SteelyKid is two months old today.
She had a routine checkup yesterday. She weighed 11 lbs 7 oz (50th to 75th percentile), was 22 3/4 inches long (50th), and had a head circumference of 39.5 cm (75th). These are down from birth (when she was in the 70th, 70th, and 90th percentiles, respectively), but her weight gain is still very healthy, as is the rest of her.
It's amazing how much two and three-quarters inches in length feels like. I'm walking sideways everywhere now when I carry her, because I'm paranoid that I'll catch her feet or, especially, her head on things to either side of me; pretty soon I won't be able to turn her around in mid-air if she's sticking her legs out stiffly; we're going to have to thread her car seat's shoulder straps through the higher position very soon; and she just looks so much bigger.
She's also noticeably stronger than at one month. She's holding her head up higher and longer when she's on her stomach—minutes rather than seconds—and sometimes does baby push-ups and gets the whole top of her chest up. We like to wave her legs around in the baby dance, and she likes it too. I have no idea if it actually strengthens anything or just amuses us all, but if she's not swaddled really carefully and tightly, she can kick her way out of a blanket in approximately thirty seconds, and when she's awake and moving around, she can bang her feet on her crib mattress loud enough to be heard through the wall.
She still doesn't like having her hands swaddled, but she does like the sling. And speaking of strong, just a couple days after she first fell asleep in it with her head all scrunched to one side, she was holding her neck straight while staring up at me. (Sometimes she falls asleep in the sling, and sometimes she just looks solemnly up at as much of me as is visible with those huge dark eyes. This tends to be when I'm eating dinner, so maybe she's just dreaming of the day when she can have solid food.) It's a good thing the sling has two shoulder straps, otherwise taking post-dinner walks with the dog would never work.
She definitely likes staring at things much more. She twists her head around to look at one of the cross-stitches I made for the nursery when she's on the changing table (which is incredibly gratifying). On good days, she can pass up to, oh, half an hour (I haven't actually timed it, but that's a reasonable guess) watching her dinosaur mobile. And better, some mornings she can be found quietly awake watching her crib mirror—self-entertaining baby! Not waking up with instant screams! She sometimes will put herself to sleep that way, too, which is nice—not that I don't enjoy cuddling her to sleep, but in the middle of the night I start thinking wistfully of my own sleep . . .
Her pattern these days is to eat just six times a day (once or twice at night). During the day, after eating, she'll be happy and alert and interactive for a while, and then she'll want to be cuddled until she falls asleep. Sometimes she'll wake up to have her diaper changed and then go back to sleep; occasionally she'll stay happily awake. She tends to have a bit of trouble with gas in the early evening, and the past couple of days just before bed; there does seem to be some correlation with foods I eat. At night, she generally goes back to sleep without too much trouble. Her feeding pattern isn't regular enough to reliably schedule things around, but it's still apparently more of a pattern than many two-month-olds.
(Oh, yes, and she doesn't like being burped, but who does? (It is perhaps wrong of me to love that picture so much, but I do. I should make it an icon.))
Her grip is still reflexively strong, and her arm and leg movements are getting less jerky, but she's not successful at hand movements yet. She's gotten her thumb in her mouth several times, but more times she's ended up with half her fist or a knuckle or nothing at all. When we put her in her play-gym, she waves her hands at the dangling toys, and sometimes she hits them and we convince ourselves that she looks pleased, but realistically it's probably just luck. We bought her a pacifier with a little plush red dog sewn onto it, to give her something bigger to grip, and she hasn't quite got the knack of that, though we can see the day coming.
Her face looks about the same to me, except that the band of scaly skin across her eyebrows has vanished (though, now, she has a mild case of cradle cap). She doesn't laugh yet—well, I heard her laugh once when she was asleep—but she continues to have a lovely collection of smiles, from full-face grins to little sideways quirks, and she coos and gahs all over the place. And on that happy note, I'm going to go relieve Chad on baby-soothing duty.
Reminder: no unsolicited advice.