My baby is already two months old. It is so weird to now be dressing him in 3-6 month clothing (some of which he is already too big for!) and finding size newborn diapers in my bag and seeing how tiny his bum once was. Luckily my hormones have settled down, otherwise I would be tearing up at this thought (which sometimes happens anyway).
While the time has flown by, it also somehow feels like it has been a really long time since we brought him home from the hospital and life changed forever. Not in a bad way or anything. It's just that so much has happened in such a small amount of time. I guess just having a baby makes the time go by slower for me and memories of the early tiny newborn days are already fading which makes it feel like it was a while ago.
I am still trying to get the hang of things but I have figured a lot of it out. Of course, when I think this, that is right when he changes things up and the guessing game begins again. Every day is a guessing game. That is one thing about my new job as a mother that I don't love. Unlike the jobs I have had in the past, I feel that I can't really "refine" my skills as a mom. Although I am most certainly better at it than I was in the first weeks with him, I still feel like I can't really progress and actually become good at it. That drives me crazy. Once I think I understand an aspect of this baby thing, suddenly things change and I once again have no clue! I never realized that I have a need to perfect my skills until this experience.
Things have gotten a lot better though from the first 6 weeks of his life. I was really struggling with breastfeeding and had to give it up despite giving it my absolute best effort, not to mention baby blues. Since then, life is happier. A lot of things didn't go as planned and I have found that I need to be more prepared for the alternatives because so far, things tend to go differently than what's expected. I planned on carrying him pretty late as that is how it is for a lot of my family. He ended up coming 3 days early and Cody had to go back to work waaay earlier than I wanted because of this. I planned to have a normal birth and wanted to avoid a C-section as much as I could. And what happened? Sawyer was breech and a C-section it was. Then I was SO TOTALLY going to breastfeed for 1 year, and now I am shelling out the big bucks for formula. Ha, yeah, plans are pretty useless.
The biggest challenge I am facing right now is... can you guess it? Sleep! This is one of those things that just keeps changing on me. Sawyer is SO TOUGH when it comes to falling asleep. It seems like every time he gets tired, I have to go through this whole ordeal that takes SO LONG to just get him to settle down and stop fussing and let sleep come. It's like wrestling an alligator. An alligator that screams. He used to fall asleep easily and now it's a bit of a nightmare and I am not sure what to do. Sorry for seeming so negative! I am just in the thick of things I guess and so that is all I can think about.
Sawyer was waking up twice in the middle of the night for feedings, then he dropped one of those feeds and I was getting pretty used to only waking up once. Well then he went back to two! That was so frustrating. Then after a while, when I thought I couldn't take anymore sleep deprivation, he started sleeping through the night for about 6 or 7 hours. That was amazing, for about a week. The night I announced my triumphant success to Facebook was the night he woke up at 3am and has been ever since. Babies really keep you on your toes. And as my sister says, babies are not robots. As obvious as that is, I often have to remind myself of it when I wonder why he isn't sleeping through the night the way a book says he should, or whatever the case may be. I can't "program" him the way I might like. I can try my best with sleep-training through structured schedules, but I can't be too surprised when he suddenly takes a step or two backwards, because he's not a robot, and that is just how babies are.
So to sum up, life pretty much revolves around sleep. When did he go down? How long did he sleep? When can I sleep and for how long? Most of the time I am so tired and unsure of when he will wake up that sleep just won't happen. And if I do get a chance to sleep for more than 2 or 3 hours, I wake up thinking I hear him on the monitor, when really he is fast asleep and I am hearing it in my head, and now I am wide awake for no reason. My body has gotten so used to not sleeping for significant chunks of time that it won't let it happen when I have the chance. I know I am a chronic worrier, but is it normal at this point to still jump every time the monitor makes a noise? Or am I really just that high strung? Ugh. If only I could just be that "chill mom" I wanted to be. But I guess I can't be too hard on myself. I have been sleep deprived for a while and in my mind, that is a pretty good reason for my stomach to lurch a little when I see him waking up early. Which happens a lot now. Help me. Haha.
Okay on to the good things. Sawyer has been intentionally smiling for over a month now, and has recently started to "talk" to us. My favorite parts of the day are when we finish feeding him, and I sit him facing me, and he makes so many cute little sounds and smiles at me and I smile and talk back and we take turns like that for a while. It is awesome. I just can't wait to hear that first little giggle. I also love to go get him out of his crib because he usually will look up at me and be so happy! He is also much happier than he was in the first month. I don't know if its normal or not, but he was pretty fussy for the first month of life. If he wasn't eating or sleeping, he was crying. Maybe it's because I have things down a little better and I know sort of what he wants, but he is a pretty happy fellow most of the time now (except for sleep time), and that is such a relief. It is also really cool to see him developing. Just simple things like when I see him looking at his hand or foot for the first time. I can see him putting things together in his head and it is awesome to watch.
With every day that goes by, I love this baby more and more. He is my little buddy. Even though this mothering thing is tough business, the good moments make it worth it. It's pretty cool that I get to hang out with such a cute dude all day.
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