Joey: 1 Month

Look who's a month old!

About a week ago I said his name and he looked me in the eye and smiled. I was so shocked. Our crankiest baby yet starts smiling the earliest? Is it even possible for a three week-old baby to make a real smile? I told Tim about it later and to me surprise he didn't say, "It was just gas." He said, "Yeah, he did that to me too, the other day." He's even started to coo. It's the best. I have to catch him just after he's had a nap and a feed.

Those smiley pictures above represent only a few fleeting seconds of the days they were taken on. Either he's been our fussiest baby or I just have a poor memory. But I'm pretty sure he's the fussiest. He has bouts of crying that last anywhere from two to four hours at a time, sometimes more, usually late in the evening. Sometimes he is inconsolable. He cries a lot the rest of the day too, but can usually be kept content by being held and in motion. Some days are worse than others. The good days make us forget all about the bad ones. I got myself a Moby wrap the other day, and that's been a sanity saver for us all. No more passing a crying baby back and forth while trying to eat dinner. I like looking down and seeing him peacefully sleeping next to my heart.

As far as sleep goes, lately it hasn't been too bad. I get him to sleep by about 9, and Tim and I go right to bed at that point too. Nighttime Netflix will have to wait awhile. He sleeps three to four hours the first stretch, wakes up to nurse and then goes right back to sleep another two to three hours. When he gets up to nurse a second time he's usually up for an hour and that's kind of a pain, but eventually he falls back asleep and then I get another hour or two of sleep too. If I'm lucky he keeps sleeping when I get up to get the kids ready for school. He can be persuaded to take a nap in the pack 'n play about an hour after he gets up, and I try really hard to make that happen because I love my morning time. The rest of the day he takes naps in the Moby. He does not like to sit in either his rocker or bouncer -- only a person holding him will do. That person is almost always me, so by the end of the day my back is very achy and tired. I am bone tired all over at that point, so I go right to bed as soon as I can and we begin the cycle again. I know it could be a lot worse, and all that sleep at night is a blessing even if it's not continuous. I take what I can get with a newborn!

On the night I took this picture Joey was having a really rough night, just crying and crying. I was back in our room trying to calm him down and nothing was working, so Tim came back to relieve me for a little while.

He had a pediatrician visit at 3 weeks. He weighed in at 10 pounds 5 ounces. He is currently wearing size 1 diapers and 0-3 month clothes, but he seems on the verge of outgrowing both of those. I've still got 200 size 1 diapers thanks to Amazon Subscribe & Save, so I'll keep stuffing him into those for as long as I can.

You may recall how in Joey's birth story I told about the one diaper Tim did -- the very first clean diaper on his clean butt. Well, Tim managed to avoid diapers for Joey's entire first month, right up until this morning. I came out to the waiting room after having my teeth cleaned and asked him how it had gone. He gestured with his hand indicating so-so. Then he said, "I changed him." I said something like, "Oh, wow." Then he said again, "I changed him," giving a pointed look at the sleeping baby who I now noticed was wearing his spare clothes. Tim's first diaper in a month had been a real doozy, and he'd had to change it on the dentist's waiting room floor. He thinks that more than made up for a whole month of no diaper changing, and I would have to agree. But then I'd also have to ask, which would you rather do? A regular, easy diaper change once every day or two, or a real mess of a diaper change once in a long while on the rare occasion that I'm not available to do it myself? To that he would probably answer that he will have nothing to do with any of the diapers from now on. We'll see about that. He can't avoid all of them.