Baby and me: 5-month update

Baby

So after returning from London we settled back into life in Muscat just fine. Master A even slept better, once doing a nine-hour stretch and, of course, I woke up at about six hours in and then worried that he was okay the rest of the time. But, no sooner we settled, what I can only guess is a growth spurt began and his sleep was terrible again. He was waking up every 2.5 hours at night and taking short naps during the day. Other than ride it out, I'm not sure what I can do to get the good sleep back.

He's taken to sleeping on his right side, rolling and arching his back. He seems to have a preference for the right and I don't know if that's related to me sleeping on my right a lot when I was pregnant. Speaking of rolling, he now rolls nicely from back to belly, but not back again. Once he's had enough on his front he just gets annoyed and as much as I try and leave him to figure out how to roll back on his own eventually he gets upset enough that I pick him up.

We've had a couple of funny incidents where sounds surprised him. Foil being one, he screamed but how much of that was fear and how much was just a response to the sound I'm not sure. He reacts in a similar way to plastic bags. He does not like the sound of the blender though, that always makes him cry.

We have also started swimming lessons. I wanted to capitalize on how much he likes bath time - he's always been happy to have his head in the water and is even daring enough to turn his face into the water and try to roll over.

I thought by now we would have something of a routine, but we do work on a 1.5 hour awake schedule, in which time we would eat and play, and then he would sleep and the cycle would be repeated.  Me not working and not really having anything that has to be done most days means that we mostly work about his mood. I'm not sure at what point we'll work to mine.

Me
Well the baby part of this post has been written for over a month, and the fact I haven't come back to finish off the me section should give you a clue as to how month six is going. I'll save a longer update for that post.