Oh The Agony

My dear sweet baby girl Olivia recently turned 10 months old. It's an exciting time because her personality is developing so well, but it's also a scary time because that seems to be the only thing developing. The unfortunate thing about having a baby when all your friends have babies is that you tend to compare them to everyone else. Right now, all the babies Olivia's age have been sitting up for months, eating well, crawling and are even close to standing up. Most babies are getting close to the 20 pound mark and are getting super tall. Olivia, is doing none of these things.

At 10 months old, Liv won't sit up, refuses to crawl and weighs an astonishing 11 pounds 5 ounces. I know it's shocking, it's actually difficult to even write it. Because the truth is that most people will say she's just "petite" but it's when you tell people just how little she weighs that you can actually HEAR the breath being sucked out of them. It's phsyically painful to admit it because I know that a lot of people instantly jump to one conclusion: I'm not doing my job.

And I'm not sure I would think much differently than them. Afterall, they don't see the massive amounts of baby food she eats, or the 6-8 times she breastfeeds a day. They don't watch her constantly snack on foods her brothers eat or adamately refuse to take a bottle or sippy cup. They also don't see the amount of times a day that I spend trying to get her to sit up, or put her on her tummy to crawl. They don't hear her wail from sun up to sundown because I make her do things she is so insistant on not doing. They see 11 pounds 5 ounces, and a baby who is completely dependent on me.

Though I beat myself up daily about it, I have to recognize that sometimes these things are completely out of my control. But I also have to stop and look at the fact that when Noah was exactly 10 months old, I wrote an almost identical BLOG about him. And that when Elijah was 11 months, I wrote another incredibly familiar BLOG about him. Though I hate to lump her in a category, when you look at the facts, it's pretty appearant that ALL my children have gone through this 10 month hump, and everyone of them have gone on to thrive. If you looked at my boys right now, you wouldn't even think they ever had trouble when they were babies.

So, as I pray and give this worry and fear to the Lord knowing that He made Olivia the way she is, and was meant to be, I take comfort in the fact that I've walked this path twice before. And I hope one day very soon, this blog will be a part of a long list of blogs that I look back on and say, "Oh yeah, I forgot that was even a problem."