All About Rylee

Remember I said in my 6 Month Birthday post that I was going to do separate posts for each of the babies? Well here it is!  This is all about Rylee!  My sweet little, petite, firecracker.

My Love Bug

At her last weigh in 3 weeks ago, Rylee weighed 13 lbs, 2 oz and was 24.5 inches.  Woo hoo!  She's reached 2 feet tall!  Rylee is still wearing 3 month clothes and some, but very few 3/6 month.  My sister made the observation the other day that Rylee has no butt, even with a diaper on!  It's true.  Any pants/shorts that are bigger than 3 month size just fall off her.  She is wearing size 2 diapers, but could probably still be in size 1.  I was afraid to buy more size 1 and have her grow out of them before we had a chance to use all of them.  Little did I know, that she would continue to have no waist!

Rylee is now a roll over queen!  She has been able to roll from her belly to her back for quite awhile, but now she rolls from her back to her belly constantly!  We cannot keep her on her back and it doesn't matter what's in her way.  She will keep working at it until she can finally get herself where she wants to go!

She's gonna roll onto her belly, even if her brother is in the way!

In the first few months of Rylee's short life, we worried because she was such an unhappy baby.  She had reason of course, but still.  I can now happily tell you that she has found her smile and talks to us all the time. She is on the brink of laughing, but hasn't quite gotten there yet.  For about 3 days, Rylee's talking was more of a scream.  She loooooved the sound of her voice scream.  She wasn't upset.  It was just her way of talking, even at 3:00 in the morning.  It was actually pretty funny and I couldn't help but laugh, all while trying to shush her at the same time.  Now she only lets out a big squeal every once in awhile instead of screaming over and over.

Rylee LOVES to stretch.  When she first wakes up, she stretches out her entire body as long as she can possibly get.  I think it's so funny when you first pick her up and she stretches her arms as far as she can overhead and locks her legs as straight as they can be.  I feel like we need to get her a cape because she's working on being a superhero trying to fly.

Rylee's fine motor skills are coming along.  She does a great job of grasping things, although she still doesn't have the concept of putting teething toy to mouth yet.  It's fun to watch her pick up a toy and actually play with it.

Rylee loves to stand up.  If she's fussing, a lot of times we can just stand her up on our lap or on the floor and she goes from fussy to smiling.  She is nowhere near standing or sitting on her own, but she does enjoy practicing.

I can now say that Rylee actually enjoys bath time.  She used to hate it with a passion and scream like a demon baby the entire time, but now she doesn't mind it at all.  Thank goodness!  Big sigh of relief there. Bath time used to be pretty miserable for both of us!  She also used to HATE getting dressed, but now doesn't mind it at all.

Same thing with diaper changes.  Used to HATE them!  I know this was because she was in so much pain due to the ulcers, so she did have a reason to be so upset.  She has been ulcer free for almost 2 months now. This has totally changed our life!  Diaper changes are no longer a method of torture.  If you are new to our story, you can read this post that tells you and shows you what we were dealing with for the first 3 months of Rylee's life.

She still has reflux and spits up ALL.  THE.  TIME.  We had her on Ranitidine for a long time, but it didn't seem to help.  We also have her using half Neosure and half Alimentum for her formula.  We tried all Alimentum, but that didn't work at all so it was too expensive to keep using that at $30/can.  The half and half seems to be our best bet so far.  We also tried soy for a week, but that was a big failure.  We finally broke down and changed medicine.  We are now trying Prevacid.  It's a $72 CO-PAY!  Yikes.  If it wasn't so expensive, we would have tried it sooner.  Our pediatrician keeps reminding me that reflux medicine is intended to take away the acidity of the spit up, but won't necessarily take AWAY the spit up.  The amount of spit up/puke that we were dealing with made us desperate enough to try the prevacid, even though it is so dang expensive.  She is still spitting up, but it does seem to be improving.  Maybe it's working?

We are still working on our sleeping arrangement.  She goes down to bed in her crib every night and will stay there anywhere from 3-5+ hours.  Sometimes we can give her a bottle and she will go back down again in her crib, although it then takes over an hour for her to go back to sleep.  Sometimes, like last night, she refuses to go back to sleep and will just cry and cry and cry.  Finally, after an hour and a half of this last night, I broke down and went to get her so we could finish out the night on the couch.  When it's 2:00 in the morning, I can only take so much.

One of my absolute favorite things in the world is when Rylee wakes up from a nap and sees me for the first time, she gives me a great big gigantic smile.  If it's the weekend and I've been shopping that day and gone for awhile, she does the same thing.  She gets soooo happy to see me and that just melts my heart.  She is getting to be a lot of fun.  I truly do think she's going to have a little firecracker personality when she gets older.  She has no problem at all letting us know when she wants something, but she also has the biggest smile when she is happy.  Although it is still hard to actually catch those smiles on the camera.  She can have the biggest smile, but as soon as I pull out the camera, she goes deadpan sometimes.  I get pretty elated when I can actually catch one on camera!

Here's a few a lot of pictures of Rylee from this past month...

Our little Oregon State fan.  Go Beavers!

Gotta love little naked babies!

She still looks so tiny in her car seat

She kind of got swallowed up by the exersaucer

I put a box under her feet so she could actually play

There's that beautiful smile!

She even tries to roll over in the swing.  Can't quite make it so she settles for sleeping on her side.

Reading us a story.  So much cuteness!

The day she turned 6 months!