7 weeks

I'm 7 weeks old today!

 

Hello everyone! This week has been very eventful for me because Mommy had lots of appointments so I got to spend lots of time with my grandmas! We played together while Mommy was gone and I did a lot of smiling. I've really discovered my tongue and I spend a lot of time showing it off to anyone who will look at it. This week I've also really started to fight sleep and I don't want to sleep in the afternoon. Then Mommy discovered that I like to sleep in the swing with the vacuum going and I'm sleeping a little better during the day . . . so she made a recording of the vacuum with her computer and now she can play it for me on her iPod! That makes me smile. :)

Movin' on up

Johnny has officially transitioned to his crib! For the first five weeks, he was sleeping in our bed in a little cosleeper/nest thing that he really enjoyed, as seen below.

 After he grew out of that, we were planning on keeping him in our room in the Pack 'N Play and then slowly transition him into his own crib in his own room. Well, Mommy decided that she would rather just feed him in his room every night instead of going through the rigmarole of feeding him in her room. So, why have him sleep in the master bedroom and then feed him in the nursery when he could do both in the nursery? Thus, we started having him sleep in his crib a few weeks ago. Well, that first night didn't go so well for Johnny and Mommy. He woke up every hour to hour and a half wanting to be comforted and soothed, which is all well and good for Johnny, but that makes me more sleep-deprived. John then had the idea of putting his cosleeper in the crib for awhile to transition him like so:

 

As you can tell, Johnny liked that idea. He slept for longer stretches, and all was well. However, if you look at the picture above, you can see that his head touches the top and his feet touch the bottom . . . so I had to take the cosleeper out, much to my dismay. I needn't have worried because he slept very well! Well as in two 3.5 hour stretches! Not bad, not bad at all.

Oh, and we finally took a family picture, so I thought I'd post it:

6 weeks old!

Look at me! I'm six weeks old today! This past week, I got to experience being babysat by Grandma Durso while Mommy went out shopping for essentials and then having Grandma and Grandpa Durso come over again last night while Mommy and Daddy had a date night. My neck is continuing to get stronger and I move my head a lot more all by myself. I've also gotten better at making eye contact with people this week and have even started to smile at some of them! Mommy took me to the school she used to work at and introduced me to all of the office ladies; I flirted with every single one of them, showing them my best faces and an occasional smile. At the end of this week Mommy packed up all of my newborn-size clothes since I don't fit into any of them anymore. It made Mommy a little sad, but I'm excited that I'm just that much closer to driving a car to pick up chicks!

Growing, growing, gone

Johnny has officially grown out of his first clothes, which was a pretty big shock to mommy. I took the cute little monkey sleeper off of him, put it in the hamper to wash, washed it a couple of days later, and then tried to put it on him. At first I thought maybe I shrank it in the dryer, but then I tried to put another newborn-size onesie on him and lo and behold! it was also too small. I know my little baby is growing fast (he weighted 11lbs 7oz last Friday), but the physical evidence is much harder to dismiss than some numbers on a scale. So, now that some of these little outfits don't fit, I have to pack them up in a container to sit in the nursery closet for the next baby.

 Goodbye monkeys and dinosaurs!

Luckily, he still fits in his pipe-fitter/lumberjack outfits, though the corduroy overalls are getting pretty snug . . .

Before I know it he'll be bringing home prom dates!

Johnny vs. Bottle

Just like the first bath post, this is a post chronicling something that happened about two weeks ago . . . alas.

Even though I know how important breastfeeding is and how good it is for the baby and mother and all of that, it comes with a burden: you can never leave your child. Not that I want to, per se, but there are things that I need to do, preferably without a baby in tow. Going to the dentist, for example. In order to do these things, I need to leave Johnny with someone else (most likely an ecstatic grandparent). However, since Johnny needs to eat every couple of hours, he needed to learn how to take a bottle; containing breastmilk, of course.

Before the actual event of giving Johnny his first bottle, I did some major research on mommy blogs and various mommy forums to find out which bottle their breastfed babies preferred. Since the Internet is so amazing, I came back with lots of information including how picky breastfed babies tend to be about the kind of nipple they're given; how different nipples can cause babies to become lazy at the breast and thus, prefer the bottle; and how you have introduce the bottle at the perfect time. If you introduce it too early, the baby might not take the breast anymore, but if you introduce it too late, they won't take the bottle at all. Yeah, way too much information for a new parent. So, I decided to introduce the bottle at 3.5 weeks of age and I headed to Babies 'R Us, faced the wall of nipples and came back with four different kinds . . . just in case.

The first bottle we tried was from The First Years called "BreastFlow." Promising, no? We thawed 2 ounces of breastmilk, stuck it in the bottle, and then John enticed our son by dripping some milk on his hungry lips. Did he take it? Yes, like a champ! He took it so well that he cleared those first two ounces in less than five minutes. And then he cried. So I defrosted two more. Downed them like a frat boy takes his Jager. So we tried two more, and finally he was satiated. John did very well feeding and then burping his son for the first time. Good job, hubby! After the first bottle, we tried the first pacifier, which Johnny also took to and currently enjoys from time to time.

After all of that Internet research, I've discovered that my child is pretty easy going and not particularly picky. He still breastfeeds easily and can take a bottle with the best of them. I sure hope all new experiences go this smoothly . . .

Rub-a-dub-dub

It's been awhile since we gave Johnny his first bath, but I figured I'd write about the experience nonetheless. After his umbilical cord fell off (about a week after birth), John and I were allowed to give him his first real bath, instead of a sponge bath. So we did!

We filled up the kitchen sink with 3 inches of warm water, donned our robes, and gave him a scrub-down. He wasn't very excited to be stripped of his pajamas and diaper in the kitchen (it was a little cold), but once he hit the water, he was a happy camper.

