Five Months...

Well I would like to proudly say that by five months (14.5 weeks adjusted age), all three babies have slept 12 hours at night twice. HALLELUJAH!! Naps are a different story and I'll touch on that in a different post. Soooo we've hit a great milestone here at the Rudd house! Every night is different with problems like Zachary waking up for a pacifier several times, Leah waking up because her one good nostril is clogged, Caleb waking up at 4am and wanting to play, etc... but we can finally see some light and hope that in the next couple months the babies will be more consistent with their sleep durations. Unfortunately I have had to stay up all night, many nights, working on the babies sleep patterns these past few months. Once I would get one down, another one would wake up an hour later. Or if I was encouraging a certain baby to sleep rather than eat, I had to be fully awake on pacifier duty while possibly soothing and feeding another. LUCKILY I have NOT been undertaking this monstrous 'sleeping through the night' task alone. In fact, I have not been without help since the babies came home four months ago! There has always been an extra set of hands whether it was my Dad, Mom, Clark's Mom, the night nanny, or Clark (all at separate times), so that come 6am I was able to crawl into bed and sleep for 5-6 hours while one of them would take baby duty. We were sure sad to see our night nanny go after six weeks that's for sure! When she left, we were JUST starting to encourage Caleb to sleep for four hours at night rather than three. Wow. Seems like eons ago. Point is, there is NO WAY I could've cared for three babies, stayed up all night with them, and started all over the next day without help. No way. Clark and I are so grateful for our family members who have sacrificed their time, sleep, and money to come to Texas and jump into the chaos going on here. We can truly never repay them because seriously, it was pretty crazy around here for a while. My mom was reminding me what life was like for the first few weeks after the babies came home and honestly I hardly remember any of it!!! It is such a blur now and I'll be honest again, I hope to never have to experience the first few months with three babies at the same time again! HA! I'm SO glad we are finally at this point. The guest room is empty now with the exception of Clark's sisters coming in a few weeks. I'm so excited for what lies ahead in the coming months and all the milestones the babies will reach. They truly are amazing human beings and I can't believe we have three of them. Really....I still can't believe it. :)

By the time I finally got to working with Zachary and his sleeping through the night, I started to get real inconsistent with when I fed him overnight, how long I let him cry, etc... I think it was because by the third kid, I was just so anxious to get him to 12 hours that I skipped a lot of vital steps I practiced with the other two. I showed a lot of consistency with Caleb and Leah and they were having successful stretches of sleep right away. We had one REALLY bad night with Zachary. He slept from 6-10pm then cried from 10-12am, then woke up and cried at 2am, 4am, and 5:30am. The next night.....he slept from 6pm-4am, the next night he slept all the way through! This was all the while Caleb and Leah had been sharing a room. Apparently Leah is a loud sleeper. Typically from 5-6am she thrashes and groans but is still asleep. Unfortunately this would wake Caleb and he would start to cry which woke Leah all the way. So for three nights they were up crying around 5am. Yuck. Caleb is now in our closet and doing much better. Fortunately for him he'll move into the guest room as soon as Clark can move the crib. You'd think a four bedroom house would be big enough for three kids!! Nope, someone still ended up sleeping in a closet. :) We actually don't mind him in the closet because he is so quiet. He does sometimes wake up in the 5am hour but just lays there quietly. Such a sweet boy.

It's so interesting to think back to when we were house hunting. We were surprised at how few homes there were to choose from and the ones that were available in our price range weren't in the condition we'd hoped. So we viewed our current home the first day it had been on the market and didn't actually have it on our 'to look at' list. We put in an offer that night, as it was in our price range, with someone else's offer and luckily ours was accepted! It had four bedrooms which was kind of awkward because it was just me and Clark. We planned on having a workout room, sauna room, candy room, theater, etc... You name it, we were going to have it in one of our many rooms. Sadly, months went by and nothing happened with the rooms. We got lots of questions about why we bought such a big house and we always answered that it was just put right in front of us so we couldn't pass it up. Little did we know all the rooms would be filled a little over a year later! Strange....we know this home has been a HUGE blessing in all of this though. Crazy how things work out.

Here's some other five-month tidbits. Not much has changed since their four month mark. I've tried several times again to do rice with Zachary but he is clearly not ready. Oh, he is still eating fine and we are still using the Simply Thick. I'll probably change over to rice cereal as a thickener here in another month or so. Leah could really use a thickener in her bottles as well (I've been using half Simply Thick packets for her) so I'll probably use the rice cereal in her bottle soon. She does eat some vegetables at night with Caleb. All we've tried so far is squash. They seemed to like it all right but I know their little bodies are having to adjust to food which makes for some uncomfortable gas at times.

This past month a record was set in our house....

I changed FOUR dirty diapers in about 30 minutes. Seriously? They decided to make my life really interesting all at the same time.

I have been trying a couple different formulas. I used up all my free Enfamil, and since it is more pricey, wanted to change to a cheaper brand. I tried Costco and felt like it was such a thick, frothy formula. Enfamil was so smooth and I was obviously used to that. So I trialed Walmart Parent's Choice and that seems to be comparable to Enfamil's consistency although it smells so weird. I can't hardly smell it once it's mixed and wonder how these babies want to drink it every four hours. They do though. That's all that matters I guess.

We're moving along though and six months will be here before we know it! Here's some five month pics... The third one isn't that great of Leah but it makes me laugh. Check out their new five-month picture on the sidebar too!






*Photos courtesy of Gram