Solids!

The days of sweet smelling diapers are over, as Micah is now eating solids! We had gotten very comfortable giving Micah six liquid feedings a day and sleeping around nine hours at night. But after weeks of waking him up at 9pm for that last feeding, I was beginning to think he could skip it. As many parents will attest, the late evening feeding is a hard one to drop once the baby is sleeping through the night. No one wants a surprise wake-up call at 3am. I finally decided I would drop the 9pm feeding and would offer some rice cereal during the day to fill him up more. I felt a little guilty for doing this, as I am a rule follower and "the books" all say to wait until 4 months to start solids. But I figured 15 weeks was close enough. And my mom always says, "Micah is a person, not a book." He didn't seem to like it at first, so we stopped and continued with our old routine (six feedings).

Well, over the holidays my mom was baby-sitting, and she offered Micah some rice cereal mixed with applesauce. He loved it! I started offering it to him myself, and now he's about to eat us out of house and home! He's been eating 2-3 solid meals a day for the last week (in addition to five liquid feedings) and is now sleeping 10-11 hours at night. Today we introduced pears, and he seems to love those, too.

In a weird way, we're sad that he goes to bed so early now. When Jamie goes back to ECU in a couple of weeks, he won't see Micah much at all on his teaching days. On the other hand, I do enjoy settling in for a warm bath in the evenings and having some time just to spend with Jamie. Our baby is growing up so fast!