3 months old already?! Say it isn't so.

I'm a little behind, and haven't written a post in awhile, so there's a lot to update:

1.  Nora is three months old! WHAT?! How did this happen?

She is getting so big and alert. It seems like one day she realized that the world is a pretty cool place, and she wants to see everything.  Sometimes it looks like her head is on a swivel, because she just looks back and forth, soaking everything in.  She smiles easily now and is even starting to laugh (though whenever I get out the video camera, she stops, of course).   Sometimes she will even sleep through the night, which makes Mommy very, very happy.  She did it fairly consistently (maybe 75% of the time) for about two weeks, but hasn't at all in the last three nights...I think this is a very mean trick to play on me, especially so close to Mother's Day. I'm hoping she will get back into the routine soon.  She still loves to play under her play gym, and today we bought her an ExerSaucer, because her legs are getting very strong and we thought she might be ready for it. We haven't tried it yet, though. 

2. She is adamantly, morally opposed to bottles.  This is coming at a bad time, because just when I started to need to go places sans baby, she decided to have other plans.  I had 2 different trainings for a class I'm going to teach this summer, and both times required me to be gone for 3+ hours.  Ryan was home with her and tried to give her bottles both times, and she wanted nothing to do with them. By the time I got home, she was a very unhappy girl. This is very stressful for me, because I feel guilty whenever I have to be gone and even when I don't have to be gone but think I might like a few hours away, I can't.  It's also, obviously, very stressful for Ryan (or whoever is with her when she gets hungry, which so far has just been Ryan), because he's home with a fussy baby and can't give her what she wants.  (And Nora is clearly not appreciative of the situation, either.) We had been practicing before the trainings, and still are, to try to convince her to take one, but she just doesn't want anything to do with them.  This came as a surprise to me, because she did fine with bottles when she was very tiny, as we had to supplement at first.  She has never gone more than a week without a bottle, so I assumed, wrongly, that we wouldn't have to worry about bottle refusal.  We've tried several different brands, different times of day, etc., but we are not seeming to have any luck. The only time she will take it without fussing is during a "dreamfeed" - around 11pm when I normally wake her up just enough to eat and go back to sleep for (hopefully) the rest of the night.  Suggestions are welcome!

3. She has become an experienced world traveller.  Or, in other words, we flew to Florida and back, and survived.  I was very nervous about the trip, unsure of how she would do on the airplane. I figured people would either love us or hate us by the end of each flight.  Luckily (for us, definitely, but also for them), they loved us.  Of the four flights total, she slept for two whole flights and part of the other two. When she was awake, she looked around and chewed on her fingers, her favorite activity.  Everyone on the flights ooh-ed and aah-ed over her and told us how adorable she is.   The only blip in whole trip was a major poop blow-out in the Atlanta airport...let's just say we had to throw away the onesie. I was very grateful we remembered to pack an extra outfit in the diaper bag.

4. She had her first visit to the ocean.  It was very sunny, and we didn't want to expose her to too much sun, but we had to put her toes in the water.  Both days that we were at the beach, she (we) put her feet in, looked around a bit, and then fell asleep.  I think she'll be a good little beach bum, just like her mama.

5. She attended her first wedding.  Aunt Andrea and Uncle Chad (now officially "Uncle") tied the knot on the beach, which was the main reason for our trip. We are so excited for them and happy to welcome Chad into the family. Plus, we're really glad they got married on the beach to give us an excuse to take a lil' vacation. :)

6. Just for fun:

Baby George Washington. I do this almost every time I give her a bath, and it always makes me laugh. She is very serious about the whole thing, probably because she is planning her venture across the Potomac.