Tara at 3 Months Old

Tara is our 3rd kid and she is turning out to be such an easy baby! She sometimes falls asleep on herself (3 times already!), she is happy most of the time and she does not have any major medical issues. She poops only once every few days (sometimes up to 8 days!) She is cheerful through most things and you can take her everywhere. And when she wants to be picked up she first says 'Waah', is silent for a while, says 'Waaahaaa!', is silent some more and she does this a few times before she starts crying! What a relief after Timmy (her older brother), who always started screaming before he even woke up and the moment you put him down.

Still I think our perceptions have changed after Timmy, who was really high need. I feel we would have thought her much harder when she would have been our first baby. For example, Tara has to be carried almost the whole day (although that is changing the last few days), but at least then she is happy (Timmy had to be carried day AND night and still was very unhappy). Of course we like to carry babies anyway, they are still so dependent and I actually feel very loving while I am carrying her, so that helps a lot. But I know the first time around, I didn't know much about parenting yet and having to carry a baby the whole time would have been hard on me, although I know I would have done it. Maybe it also helps that I know now how short this newborn phase lasts and how soon she will be running through the house on her own.

Also she doesn't sleep through the night yet and I don't expect her to do that anytime soon, but it is no problem, since I am used to broken nights already and she sleeps with us, so I just roll over and plug in :-) She also nurses very frequently, but after 2 other nursers like that, I expected her to do that. I guess being an experienced mom helps in knowing what to expect of an infant, the first time around all those things hit me much harder. For example, I had heard about night feedings, but somehow reality didn't hit home until I really had to do them :-) And Cees (our first one) had medical problems and needed to be weighed before and after a feeding, so even though we had a family bed, we still needed to get up in the middle of the night a few times, to weigh him before and after. And he never wanted to lie still on the scales, which made it twice as hard!!!

She usually falls asleep while being carried and wakes up the moment you put her down, but even that doesn't frustrate us anymore, we just carry her around while she is sleeping (and this is changing already, she is now learning to fall asleep all by herself, without any encouragment from us (we are totally amazed about that, our other kids never did this))

I also think, that when this would have been our first baby, we would have been smug and thought 'She is such an easy baby, rarely cries, I am sure that's because we are such good parents and we are practicing attachment parenting.' :-) After 3 totally different babies I know that is not why she is so easy, it is just her temperament :-)

So we are very grateful that our first girl baby turns out to be so easy (although I don't think it's because her being a girl, it's just her character). I know we would have survived another Timmy, but life with her is sooooo much more relaxed!

She has been camping a few times already. When she was almost 2 months old, Sander's parents came over here to take care of our boys for a few days, so that we could go camping with only Tara. It was a lot of fun, and we did some nice hikes with her. The most notable one was the Frankensteyn Cliffs in New Hampshire, which was a tad more challenging than was shown on our map! The camping itself with such a small baby was easy though, she can't roam anywhere yet!

The next weekend we went camping with the whole family and did fun trips too. Cees and Tim really enjoyed our visit to the Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory, especially the free samples. Tara missed out on them, she is still totally breastfed. We did even one more camping another weekend to meet some on line friends. The picture on the bottom shows Tara in our camping family bed, together with daddy and Cees.

Developmentally: Tara did the rolling over from belly to back for the first time today! I am so proud at her! :-) She is smiling and laughing a lot and she has started to hit toys and to really hold them. Time seems to be going so fast!