Update on us, 4.5 months

I thought I'd write a quick update on what Ezra's been up to. He's now 4.5+ months old.

Ezra sits quite well on his own. He sometimes topples backwards so I keep a pillow behind him. He recognizes his name and turns to us when we call him, which is exciting to see. He loves to reach out and touch everything, but especially faces. He has started having a little bit of stranger anxiety, though, but only with larger groups paying attention to him. His favorite activity right now is story time at the library, which we go to on Tuesday mornings. He absolutely loves watching the other babies and children--he just lights up! He also enjoys all of the songs. He constantly has his fingers, thumb, or recently the entire back of his hand or his wrist/arm in his mouth, and he drools a LOT! He doesn't generally suck his thumb, though--he chews it! He has a fabulous sense of humor and laughs easily.

This morning Baruch and I watched him do something we thought was amazing. He has an exersaucer that he likes to sit in sometimes to play with the toys and look around. There is one toy that is a plastic enclosed tube with little plastic balls/beads in it which you can spin around so the beads make noise. Next to it there is a long plastic thing with a loop on the end. (It's hard to describe these things) Anyway this morning he was pushing around the first toy and then he looked over at the second and took it and used it to spin the first. Then he stopped and used his hands again, and then used the second toy again. It was so amazing to watch him learn that he could manipulate one toy with the other!

There are more mundane things that I feel compelled to record so I don't forget them in the future. Ezra has just stopped nursing every two hours during the day; now he nurses every 2-4 hours, depending on what he's doing. I'm just following his lead in this. He's been staying awake for longer periods of time between naps, usually 1.5 to 2 hours, which is probably the main reason he's nursing less often. More and more often he's nursing to sleep for naps, which he never used to do. He recently went through a period (maybe 1.5-2 weeks) of sleeping horribly, only 30 to 60 minutes at a time and waking up not wanting to sleep at all. I think it must have been a growth spurt, because now he's grown out of most of his 3-6 month clothes!