Three Months Old

Yesterday, our girls turned three months old. We posted photos that cover this past month. We don’t have formal measurements from the doctor’s office on how tall the girls are or how much they weigh, but it looks like Eleanor is now 23.5 inches and Miranda is 22.5 inches. For Miranda, that’s four inches of growth in three months. Eleanor grew four and a half inches. That seems like a lot, but they are probably right around the fiftieth percentile still.

The girls have just reached that “Gerber Baby” size. It’s the point in a baby’s growth where you most often see them in baby formula commercials — they’ve outgrown any weird skinniness that they might have when they’re born, they are pretty aware of what’s around them, but they can’t move off their backs still. They’re just cute and pudgy and wiggly.

We’ve been hearing new sounds from them all month. They’re putting together different vowel and consonant sounds and they almost seem like they want to talk. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s until they reach almost one year in age that they start to make associations between their own sounds and any actual meaning. Agnes’ mother has been quizzing them on a daily basis, asking them, “Where’s the pretty flowers?” and pointing their faces to the pictures of flowers on our wall. I wonder when they’ll start to look there just by being asked the question (in Taiwanese, of course).

I mentioned in an earlier post that Eleanor is no longer wearing gloves and neither of them are being swaddled. While the first part is true, the part about swaddling may have been premature. They don’t startle themselves any more, but the girls will still get fussy and refuse to sleep until they’re bound in their blankets. It looks like we’ll be doing that for a little while longer.

The girls have recently moved up to five ounce bottles, five times a day. We found that they were finishing their four ounce bottles every time and often wanted a little more. Now, they finish the five ounce bottles most of the time and rarely want more. My understanding is that their total formula intake will probably never exceed much more than thirty or thirty-five ounces in a day. Instead, they’ll start to eat solids at six months and start to reduce how much they eat through their bottles.

I’m not sure what else to expect this month. I think we’ll finally try eating in a restaurant if we can find someone to come with us. It can’t just be the four of us because if Eleanor and Miranda each have a meltdown where they need to be taken out of the restaurant, there will be no one left at the table. If we do make it out there, we’ll be sure to write about it here.