Four weeks: when every hour is like all day at Disneyland

Yesterday Owen was four weeks old!  Time has passed so quickly since we were on our way to Cedars-Sinai that gloomy Saturday morning a month ago.  Owen has changed so much in this time.  He is growing and growing and growing.  Today he weighs 9lbs, 9oz.  We are starting to wonder if he can be growing too fast.  We'll ask the pediatrician next week. Meanwhile, he has outgrown almost all his newborn clothes and is into the next size of diapers too. 



Do sharks cry?  I don't think they do, so maybe our shark week jokes are starting to fall apart.  This week Owen cried.  A lot.  Life is really hard when you're four weeks old.  I think about how I feel after being at Disneyland all day.  He must feel like that after only an hour or two of being in our living room.  There are a lot of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings.  He has to digest food and battle constantly with gravity.  There is cold and hot and wet and scratchy and hunger to deal with.  Not to mention people putting clothes on him and taking them off, people bathing him, people getting in his face and wanting to play all the time.  Its all really, really hard to deal with.

So what is a young man do?  He cries.  Sometimes for hours and hours.  We try all of our various tricks to make him more comfortable, but once he's fed and dry and rocked and pacified, there isn't much else in our arsenal.  Yesterday was our hardest day yet.  After about the 4th hour of crying, I put him in the car and got on the freeway.  I had no destination, I just wanted some peace.  The car really works well to knock him out, so we drove down to Manhattan Beach, went to Trader Joe's for no good reason, and came home again.  It worked for exactly as long as the car was in motion. Why isn't there a baby seat that imitates the noise and motion of the car??


But it wasn't all crying this week. This week was the first time Owen did anything with intent.  Early in the week, he started actively seeking and lunging for the boob with his mouth--not just randomly rooting around or waving his mouth back and forth, but identifying his target and reaching for it.  This morning, I held his pacifier up close to his mouth, and he lunged for that.  Up until now it was anyone's guess whether he wanted the pacifier at any particular moment. Even he didn't seem to know.  

Owen has let out some farts that would make a grown man proud.  (See fanciful marshmallow interpretation at left).  This seems to be the cause of the crying sometimes... but not all the time.  He is picking up his head with much more control and can lift it and turn it to the other side when he's up on our shoulder.  He is happy hanging out by himself looking around the room for short periods now.  He is sleeping a little bit longer at night, about 3 hours and sometimes 3 1/2 hours.  Noah started giving him a bottle for early morning feeding between 4 and 6 am, and although he resisted at first, he is now happy to nom from the bottle.  I am very happy to get a 5 hour stretch of sleep every night.  Noah is happy to have some special early morning daddy time.  So everyone is happy with this arrangement.