Darrell & Sharyn

Time has just flown by. I can’t believe that he is already two months old. I can still vividly remember giving birth. He has grown a lot in the last month. He is now 25” long (off the charts for height) and 13#9oz (90th percentile). He has slowed down weight gain and is only gaining about 1.5oz per day instead of the 2oz/day he was at 1 month. He is starting to outgrow a lot of his 0-3 month clothing. Some of the 0-6 month we have are starting to fit him nicely which makes me doubtful that we will end up being able to use them when he is 6 months. I need to go through his clothes and put away the ones he outgrew and prep the next ones as I only have up to 3-6 month out right now.

He is starting to smile more and more on purpose and in reaction to us. I love it! He is getting the cooing and the giggling going to. This boy has truly wrapped me around his little finger. (I’m pretty sure Darrell is wrapped around the other one as well. :P) We love getting lots of photos of him (as I’m sure you can tell), the downside is that he doesn’t know what to think of the phone. He will be smiling and giggling but as soon as he sees the camera, the smile turns into a WTF face. We are trying to get sneakier about getting photo and video of him smiling. It is definitely hard to get a good one. Thank goodness we have digital photos with the amount of photos we take.

Edward has got a bit of a tummy, so we had to pull the cloth diapers out a snap. Makes me happy he is growing but sad that he is growing so fast. We have also found out that he sleeps much, much better on his side than on his back. Once we started putting him on his side, he started sleeping for anywhere from 5-7 hours at a time at night. It makes this momma happy that I am getting sleep! The only issue we have had lately is that he goes down for naps just fine during the day. but once it hits about 6pm until about 10:30-11, he is nursing every hour and refuses to sleep. He gets cranky and just seems like he has hit the stage where he is so tired he can’t sleep. We are definitely working on that and I hope it gets better. We are a little tired of one of us trying for half an hour, the other one trying for half an hour and then the first one goes back for another half hour before he finally goes down. Then it is easy peasy until the next night. He wakes up and gets a feeding between midnight and one and then doesn’t wake up until between 6-7. Eats and goes right back down until 9am. This is a lot like he was in the womb as he use to have his “dance party” every night around 9pm.

He loves holding his head up and ‘standing’ on us. We have also found that he likes sitting and facing forward so I usually hold him on my lap facing forward a lot and he will just sit there and look around while gnawing on his hand. Still hasn’t found the thumb reliably, but has gotten the thumb/forefinger suck down.

We are just enthralled by this little boy and are completely in love. Darrell is excited and ready for #2 already. 🙂 – not happening for another year at least.

*Granted I am 16 days late, but better late than never?*

So much has changed in the one month since Edward joined our life. He has changed so much and we are excited to experience the next couple months when he starts to become more aware and interactive with us. He has just started to smile in response to us. He doesn’t do it all the time, but when he does, it just melts our hearts. We attempt to get him to do it multiple times in a row so we know it is a response to us instead of gas. 🙂

Breastfeeding has gotten immensely easier. He is getting faster at feeding, so I am only feeding him for 5-10 minutes instead of the 15-20 it was in the beginning. Granted, he still occasionally has a 30 minute session but I have begun to realize that it is more when he just wants to suck and we are trying not to use a pacifier so we are trying to find a nice medium (which mainly means that we use our finger or a soother while sometimes using a pacifier if we get desperate and he is sucking for a long time). He still has the daily cluster feed where he wants to eat every hour for 3-4 hours. Sometimes it drives me nuts because by the time I feed him, burp him, put him down and start to do something, he is hungry again. Luckily, most of the cluster feedings happen at night and Darrell is able to help me do stuff. I pump once a day (in the mornings) so that we have a bottle’s worth of milk in the fridge at a time. If I get frustrated to much during cluster time, Darrell feeds him and then I pump in the morning. If not, then I don’t pump.

Edward is still on a 2-3 hour sleep schedule at night. He is starting to occasionally get a good 4 hour stretch and I wake up feeling recharged. Unfortunately, after the 4am feeding, he doesn’t like to go right back to sleep and wants to stay up, so I am up for about an hour and a half before feeding him again and then he goes back to sleep. I am waiting for that to change again. During the day, he is great and gives me just enough time between feedings to either take an hour nap, make food, or get some chores done. He does a single 4 hour stretch of awake time a day. Usually it is in the morning, but occasionally it is at night. He loves to just lay around and look at the different lights (sunlight and lightbulbs).

He isn’t to fussy and only occasionally does he really wail when we can’t figure out what he needs. I think we have only had about 3 good wails since we left the birth center. Other than that, he mostly cries when he wants to be fed and I am changing his diaper first, but once I pick him up, he stops. He does love to spit-up. We easily go through almost all of our receiving blankets and burp rags in a two day period. Sometimes it only takes a day. We lay them out over a chair to let them air-dry during the day. So it has me doing at least a load of laundry a day (especially with the cloth diapers).

I’m excited for the next few milestones. I know everyone says that they grow up so fast, so I am enjoying each and every moment (even the difficult ones).