6 months reflection

Time flies. My grand-daughter is already 6 months old. I can now sit back and recall the experiences we all went through, the parents and me the grandpa.

From birth my grand-daughter is a very light sleeper in the day. On the average she sleeps only half an hour each time with occasionally extending to 1 hour and rarely 2 hours at a stretch. Sometimes it is only for 5 or 10 minutes. I marvelled at how she is so energised even after such a short sleep and is able to last for another hour or two. At night she goes to bed around mid-night! No matter how much she is coaxed to sleep, she will only sleep when she is ready to sleep.

Her finger licking habit I guess must have started while she was still in the mother's womb. When newly born, her hands were covered with mittens and I noticed that she always try to put her hand into the mouth. So the mittens were always wet. Finally after one month she stopped wearing mittens and then she was able to put her tiny finger into the mouth. She is still doing it now at 6 months old. Of course her latest achievement is now to put her toes into her month. This feat she just managed to achieve.

For the first 2 to 3 months it was a period of adjustment for her parents and grandparents. It was indeed stressful especially with regards to her sleeping habit. Everyone expect a newly born baby to sleep most of the time and only gets up for a feed but in this case she was awake most of the time! We were certainly worried as to whether the baby was getting enough sleep. On the other hand we found that she is growing and did not show any adverse effect due to lack of sleep.

Of course now that we are able to understand her character it is less stressful. We have learned to accept her for who she is, her mannerism and her likes and dislikes.