Azra's first holiday!

Azra is now 3 months and 3 weeks old. These photos were taken on the last day of Istanbul's Indian summer on Azra's first ferry boat ride. Now she is quite an experienced little baby. In almost 4 months she has been on a bus, a dolmus, a car, a ferry boat and now a plane. And she has cried on all but the dolmus (Dolmus in Turkish translates as 'stuffed' which is sometimes a very accurate description of these mini buses!). We took her on her first holiday last week. We went to Antalya. We were a little scared how it would be in terms of her crying etc. She did cry, inevitably, on the plane, in the restaurant at breakfast, in the restaurant at dinner, in the streets but at least at was easy to get her to sleep!!! No problems there. Maybe it was because of the heat. We left behind cold Istanbul and sweated in Antalya!
We had our first sea experience for the year, but Azra had the first one of her life. She was quite okay at the beginning. I guess she was expecting it to be like her bath. When she found that it wasn't quite as warm as that she started crying! I think she had a great time on holidays. In the hotel there was a continuous water fall and she loves this sound (don't we all!). And everyone, well many people, are entranced by babies and they were playing with her, cooing to her, admiring her. There may have been people doing quite the opposite especially when she was crying- or sometimes screaming- but she is a baby after all. I am sure we all did the same!
Nowadays she is chatting a lot and is discovering the limits of her voicebox and having a great time doing it! For example this morning she woke up at 5.30am to feed but then after her belly was full decided it was time to have a sing-song! Just what we love at 6am! It seems like she is just so enamoured with her new ly found talents that she just can't wait to practise them! She is also getting more and more active. 2 days ago she was laying on her tummy in her activity gym and then somehow managed to flip herself on to her back! When she did so she just cried! I guess she was completely startled by what she had done! I hadn't expected her to be doing things like this so early, it's a little bit scary! Hopefully it was just a freak occurrence! She is as adorable as ever as she chats or flaps away. She is getting easier to get to sleep at night, but maybe I shouldn't say anything, as inevitably it will change! She is having the same spitting up issues. I am not worrying about it anymore, reflux or whatever, she is obviously gaining plenty of weight and is healthy, so....
She now has her Australian passport so she is ready to become a jetsetter....only one more month to go and she will be!

Azra is 3 months old!

Azra is 3 months old. Where has that time gone? Have I done my best to enjoy her babyhood before it passes? This is what I ask myself. Everybody says that I will miss this period so I am trying to take advantage of it. We go to the park, take walks along the seaside, go shopping, friends come over to see her. We spend time with Ali (5 weeks older than Azra) and his mum. We play at home with toys. Now she is starting to pick things up and look at them and hold them. Here you can see her with her monkey. Actuallly she used to be scared of him as he was pretty much the same size, in the past month I have put some of her animals at the top of the chair so the when she lays down she can see and speak to them. She has very animated conversations consisting of 'oooh' and 'agoo' with both me and the animals!
When we go to the park I take her on the swing. She loves it! Because she loves this movement so much we decided to buy a rocking chair to help us in our struggle to get her to sleep. What used to be not such a problem has become quite difficult. It is very rare that we can get her to sleep before 10.30. Actually we start the process at 8.30-9pm with a bath and then I feed her. She goes to sleep I try to put her to bed but she wakes up immediately, so then the process starts again. Sometimes the process can go up to 2 hours. Fortunately not more than that though. The rocking chair has helped us a bit at least. We even play music for her now to help her. Some nights nothing helps though. And to make it worse the hours that she sleeps have become less. She used to sleep at least 5 hours but often 6 or 7 without waking up. Now we are lucky if she sleeps 5 hours. She often wakes up 2 hours after we have put her to sleep as well! I thought I had found a way to keep her asleep. We started putting a hot water bottle in her bed so that as we took her out of our warm arms she wouldn't notice so much as her bed would also be warm. Then I found that if I held her arms close to her chest and put my other hand on her stomach, shushed her to sleep and rocked her cradle that when she woke she would go immediately back to sleep when I would do this. When I found this I thought that I had the secrets cracked. However, it works for a while and then you try to do it a few nights later and it doesn't work. Everything changes as does her sleeping habits. The difficult thing is when you have been in control of your life, and then a baby comes along and you have no control whatsoever. If she is is pain, or is tired but can't sleep, hungry but refuses to feed, cries and won't stop whatever you do, there is nothing that you can do. This is difficult, especially for a person who like to be in control! That's when you focus on her smiles and the great things you see in front of you. I guess one has to learn to deal with not being in control!
She has started consciously touching things as she shows with the activity gym. That started about 2 weeks ago. She holds a toy up to look at it and examine it. She has also started smiling at herself in the mirror. She used to cry now however usually she smiles broadly. When we do baby yoga sometimes she even giggles. This is a rare occurrence though.
We took her for her 3 month check up last weekend. She was 5.75kg and 62 cm. So now she must be 6 kg. She is becoming noticeably heavier and chubbier. In fact for her passport photo she has a double chin! To think that she has to live with that photo for at least 5 years! I am even able sometimes to understand the meaning of her cries. It has taken me a while! I remember reading that around 3 weeks a mother can tell the meaning of her baby's cry....
I thought that we had found the reason for her acid reflux. For 10 days I ate no tomatoes, kiwi fruit, and such acidic foods and no chocolate. One weekend I ate tomatoes and chocolate and Azra was much worse after a week of being much better. I stopped eating them and after a few days she was measurably better, spitting up and crying much less. Now however, the spitting up has increased and returned to what it used to be but she is not crying like she used to. So have I found the reason???