7 Weeks!

Lukie turns 7 weeks old today! I would say time has flown...and in a way it has...but there are days...oh, there are days. I was telling a friend the other day: the days are slow, but the weeks go quickly. It seems like, on days when Lukas is really frustrating me and cries all day, the end of the day can't come quickly enough. Then I look back on Sunday and wonder how another week has gone by.

Luke went through his 6-week growth spurt right on time. At 5.5 weeks, he started getting really fussy (well, even fussier than usual), and about two days ago it started getting a little better. Everything I've read says that crying peaks at 6 weeks or so, so hopefully we're on the downswing. When he's happy and having fun, it is SO fun. He smiles like this:

But when he's cranky, whoa, man. I don't think he's an incredibly fussy baby; I think he might be on the fussy side of the scale, but he's been better lately, so hopefully it'll start declining a little bit here soon. He's been a challenge, for sure. Everyone tells me that if I have another kid, that kid might be the exact opposite and be the calmest baby ever. We'll see if I survive this one!!

I feel like the days have kind of blurred together here lately...sleep deprivation? Honestly, Lukie's sleeping has been getting better. It may have been better for a while, actually, and I was ruining it. I've never really been around a newborn at night before, so I didn't know a crucial fact: newborns are LOUD sleepers! Lukie grunts, cries, kicks, gurgles, and everything else under the sun in his sleep, and I was mistaking particularly loud grunts for being awake. No wonder the kid was cranky every morning; I had spent every night getting him up every two hours when he started grunting really loudly. Who knows, he might have spent longer times asleep if I'd have waited him out. 

After coming to this realization about a week ago, we decided to take a different approach to Lukie's sleeping. I'm a super light sleeper, and I was waking up every time Lukas moved in his sleep. To deal with this, we've moved Luke's bassinet out into the hallway outside the bedroom and put a fan out there for white noise. Now, I can hear him if he starts to make "awake" noises, but I have a better shot at ignoring "sleep" noises.

Lukas has a natural bedtime of about 7:30 or 8 (and I am not messing with this- I will defend that bedtime to the death! It's the only easy thing he does!), so we put him in the buzzy seat downstairs while Pete works on things for school. This way I can go upstairs and get some really quiet, deep sleep for a few hours, probably from about 9-12. Eventually, around 12:00 or 1:00, Luke wakes up hungry and Pete brings him up to me. I don't stimulate him at all, just feed him and burp him. He's usually back down by 1:30 or so and sleeps until 3:30 or 4. Luke's a bit harder to get to go down at this point, but he usually goes into another (fitful) sleep until about 5:45. When he starts to cry, I get up, change his diaper, feed him again, and spend an hour or so in bed either reading or using the internet on my phone. We're up at about 7. All told, with the breaks required to feed, change (sometimes), and get Lukas back to sleep, I'm probably getting about 6 very broken hours of sleep, which is way better than the 3-4 I was getting a few weeks ago.

In other news, we bought a new car! It's a Jetta SportWagen. My Malibu had 140,000 miles on it and was going to require at least $1,000 in repairs this year. It needed new tires and had another wheel bearing going out. We decided that since Volkswagen has a great financing offer going on right now, we'd take the plunge and get a new vehicle. Pictures to come in a couple days.

Finally, we've started reading to Lukie a little bit. I'm really glad now that I took that Youth Services Librarianship class! Babies really respond to high-contrast images, so we've done really simple board books. He didn't really give a hoot when I read "The Little Engine that Could" to him (one of my personal favorites), but when I got out "The Very Hungry Caterpillar", he actually looked at the pages while I was reading them to him. It was fun, and it keeps me going because I know someday he'll be a little boy, sitting on my lap, and bringing me his favorite book to read every night at bedtime.

Here are some 7-week-old pictures with which to end the post. I can't believe how big he is. I have a feeling I'm going to be in trouble with the doctor at his 2 month appointment...but you try telling this kid it's time to stop eating! The doctor said to only feed him one side, or to limit the time he spends on each side if I want to do both...all that has led to is his wanting to eat every hour/hour and a half instead of every two hours. I've got a feeling we're going to have a 14 pound kid on September 5th.

He's so ridiculously beautiful in this picture. I just can't!