Welcome To Month Four With Your Baby!

Month 4 Of What To Expect From Your Baby

As your baby grows much more interested in the word around him, he loves touching things that feel different and he is also listening to sounds more keenly now. This is the time to bring out the musical toys or the rattles that help him understand ‘cause and effect’ – he moves his arm and the rattle makes noise- this can give him hours of play time.

His vision has developed now so that he can differentiate between shades of color better. His play gym is probably his favorite place to be now because it has so many different shapes, colors and textures for him to look at, feel and practice his grabbing skills on.

Feeding Pattern Changes

Getting more efficient at feeding now, the frequency with which you need to feed him may reduce, or at the very least, he’ll be getting faster at feeding. At this stage, he is getting all the nourishment he needs from your breast milk or formula and breast milk or formula will remain the primary source of nourishment, even once solids are started, right up until at least 6 months. Prior to 6 months, any solids given are purely given to introduce baby to foods and textures, not as a source of energy unless you’re otherwise advised by your healthcare provider.

What we mean by this is, you may wish to start to slowly introduce solids from around 6 months and not before 4 months, and continue feeding baby breast milk/formula as required ( do not drop milk feeds in place of solids at this stage). The ideal age is 6 months however some babies show an interest at 4 months. Babies should not have solids introduced before 4 months. While it may be a little while off yet, here’s a handy article on how to prepare baby food for when the time comes.

Try this: keep placing baby on his tummy and you’ll see he is far more comfortable now than he was last month. He may be able to push himself slightly up and look around from this new perspective. If he doesn’t like being on his tummy, don’t leave him in this position for long but keep doing it for a few minutes a day until he gets accustomed to this posture.

The 4 Month Sleep Regression

Sleep (or lack thereof) is a hot topic for all new parents. The truth is, baby’s sleep may overall get better with time, but it has many setbacks along the way. These set backs are actually not true setbacks as such, but rather a reflection of your baby’s development and all the wonderful milestones he is reaching. At 4 months, your baby moves into sleep cycles much like adults, where there’ll be a lighter sleep, followed by a deep sleep and this pattern continues during the entire sleep phase. When baby transitions between the light and deep sleeps, they now may have trouble getting back to sleep. Hence you may have gone from a baby doing a stretch of 6 hours per night, to one waking every couple of hours or even every 45 minutes! Just know this is completely normal for many babies and it’s now that we can use gentle sleep associations to help them get back to sleep such as patting, rocking, a pacifier, white noise machine or comforter.

There is a myriad of advice online of what to do and what not to do. Here’s the thing: you really need to allow yourself to do what you need to do, to get the most sleep for you and your baby and your whole family. And just know that whatever you decide to do, can always be changed at some point. You do whatever you need to do, until it’s no longer working for you. Then try a new approach, if it’s not.

“ We tried introducing a comforter, but our babe didn’t take to it. A dummy worked as a sleep association for him, and we only used it at bedtime for that reason. We introduced a white noise machine late in the game, second time around I’ll be using that straight away because it made a huge difference.” Beth