Haven’t updated in so long! Well, taking care of a baby does swallow up 95% of one’s time, if you’re doing it properly, that is. Which I hope I am.

Freya is asleep right now but could awaken at any minute. How about some recent pics?

She weighs between 13 and 14 pounds now, and is a big chubby girl. She’ll be 5 months old on the 27th. I love her more than words can describe.

I desperately want and need to blog more, or even just write in my notebook. It’s such a cliche, but being a parent truly is the most difficult and most wonderful thing. I want to document what this is like. For the time being, I am lucky enough to be a full-time mother. I officially quit my job a few weeks ago.

Breastfeeding is going great, I am so glad I stuck with it. Freya has never tasted a drop of formula and hopefully she never will. That stuff is, well, kinda nasty. When she is six or maybe seven months old, we’ll let her try some mashed fruit and vegetables. I think she deserves fresh food as her introduction to a solid diet, so I want to avoid processed baby food as well. It will end up being less expensive, too.

But she will have mama’s milk as her main meal until she’s a year old at least, then we’ll probably start transitioning to more solid foods. I’m not putting an end date on nursing though. It will happen when it happens. By the time she is two we might just be doing one nurse at bedtime, which is pretty typical for those who do “extended” nursing (I don’t know why two years is considered extended when the World Health Organization recommends two years for all babies, but w/e. Breastfeeding is so inconvenient, which is of course the worst thing in the whole world to the typical American).

Anyhoo. Waiting for my hair to grow out… I super regret cutting it so short. Feh. Every day it grows a bit more. Right now I hate it so much.

Freya is hitting all her little milestones. She can prop herself up on her hands briefly, and rest on her elbows for long periods during tummy time. She vocalizes and laughs and smiles constantly. Getting good at using her hands, lately when I’m carrying her around she reaches out to try to touch things — yesterday she pet Kona! She found this very amusing, as did I. She’s just doing so great. Sleep is going well, too, maybe because she shares our bed. I loooove snuggling with her, especially in the morning after Brian gets up. I don’t plan to “sleep train” our baby; she’s not a puppy. Her little brain works differently than an adult’s, and her sleep patterns are very different. She still lives so much on instinct, so I trust that she’s waking to eat (or whatever) when she needs to. Fortunately she doesn’t keep me up long — I just pop her on my boob and we both doze off again.

I know that in time, as she matures, she will be ready to sleep on her own. But we do not buy into the misguided belief that babies should become independent of their parents as soon as humanly possible. Whoever heard of an independent baby? I don’t mind at all that my baby needs me — she’s a baby. Of course she needs her mother. I don’t want to separate her from me when she is so little and vulnerable. If we lived in the wild, I wouldn’t stick her in a different corner of the cave, either. Mama bears sleep with their cubs, and she is surely my little cub.

So if it wasn’t obvious yet, we are attached parents. But I knew these were the things I wanted to do before we even got pregnant and before I knew what Attachment Parenting was. It just feels natural, it just feels right. It just feels like what my mothering instincts tell me, and they would not steer me wrong.

Ok on that note, time to wake that little boo and give her some milk. Bye!