Three months of Maren

Maren is now three months old. Again, it is surprising how quickly time goes by and yet how it is hard to imagine life without her.

I am not sure whether I have measured her totally properly, but I think she has grown about three and a half or 4 inches since she was born. She is a tall kiddo! She hasn't been weighed on a proper scale since December 10, and her weight gain has been a pretty consistent source of worry for me. Ever since learning that she was not gaining weight appropriately at about two and a half weeks, I have been vigilant about tracking her weight. For a long time, she was gaining weight consistently – about 1 ounce per day. But when she was weighed on December 10, she had gained a little less than that since her last weighing on December 1. I have tried weighing her on our bathroom scale by weighing myself and then holding her and getting a second weight, and if this is accurate, her weight gain has slowed considerably. But I don't trust that this is accurate, so sometime in the next couple of days we will take her to the public health office (where there is a baby scale in the waiting room) and get a more accurate weight. Jeff tells me to pay attention to other things, like the fact that she seems happy, and is meeting her developmental milestones, and seems to be eating fine. I know that he is right, but at the same time can't help worrying!

Fortunately, she doesn't give me a whole lot else to worry about. She continues to be a happy, easy baby, and seems to be thriving. She smiles and "talks" all the time, and continues to be easily soothed. A couple of days ago she seemed to discover a new kind of crying, which was quite disconcerting – extremely loud and intense, and it seemed to me that she must be in intense pain to be crying like that. However, Jeff was able to calm her down by walking her up and down the hall for a few minutes, and she has used this cry a couple of times since with similar outcomes. So it seems that it is just a new kind of crying.

As is typical with a baby, sleep is inconsistent and sometimes difficult. The night before last she was up to feed to five times. But last night she slept for a four hour stretch, nursed for twenty or thirty minutes, and then slept for about five more hours. She usually wakes me up probably twice a night to nurse, but she never fully wakes up, and is asleep again by the time she's done nursing. There is no difficult time getting her back to sleep. So even if she wakes me up a couple of times in the night, as long as I can get back to sleep quickly (which I usually can), things are not at all bad.

At three months old, Maren is more interactive than she was when she was younger. She demands more attention, and wants to see more of her world. She used to be content facing me and staring at my face or even just the chair or the wall behind me, but now she wants to face out and watch everything that is going on. She seems to love watching Jeff when he is busy in the kitchen.

She is also getting very strong – she holds her head up really well, and can now do a mini "baby push-up," and kicks and swings her arms all the time. She has not quite discovered putting objects into her mouth yet, but spends a great deal of time with her hands in her mouth.

Jeff starts back at work after the new year. He will resume his normal teaching load, and will be expected to be active with all his other duties, but fortunately there is a lot of work he can do from home. It has been nice having this time together as a new family, and although I wish we had more time, I know that we are extremely lucky to be in the position we are in!

We are also lucky to have such a sweet baby :-)

Merry Christmas!

Twelve days of baby Christmas

Today while Maren was nursing, I rewrote the twelve days of Christmas song for life with a new baby. It is of course repetitive, so here is the final verse:

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my baby gave to me
Twelve toothless smiles
Eleven baby cuddles
Ten coos and goos
Nine cries for feeding
Eight wet diapers
Seven stinky toots
Six little sneezes
Five hours of sleep
Four bouts of hiccups
Three loud burps
Two outgrown onesies
And a poop that was legen-dary



Merry Christmas :-)

Stuff of the week

I have just a few minutes to do a post, so it won't be coherent, just some random things that have happened:

1. Our vacuum broke. Rather than figure out how to get it fixed, we decided to purchase a new, somewhat nicer vacuum. It was on sale at Canadian Tire (for you Americans, this is a huge chain store in Canada, and a little hard to describe – they have a little bit of everything), and I don't think it cost much more than our old vacuum, but the difference in suction power is pretty amazing. It is a Shark brand. So far so good.

2. Maren is getting quite strong. She has developed some excellent head control:

We think she might have grown about an inch in the past week. She was measured when she had her shots, and measured in the 50th percentile, and then ten days later was measured at a doctor's appointment and was in the 98th percentile. I don't trust that she was necessarily measured properly either time, but we have seen a fairly sudden change in which clothes fit her. It is kind of amazing just how quickly she can grow!

3. We all have a cold. I'm not naming names, but someone in our household does not have the best habits related to washing his hands after being around people who are sick. Fortunately the rest of us do not seem to have gotten the cold quite as badly.

4. We finally got around to decorating our Christmas tree. For the first time ever, we have an artificial tree. There were many reasons for deciding to go with an artificial tree this year, including the fact that we wanted a tree at the end of November for the Loucks family Christmas and wanted the tree to stay up through Christmas day, and the fact that Christmas trees aren't actually grown anywhere near here, so they are shipped from very far away and are both not so fresh and not so environmentally friendly because of it. So we bought a fake tree, which has LED lights that can be either white or multicolored, which is pretty neat. In the past week we have finally decorated the tree, and it is looking pretty good.

5. My sister and brother-in-law are going to be visiting this week, arriving late tomorrow night. It will be their first trip to Regina and their first time meeting Maren, so we are all looking forward to it!

Loucks family Christmas

Last weekend we celebrated an early Christmas with Jeff's siblings and their families. They all traveled to Regina to meet Maren and celebrate with us. We baked cookies, had presents, and did all of the things that we do for Christmas. Here are a few photos:

Maren is now two months old, and so much has changed since last month! She smiles big smiles all the time, and even has what Jeff calls "proto-conversations" by cooing and making goo sounds in response to being talked to. She is beginning to demand a bit more attention, and if she gets fussy it no longer necessarily means that she is hungry – she might be bored, want to be moved to a different position, or need a diaper change. She has started burping on her own, so that she does not need to be burped several times during/after each feed, and she has gone from farting like an old man to having largely silent poops and toots. She continues to be happy most of the time, and although we are able to put her in the bassinet for naps sometimes (two days ago she broke the record by being in the bassinet for fifty minutes), she spends most of her time in bodily contact with either me or Jeff. She and I are getting more comfortable venturing out on our own, although we haven't done very long trips yet. She is still the easiest and sweetest baby I have ever met – she had her two-month immunizations last week, and the nurse commented on how social she was and what a good baby she was. I absolutely agree :-)