Papaya hits the six month milestone and life continues on.

I’ve been in the planning process of rebuilding the backyard shed, which has taken up a good chunk of my Papaya’s nap free time. More to come on that project later.

Papaya turned six months! Mama and I wanted to wait until now to start supplementing her food with formula. This has been a liberating step for the stay at home papa, who now doesn’t have to worry quite as much about food supply on a daily basis while Mama works, pumps, and makes breast feeding visits during the work day.

The little nugget is now freely rolling belly to back, back to belly, left to right, and right to left. She also sits up fairly well but not without close supervision. She’s getting very frustrated by her inability to scoot forward and back, so that’s likely coming up very soon. She’s now trying lots of real food with us as she’s long since been showing high interest. Hopefully that interest continues after she’s a year old when food starts to become an actual source of nutrition.

Sleep update: she’s waking about twice a night, and the first sleeping period continues to improve. We’re now experimenting with a new sleeping arrangement, initially brought on by yet another sickness of Nashi. I sleep with the boy in one room and Mama sleeps with Papaya in the main bedroom. This allows the baby to have enough space on the bed and not be disturbed, but close enough that she goes to sleep relatively easily. This is our current form of “sleep training.” We’re sort of aware that we’re destined to all sleep in the same room, possibly with a ridiculous set up of main bed in the middle for us, small beds on each side for the kids. Just one big pile of bed, really.

The parents actually like the idea of a big sleeping pile. The current focus is getting Papaya to progress in her sleep development without needing Mama as a crutch. This method seems to actually support that at the moment. Thinking back to Nashi’s sleep stuff, the real issue during this time with him was that he kept waking up and needing a boob for comfort. We finally had to spend a month or so with Mama in the other room just so he lost that dependency. Once that happened, we were kind of home free with him. Then we just had the coughing and vomiting thing that turned out to be a tonsil issue. The boob-as-comfort issue is something we’ve kept in check pretty well with Papaya. She’s naturally a little more independent.

I won’t touch on the continuing threenager issues we’re having with Nashi and instead will leave this here: he still insists on holding and squeezing my arm when he goes to sleep. I set our new room up with his bed next to mine. He falls asleep every night with both hands on my arm, one of which up my shirt towards my shoulder. He’s a sweet mush. I actually even caught him reaching up Papaya’s arm a little when I was reading them a story on the couch. Arms are his happy place. His future wife may read this someday and go “you’ve been doing this since you were a toddler!”