to document and send to Kyle!

I'm not sleeping!!

One of the nights he kept refusing to go to sleep - we decided it was just his way of getting alone time with us without Landon and Layla around.

Finally, Mason is taking all of his naps in his crib now! After a couple of solid weeks of NO swing time, once I knew he had it down sleeping in the crib, I'll occasionally let him sleep in the swing now if he wakes up too early.

He's still not sleeping long at night...he's very inconsistent. Occasionally he'll sleep 5 or even 6 hours at a time, but usually he wakes up every 3-4 hours. Mason Mason Mason. What are we gonna do with you?

Even though I miss sleeping through the night without waking up, I'll gladly do it for this sweet boy!