RJ's Three Month Update

On Wednesday, September 19, RJ turned 3 months old. Unfortunately, it has taken me almost a month to compile the pictures and video from Month 3 to blog about it so imagine the rest of this post to be from a month ago.

In Month 3 we went to Hollywood, Napa Valley and the Lodi Grape Festival, and RJ has had his first babysitter and started school. More importantly he's gaining more weight. He's still small for his age (he's still catching up from the surgery setback), but he's gaining steadily on average of about an ounce a day.

Here's a chart of his daily growth up through his 3 month birthday (where he was 9 lbs and 4 oz) . We started weighing him almost every day since mid-August.
In his third month, he's also started doing some pretty neat stuff.

He has gotten consistently better at holding his head up and he has been rolling over! He first did this about a month ago, but it's really only been consistent recently. I actually was lucky enough to catch his first roll on video, completely by accident. It can be argued that he wasn't fully on his tummy in the video, but since then we have definitely witnessed bona fide rolling over without the help of not being fully situated on his tummy.

We have also discovered the fun of playing "superman", which is good for fostering neck strength. We'll keep playing this game until he inevitably spits up all over me. (He has quite the talent for spitting up.)

Over this last month RJ has been interacting more and more with his toys since his motor control has increased and he has figured out how his hands work. He likes to "talk" to Blue Dog and Lion and he likes to hold onto monkey's ears and feel monkey's knit texture. We also play with the blocks that GG Ho! Ho! gave him. I stack them and RJ knocks them over! This started by accident, like most activities in the second substage of the Sensorimotor Period of development (Piaget, 1966). In this stage, infants typically engage in behaviors by accident or due to a reflex, but then are able to repeat the action through somewhat voluntary means.

We still can't get over what a great baby we have. He has his fussy periods (and even fussy days from time to time), but he really is a pretty happy baby. He's also a very active baby who is alert a great amount of the time. Our biggest challenge is getting him to sleep, but at least he figured out the day vs. night distinction this month. His sleep is concentrated more at night than during the day. We're also still working on getting him scheduled - our mornings are at least getting better - he usually wakes up right around the time we're ready for him - 6:15. But there are days when he's up earlier or we have to wake him up at 6:15 so we can get out the door!

For more pictures and video from Month 3, just click on any of the pictures.