6 Weeks Old

Smiling for Mommy - 6/3/08

This is it...the magic week. Everyone says that the first 6 weeks are so hard and then it gets so much easier. We've been blessed with and easy baby so even though its been hard I'm not feeling too overwhelmed. But, it will be interesting to see if things really do change a lot now that Grace is 6 weeks old. The last week has been really fun with her. I'll list all the new, cool and hard things that have been happening.

1. Grace has been super smiley. She gravitates towards our voices and gets huge smiles on her face when we talk to her and smile at her. She also has been smiling at other people and her toys a lot too.

2. Grace makes a lot of new noises these days. She's been cooing and even squealing. She also has been fussing more. I've read multiple sources that fussiness escalates up to about week 6 and then starts dying down again. I'm going to believe that and if it is true I can't really complain about her fussiness.

3. We're working on taking a bottle. The first 3 times we gave it to Grace she took it with no problem. Then she had a couple of nights when she wouldn't take it. I think part of the problem might be we have tried to give it to her when she was not too happy already. Today I'm going to try to give it to her in the afternoon when she is in a good mood. Some sources say that the mom shouldn't give the bottle but I've been able to give her a couple so far so I'm just going to try and hope she takes it from me. We really want to be able to give her a bottle so if we want to go out for more than 2 hours we can. The main goal is by our anniversary on the 23rd of this month she will be fine with a bottle so my parents can come and watch her.

4. Grace has been sleeping 6-8 hours at night for the past week. We put her down for good around 10:30 or 11 and she has only woken up once before 5 and usually I wake her up because I want to feed her. We are really encouraged by her ability to sleep at night and hope she can keep this up. Daytime sleep is still unpredictable but I've read it will be until about 3 months or so. Plus she's pretty good during the day so it's not too stressful if she doesn't sleep.