 

 

After this delightful bath, we took him out and wrapped him in his little hooded towel, which wasn't his favorite since it was a little cold. John toweled him off as much as he could so we could put a diaper on him when we got upstairs.

But then he peed all over John. And I laughed. A lot.

The Sleepiest Child of All

Johnny was born before Christmas, which means he was around for all of the holiday and family madness that occurs at the end of December. Luckily for everyone involved, Johnny inherited his father's ability to sleep anywhere and in any position. Therefore, he was passed around from person to person in his little baby burrito (see Figure 1) while remaining in deep NREM sleep. John and I refer to this deep sleep as "PTFO" . . . passed the f--- out (see Figure 2). Yes, we think it's funny to use curse words to describe our child's state of existence since he can't understand us yet. You may judge our parenting skills accordingly.

Figure 1: Baby burrito, aka "swaddle"

Figure 2: PTFO

As he approaches his one-month mark, he's gotten a little more lively during the day . . . and night, much to his mother's dismay. But, since he is much more awake and alert, he spends more time doing things like tummy time (Figure 3) and enjoying the mobile on his swing (Figure 4).

Figure 3: Tummy Time on his surfboard mat from Uncle Glen and Aunt Margie

Figure 4: Admiring the mobile on his swing



Basically, our son is adorable and I take way too many pictures of him.

Johnny is here!

For those of you who are actually reading this blog, this post will be old news. Sorry. I already wasn't good at keeping up the blog and then I went and had a kid, which compounds the problem. I'm working on it. :)

John Steven Durso arrived at 10:54am on Sunday, December 13th. He weighed in at 7lbs oz and measured 20 inches long. Sounds all well and good, but of course there is a story leading up to his birth . . .

*Note: The following is the story of labor and delivery, the in-depth version. If you're not interested at all, then I suggest you move along to another site until the next post!*

It was 4am on Saturday, December 12th. John and I had gotten home from our second to last childbirth class about six hours previous and were sleeping soundly. I awoke to discover wetness in my drawers and sheets . . . so I rushed to the bathroom and sure enough! Water breakage! I called John out of bed and we started getting ready to go to the hospital. It was a completely surreal experience getting dressed and collecting last minute items, knowing that the contractions would start any second and by the end of the day we would have a son or daughter. We were actually pretty calm about the whole thing as we made our way downstairs and had some breakfast; definitely not how they portray it in the movies! After breakfast, we traveled south to Sharp Mary Birch Hospital for Women and checked into triage.

The point of triage is to make sure that my water actually broke and I didn't just wet the bed; to verify water breakage, the nurses will take a sample of the water and see if it reacts with certain substances. If it reacts, then yes, it is amniotic fluid, if it doesn't, then go home. Well, after waiting for an hour on the first test, it came back negative. The nurse, however, was skeptical of this result considering I was sitting in a puddle. So we tried again. An hour later, positive! And up to labor & delivery we go! The labor and delivery ward of Sharp Mary Birch consists of many different private rooms, each with their own nurse to monitor you and only you . . . it's awesome. We get there, get the IV started (which might have been the worst part of the entire labor experience), get told that I'm 2cm dilated and we realize that I'm not having any contractions, which apparently is a bad thing. Thus, the nurse tells me to walk. And walk I did. John and I couldn't leave the ward though, so we walked the same hall and waiting room over and over and over again in 40 minute intervals. After the 40 minutes, we would go back to the room where I would be strapped down with  monitors to make sure the baby was okay and to check out my contraction cycle. 10 hours later, nothing has happened and I'm exhausted from walking around all day and from getting up so early so I decide to take a break. It's at this point that John and I have to seriously consider getting induced because my body wasn't taking the hint - I was still 2cm dilated. I was not interested in induction since I knew it's a much more painful process than letting your body do it on its own. However, John's Aunt Margie, who is a labor and delivery nurse herself, told us that if it were her, she'd start the Pitocin (induction drug) in the next hour to get things moving. Plus, the longer we waited, the larger the risk of infection for the baby.

6pm, we start the Pitocin. And man was it awful.

I was kind of hoping to go through this whole labor and delivery experience drug-free because I knew I could do it, but the Pitocin caused the contractions to come pretty close together (no longer than four minutes apart) and they came hard. I was feeling like I could do it still until about 3am, when the nurse said I was only 4cm dilated. By this point, I had been up for 23 hours, had walked the halls for 10 of those hours, and dealt with some pretty hard contractions for 9 hours. I was exhausted. I knew that if I had to labor like that for another 9 hours to make it to 10 cm, I would be too tired to push, so we called in the anesthesiologist. He gave me an epidural (which is a really weird sensation, by the way) with little discomfort, and I was on my way to sleep in about 15 minutes. Glorious, glorious sleep!

7am - been in the hospital for about 26 hours. I wake up from a nice, anesthesia-aided nap, to my nurse telling me that I'm at 8cm! Yay! I have a nice breakfast of clear liquids (broth, Jell-O, water, and juice) and just three hours later, I'm at 10cm and it's time to push.

I pushed for just under an hour, the doctor came in, caught the baby and showed him to us without telling us if it was a boy or a girl (which was very cool) and we saw it was a boy! John Steven had arrived! They placed him on my chest, wiped him off a little bit, and we enjoyed an hour of uninterrupted (well, except for the doctor massaging my belly and stitching me up) family time. Absolute bliss. Not gonna lie, I definitely cried while he was lying on my chest, but he didn't. He was pretty happy to be lying on his mom.

After that first hour, they cleaned him off a little more, weighed him, and then gave him back. He didn't leave our sides for more than a couple minutes the entire time we remained in the hospital.

Proud papa!

Our little family!

More on Johnny to come later!