One Month Update...

It's hard to believe that our little girl is nearly a month old. Last night Don mentioned that neither of us realized that this weekend was the 4th of July already.  My, how our life has changed in this last month!

I thought I'd take an opportunity while she's napping to describe how that month has gone. Most of our family is far away and not everyone has had a chance to meet Audrey yet, so I thought that some of you might be interested in hearing how her days are spent. The rest of you might be a bit bored by this and can feel free to skip this post.

When we discharged from the hospital the instructions for caring for our baby were: feed her every 2-3 hours and change her before and after every feeding.  We've pretty much followed these rules although we've also sought lots of advice from family and friends as well.  In general, Audrey eats about every three hours during the day, and she does need to be changed both before eating and after.  We've gone through a bunch of diapers because she likes to wait until we're changing her to go to the bathroom.  Thankfully though, she likes to look out the window and is generally calmed by getting a fresh diaper on and being all clean.

She's also eating well. We've decided to weigh her about once a week using our scale here at home. It may not the most exact method but our next pediatrician appointment isn't until mid July, so we wanted to know whether she's gaining weight.  By our estimation she's about 8.5 pounds now.  She's starting to get very chubby cheeks and little rolls on her legs and arms.  Don said that his parents called him a "Winston Churchill" baby because of his round face and chubby cheeks, and she's taking after him already.

We've also tried adopted a nightly routine to help calm her to sleep.  I have two bottles in reserve in the fridge... one is for "emergency" and one is for Don to give her each night so that they have some quality time together when he gets home.  She's getting pretty good at the bottle feeding and seems to enjoy getting fed by her Dad.  I think she saves her best smiles for him - his voice seems to soothe her and she stares at him the whole time.  When I feed her, she's looking around the room, at the couch, or the design on my shirt.  With him, she's staring right at his face while he talks to her and smiles at her.  Next, we bathe her if it's a bath night (about every other night so far).  Luckily, the bath seems to really calm her.  She doesn't make a peep and seems to enjoy the bath us putting lotion all over her after she's done.

We're still working on sleep routines.  She's generally in a sleep, eat, play pattern of activities. When she wakes up from sleeping we generally eat right away. Then she is usually awake and alert for a while - this is play time.  Play time is the most unpredictable time for me... during the day it could be 30 minutes, or 2 hours.  She seems to have "awake times" during mid day and sometimes may not even fall asleep between feedings.  She can get pretty cranky so I'm working on putting her down awake so that she can wind down and learn to calm herself so that she can fall asleep.   At night she's generally right back to bed after a feeding with little or no playtime.

Once she is asleep, she apparently takes after her mom because she sounds like a bulldozer in her room... the little thing is quite a grunter.  I asked my mom about this and she said my sister and I were both like this as newborns. She said that by night 3 we were in our own room and she didn't use a monitor - we were that loud.  So far Audrey seems to sleep grunt only occasionally, but when she does it is very loud.  We've stopped using the baby monitor at night because she's so loud.  Now I only go in to her room if she's crying - any other loud grunting noise is usually made in her sleep and there's no reason to wake her.

So far at night she's sleeping anywhere from 3 - 5 hours at a stretch.  Last night she slept 5 hours and we finally woke her to feed her because we were a little nervous to let her go longer than that without a feeding.  We'll see how long that lasts though - today I'm going to do a little research on how long a 4 week old can go between feedings. I imagine she might have outgrown those hospital discharge instructions on feeding schedules by now.

Well, that's pretty much our daily routine for now.  I've been getting lots of notes from family and friends about our posts, so I'll keep them coming.   Here's a parting picture of our little "Winston Churchill" baby.