My baby is 4 months old!

Another month has sailed by with Gavin! He continues to be the apple of our eye :). Or pumpkin, sugar pie, snuggle bug, cutie pie, sweet cheeks, or any of the other pet names we have for him. It's amazing how this little baby continues to develop into a life full of personality and charm.

Today we had Gavin's 4 month appointment and his stats are looking great:
26 inches long= 85% for height
15 lbs, 8 oz = 65% for weight
and his head is in the 45% for head circumference

The one sad note of the appointment is that there's not much we can do at this point for his nasty cold he's been fighting off since December 23rd. That's right, almost a MONTH-ugh! We both got sick right before Christmas. His cold at that point was just a stuffy nose and after 2 weeks of that he started developing a cough. We took him to his pediatrician who thought it was a virus, and thus, not much we could do about it. We have these saline drops we put in his nose and then clean it out with a bulb syringe. You can guess how much he LOVES this process. Then last week we got a call from daycare that he had a fever of 100.8 and that we'd have to pick him up for the day (policy at daycare) and that he just wasn't himself, and had awoken from a nap quite inconsolably crying. Gavin is VERY easily soothed generally so this was concerning as well. By the time I got there a half hour later they said he was refusing to eat and they had retaken his temp which had spiked to 102.5. For a baby this is really high, so I immediately called our doctor's office nurse line and they told me to take him straight to the ER (and recommend this if it's over 101.5 for a baby his age). So of course, I was terrified and drove like a crazy woman as quickly (yet safely) as I could to Children's Hospital's ER. Tom met me there and luckily we had a great doctor and nurse care for him. They gave him Tylenol which helped break the fever but the testing they did to rule out what was going on was almost just as bad, if not worse, than his actual symptoms. They drew blood which involved one man squeezing his wrist and holding his arm down and then the nurse taking his blood which seemed to take forever since his blood wasn't draining very quickly. He screamed the whole time. Then they had to take a urine sample by giving him a catheter. Also screamed the entire time. Then they did a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia and it involved strapping him to the x-ray bed with his arms strapped up above his head. It was torture for him and us as we had to stand behind the glass wall and watch him scream his little lungs out. AWFUL. And after all that testing they determined it was still a virus. They did encourage us to let him sleep in his car seat though so he could be somewhat elevated and not have so much drainage irritating his throat. So we've been continuing the same old same old but it doesn't seem to be getting much better and on Monday he spiked another fever up to 100.2. The pediatrician thought that he could have caught another little bug since his immune system is more vulnerable as he's fighting off the current cold. Lovely. From now on, I'm going to start acting like a linebacker towards anyone who comes within 50 feet of my baby with a cold!

So on the BRIGHT side, Gavin has been developing beautifully otherwise. He has been continuing to eat well and has been becoming VERY social. Just for the last week he's been starting to squeal in delight at things, including when he sees me or Tom, which we LOVE. He also babbles like crazy which is so cute. And when we put him on his changing table, he kicks his feet and moves his arms like a wild man. I think he'll be a runner like his mommy :). I also bought Gavin 2 presents this week from Once Upon A Child, which is a fantastic store of second hand kid's items. I got Gavin a bouncy seat and an exersaucer. We haven't tried out the exersaucer yet but he sure loved the bouncy seat given how much he loves to kick his legs. Gavin has also thoroughly been enjoying the discovery of both his hands and feet. He now sticks his fingers (and anything else he can get ahold of) in his mouth and loves to grab his feet when we're changing his diaper. His other new favorite activity is grabbing Mommy's hair, earrings, and necklaces. For a long haired woman who likes her jewelry this is painful! But I can see the temptation, being that necklaces and earrings are so sparkly and fun for a baby. It is really fun for us to see him be able to learn new things almost daily.

This past month we also got to spend our first Christmas with our little sweet man. Even though both Gavin and I were sick, it was so fun to get to spend the day together as a family. We started our new family tradition of singing Christmas carols around the piano, serenaded by Tom's amazing piano skills, of course. Gavin wore his adorable Santa-esc outfit and looked as cute as ever. Then my parents and brother came over for dinner and present opening. Gavin, of course, got very spoiled. Needless to say, we won't need to be buying him clothes till he's a year old now.

Well I think that's the main news of month 4, thanks for following our family stories!