Peanut turned 5 months old yesterday. Where has the time gone? He’s almost a half-year old. The first couple of months I wondered how I would survive getting no more than 3 consecutive hours of sleep at a time and the endless pumping sessions. I’m still sleep deprived, but Hubby and I have worked out a system where I can get 6-7 hours of sleep a night and I dropped the night pump a couple months ago. Oh, the luxury!

Peanut is developing into a real little person now. He’s so curious and drinks everything in. The ceiling fan and the musical activity gym with moving critters enthrall him. He grabs onto the critters with such strength, I’m afraid he’s going to break them. He loves our daily stroller walks. Anytime we pass under a tree, he gets wide-eyed and stares at the leaves. The white fence at the end of our street also grabs his attention. I recently got a funky Wh00zit mobile for his crib in hopes of transitioning him to at least napping in it and yesterday he giggled at the mobile. That is until he decided he wanted OUT and started screaming.

And he’s impatient. If he doesn’t get his bottle NOW he screams. Once the bottle is securely in his mouth, all is good. He knows Mommy and Daddy and smiles endlessly at us – even when the bottle is in his mouth. Those bottle-in-mouth smiles are adorable. He loves kisses on his cheeks and belly and giggles and cackles with delight. Bath time is sort of iffy. Sometimes baths are fun, other times they’re screamfests.

He’s a little uncertain about strangers. He’s curious with new people and will sometimes smile, but if they get in too close, hell breaks loose. He takes after Mommy in needing his personal space. He also is very, very cranky when he first wakes up. Also like Mommy.

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Next week I return to full-time status. Something I’m dreading. We seriously need the money – our mortgage increased $300 a month in January. Apparently they didn’t estimate this year’s taxes correctly, so our escrow is in the negative, and not only do we have to make that up, but we have to pay extra to cover next year’s taxes. We still owe $2000 to the hospital for Peanut’s NICU stay (thank goodness for decent insurance or it would’ve been 10 times that), and we started getting bills for his $ynagis shots. He’s had 3 so far and we’re not sure if he’ll get another. They run to the tune of $430 a pop (again, insurance is a savior they would otherwise be in the neighborhood of $1800 each).
Mom’s been doing amazingly well. She’s not in too much pain and seems to have her emotions in check. She has been laying on the guilt trips and passive crap about not seeing enough of Peanut, but I can generally let it pass in one ear and out the other. When she starts the passive crapola with the baby “I know you want to see more of Grandma” I respond with “Grandma is being passive-aggressive.” It generally nips the comments and is a lot kinder than what I’d really like to say. She still gets on me about letting Peanut stay with her which is not going to happen and I have become more blunt about it. Who knows, maybe she’d be perfectly capable and safe with the baby, but I’m not taking my chances. She also has no safe place for him to sleep other than the carseat if I leave it with her and I’m not too keen in that. One of her cats is a little too nosy with the baby and I’m afraid she might scratch him – she has an attitude and is not shy about using her claws.