I meant to get this out earlier this week, but here we are, days later. Oh well. Week 10 started off well, things were progressing in the sleep department. We were working our way up from 5-6 hours a night in the first stretch to a wonderful 7 hour stretch and then *bam* serious regression. In the last two weeks it has been consistently 2-3 hour stretches with one eye crunching 1.5 hour awakening just after being put down for the night. Last Thursday I got 4.5 hours before he woke up but that has been the longest stretch in the last two weeks. I did some reading online and…

The big things for Forest during his eighth and ninth weeks of life were his first shots and me returning to work. I remember getting some shots as a small kid but over the years I’ve forgotten just how painful and scary they could have been. I must have blocked out some of that when anticipating Forest’s first round of shots because it was much more horrible than I imagined. He had four different vaccinations, one of them being a liquid taken by mouth (rotovirus), and then three shots in the tops of both thighs. Oh the wail that came out of his mouth! It was devastating to watch and…

General Thoughts Sometimes I wonder who the person in the photo is. It’s me, of course, but a different me and yet the same me. It’s odd, motherhood, parenthood. We’re the same people yet completely different. Part of me feels like Forest has always been with us, but of course I know he hasn’t been. There was a time that I couldn’t have even fathomed him. The other day I had placed him on the Boppy to sleep which was situated on the ottoman to our oversized chair in the living room. Leo was sitting with him and I reminisced for a second that Forest was sitting where Samson used…

Every week that goes by I get just a teensy bit more sad. The dude continues to grow like a weed, making me wonder just when these leaps and bounds of poundage are going to slow down. This morning at my final Wednesday morning breastfeeding group that I will attend before heading back to work next week, I weighed Forest before feeding him and he was 13 lbs 7.6 ounces, which is about a pound more than he was last week! He has his 8 week pediatrician appointment tomorrow and I was expecting him to just be near 13 lbs, not over and beyond it! We keep telling Leo that…

Forest is slowly morphing out of the newborn stage and into the general baby stage. At somewhere near 12.5 lbs I’m pretty sure most people wouldn’t think he was only six weeks old just by looking at him. He’s now far more engaged with his surroundings and has started doing more smiling and light laughing, though it is more like cooing with a smile. His cooing and talking has picked up more, too. Last week I meant to mention one big milestone that I started working on but didn’t get around to writing about here. I started elimination communication around the middle of 4.5 weeks. It was mostly on a…

So, last week you remember I wrote about those 15-20 minute nighttime feedings?? Well, of course that got switched up this week. I think it was Saturday night/Sunday morning there was a lovely 3 hour stretch of a not sleepy baby from 12:30am until 3:30 am. The first hour was spent feeding him, with the second 30 minutes of that hour being needed because he’d fallen asleep after feeding one side and then woke up as soon as I put him down. So I picked him back up and we went back out into the living area outside our bedroom and I fed him on the other side. Same thing…

Forest is growing up! Where did September go? I swear it just began and now here we are in October. I know where September went, the first half was spent in a muddied haze of trying to navigate parenthood and the second half was spent trying to continue working out those kinks within the confines of the house. Every afternoon I look at the clock and wonder where my day went. The most productive things I do come in spurts and I rarely accomplish much off of any to-do list. Maybe I get to sweeping the floor. One day I managed to dye my hair. I’ve been wanting to finish…

Oh man. Forest at three weeks means that he’s still a pretty good baby, but last week’s evening woes are carrying over into week three, making everything after 5pm until 10pm a festival of crying, feeding, and diaper changing. If it isn’t umpteen diaper changes in an hour, paused by about a 10 minute session of general contentedness, followed by the need to feed for 15-30 minutes, alternated back again with some diaper changes, punctuated with some more crying that we can’t decide what it means (usually means he’s gonna need a diaper change in the next five minutes…he’s just preparing us in advance), followed by another bit of ‘Oh,…