4 Months Old

Dear Lane,

Happy Birthday! Today you are four months old! How on earth did you get to be so big already? We went to the doctor today and you are 25 1/4 inches long, and you weigh 12 pounds, 5 ounces. That's the 75-90% range for height and the 25-50% for weight. Your head circumference is 15 1/2 inches, which is only in the 10-25% range, but the doctor says that even though it's on the small end, it's still normal, so all is good. You also got five shots. You were such a trooper, although you were definitely not happy about getting poked so many times! I think you might be getting some teeth, because you've been pulling at your ears and stick everything in your mouth, chewing or sucking on it.

You are getting so stinkin' big, Lane! You can hold your head very steady. You found your feet last week, and now you like to grab them when you're lying on your back. I can't wait to see you put them in your mouth, which I know will happen soon! You also actually enjoy tummy time now! You like to look at the patterns on the mat that we put you on, and you even rotate yourself around when you're on your tummy. When you're on your back you like to use your feet to push yourself around. We've found you backed into a corner, or lying sideways in your crib. It's so funny to see you move yourself around on your back, pushing yourself in circles. You are also trying really hard to roll from your back to your tummy, but you haven't quite figured it out yet.

Tonight we gave you your first rice cereal feeding! You've been eying our food for about a month now, and often try to pull our plates towards you, so we figured that you were ready for it. You did really well eating from a spoon and seemed to enjoy the cereal. Maybe it will help fill up your belly so you sleep longer at night, too! You sleep about 11-12 hours at night, usually waking up only once around 3:00 or 4:00 to eat. You can sit up pretty well if we support you, and you can hold your body weight if we help you stand up. You are too, too cute. Everyday we marvel at what a gift from God you are!

Love,

Mommy and Daddy


You love to "fly."


You're really good at standing up, with support from us, of course!


Some of the best times with you are in the bed, when you like to talk to us and grab our faces and put your hands in our mouths.


You like chewing on things.


Tummy time! You're eying that giraffe, and you like to put him in your mouth!


You're trying to roll over from your back to your tummy.


You liked your first rice cereal.


You're still so smiley!

And the winner is...

After tallying all the votes and determining which photos we liked the best, this is the winner! Let me know if you want us to mail you one. You can leave your address in the comment section or send me an email. I won't publish those comments with addresses so nobody will see them except me (in blogger...if you leave your address in the comment section on facebook...well, I make no promises).

Thanks so much to everyone who voted! We really appreciate all the feedback and we did take it all into consideration!

Diary of a Spider Bite

As some of you know, a few weeks ago I was bitten by a brown recluse spider. It was a Friday evening, and I didn't even know that it had happened. That night, in the midst of getting up four times to nurse Lane, I scratched the bite. Saturday morning the bite had swollen up a bit, but not enough for me to think it was anything more than a mosquito bite, since I swell up pretty badly when bitten by mosquitoes. However, by Saturday evening when we arrived at my dad's house, it had swollen up a bit more, enough to where my stepmom thought I should go to the ER. Well, I didn't want to go to the ER just to pay $1000 or so for them to write me a prescription, so I figured I'd wait until the next day and go to an Urgent Care place (the ones in Asheville were closed by the time we go there on Saturday night).

Sunday morning my leg looked like this:


The inner black lines are where I drew around the swelling on Saturday night before going to bed. The outer black lines are where it had swollen to by Sunday morning.

Sunday morning my leg had swollen even more and I was limping because the muscles surrounding the bite were extremely sore. I have a cousin who's a pharmacist that we'd be seeing later in the day at my sister's house, so I thought I'd wait until then and ask her what she thought. Well, the first thing she said was "you need antibiotics." So off to the Urgent Care we went. The doctor there gave me two prescriptions, neither of which I remember the names of, but one was an antibiotic and the other was a steroid. I took my first dose on Sunday afternoon.

By noon on Tuesday my leg looked like this:


The redness had gone down, as had the swelling. With the quarter there you can see just how much of my leg had been swollen!

I continued taking my drugs and by Thursday you could barely tell that I had been bitten:


Thursday morning. You can still see where I was bitten, but all the swelling was gone.

So, all this to say: if you're ever bitten by something and you start to swell up like I did, go to the doctor. Then you won't end up with a hole in your flesh. I thought about borrowing a picture from another website, but they're quite disgusting and I didn't want to make anyone puke. So...hip hip hooray for modern medicine for saving my leg!