y sweet Henry,

When you were first born, I saw you next to a four month old baby and I thought to myself that four months seemed so old. It felt eons away from where we were at the time, both in development and in actual time. Now look at you: you’re four months old. I looked at you the other day and thought, “Whoa, we made it!” Because each milestone, each new development, each additional pound, they’re all things that felt so far away at one time.

This month we rearranged your routine a bit. You were fighting your daytime naps and waking up at 4:30 every morning (after previously having slept until 7am). So we dropped one nap (you only take three now) and lengthened your awake/play time. Right around that time, we hit the daylight savings time change so I decided we were just going to roll with it and pretend it didn’t happen. That meant your bedtime changed from 7 PM to 8 PM, but—bonus—your  morning rise-and-shine also changed, from 7 AM to 8 AM. After all those big changes in your routine, you have started taking longer naps and sleeping through the night (like 11-12 hours!). Miracle of miracles. This means I can usually get breakfast AND a shower before you get up. Thank you, sweet Henry.

(I think you look like the Target lady in this ^ photo. Except cuter. Obvs.)

People always ask if you’re a good baby. I think that’s a strange question because a) you are our first child so we have no one to compare you to, b) if you weren’t a good baby, would we be honest and say, “Nope, he actually is the worst.”, and c) being a good baby or not is [mostly] all in one’s personal threshold of how they deal with things. My difficulties aren’t someone else’s nor their’s mine. Regardless, I do think you’re a good baby. In fact, sometimes you’re so good that it’s easy to let you play on the floor while I clean the kitchen and do some laundry and then 30 minutes later, I’m all like, “You still doing okay?” And you smile like you’re honored to be asked. But then I feel guilty for not spending those last 30 minutes making you smile even more.

As for new developments, you’ve started laughing. It is still more of a chuckling grunt than an actual giggle, but you’re getting really close! You love to sit up, but prefer standing. Your wobbly head is stabilizing as your neck gets stronger and that means you can sit in your bumbo seat. We got you a jumperoo, but you’re not quite tall enough yet even with some books stacked underneath. I’m pretty excited to see you jumping around in it soon though.

Things that are guaranteed to make you smile are singing (and motions) “If You’re Happy and You Know It” and “The Wheels on the Bus”. Also, making any kind of whistling or “bbbbb” sounds. You also love story time and my collection of books for you has come in handy! We’ve already made it through the entire collection of Curious George and have started on Winnie the Poo. We also have lots of baby books, but I need at least one story a day that involves an actual grammatical sentence that doesn’t rhyme. So we intersperse the baby books with the toddler books and everyone is happy.

The weather has been warming up and we have been taking huge advantage of going outside. For the past two weeks, we’ve gone on a walk almost every afternoon. You usually fall asleep to the lull of the stroller movement, but when you’re awake, you’re happy to look around at this new space. And speaking of looking around, we joke that you have your head on a swivel because it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve seen the living room (or any other room in our house), you still look back and forth, back and forth like you’re taking in everything for the first time again. It’s both hilarious and entertaining.

You make me smile on an hourly basis, my sweet. You have brought us so much happiness. So much.

I love you more than you’ll ever know.