16 Weeks: Laughing, squealing, grabbing, sitting, etc!

It has been a while since I wrote about what Owen is up to!  In the last three weeks, he's been doing a lot of practice LAUGHING.  Low giggles and very high pitched squeals abound as his face lights up with big, gummy, drooly grins.  It is ultra cute.  Whenever he sees Mom, Owen acts as if a sparkling rainbow of laughter and fun has appeared around my head like a halo.  This is a fun phase for me.  It gives me a whole new perspective on what an asshole I was as a teenager.  I am not looking forward to a day when Owen looks at me and all he sees is The Man, trying to keep him down.  In addition to giggles and squeals, he's started to make some babbling noises including a low ooooohhh and a lot of aaahs.  There are also some aaah-goos and plain goos.

He is starting to grab onto stuff.  He's getting very attached to his giraffe nunu (aka, lovey, blankie).  Especially its ears.  He can spot the ears on that giraffe from about a mile away, and uses all his concentration to get one into his mouth.  Then he sucks on it with wet slurping noises.  I can tell this is going to be the bad habit we're going to struggle with later.  He's probably going to take that giraffe to camp with him when he's 12, hiding it in his sleeping bag.  And it will have no ears left.  

About a week ago, Owen slept from 7pm to 5:20am--over 10 hours.  I finally woke him up at that point, in part because I was worried about him and in part because it's faster if he nurses (rather than having to pump).  It was a one-time event but we will take the good nights.  He's been a little inconsistent with sleeping, sometimes going just 3 hours and sometimes up to 8 hours.  But he still sleeps from about 7 to about 7 or 8am, with a few wake-up calls to eat, and we're just fine with that.

The sleep-related difficulty over the past month has been with napping.  Owen does not take a good nap these days.  It's frustrating for everyone because I don't ever get a break to do chores, work out, etc, and Owen ends up so overtired that he is just miserable.  We attended a sleep techniques class last week to learn more about how to take a good nap, and the guidance was to 1. stay home and not try to nap on the road and 2. do whatever it takes to get a good nap in.  For Owen, this means I have to get in bed with him and stay there with my hand on him to make sure he stays asleep.  This past week has been weird due to the holiday, but in the coming week we will try out the new advice and see how it goes. 

Owen weighs over 16 lbs.  He is really steady holding his head up in any position, and he gets a big kick out of tummy time now that he's in control.  He likes to look at the classic book "Squishy Turtle and Friends" while he props himself up on his elbows.  When he gets tired, he enjoys gumming the play mat he's laying on.  He's also getting good at sitting up with assistance.

He got to meet his Uncle Dan this week.  Dan and Meg came out for Thanksgiving!  One of the cutest moments of them together was when Dan put Owen on his knee and bounced him around.  This made Owen positively squeal with delight. 

Grown-up life also marches on.  Owen's room is finally complete.  We got new curtains, a small rug/play mat, and a new floor-bed for him.  The bed is a little bigger than is truly necessary (it is a queen), but we really like it.  It makes it so easy to lay down next to him and give him a pat as he nods off to sleep.  I was skeptical of the whole floor-bed concept but so far it's really great. 

We got his passport on Saturday, but unfortunately they got the spelling on Nathaniel wrong... so a visit to the Federal Building is in our near future.  We had a good trial day with nanny Tricia, and Owen will have his first day solo with her this week.  He is doing great with the bottle now, provided that the milk is an appropriate temperature, so I don't have any concerns about how he will do with a more regular nanny situation.  Tricia even knows sign language so maybe we will learn something from her. 

And, since my last post, we got the news that our beloved cat Cleo is dying of cancer.  This has been difficult news to accept and it's really cast a shadow on our lives. We are trying to make her as comfortable as possible in her few remaining weeks.  I let her eat most of a chicken breast off my Thanksgiving dinner plate.  We're watching her carefully and she seems quite happy for now... in fact today she demanded seconds of her ultra-fancy canned cat food and then chased her feather toy around the living room until she crunched its neck until it was dead.  Our only wish for her is that she remains comfortable until her final hour.  I think this is what we all want for our loved ones.

Thanksgiving was a time to reflect on everything we have.  We feel very lucky to have had Cleo in our lives for 11 wonderful years and I know she feels the same way.  We also have the cutest little boy we could hope for, not to mention we are healthy and usually happy, and we have good food and a good house, two cars and two jobs.  Life is good.  Even though it is sometimes hard to do.  

100th Day in Office: Owen makes a speech

3 months: Another S Bites the Dust

Owen is three months old today!  He's outgrown all his 3-6 month sized clothing.  We received a big box of hand-me-downs from the sister of our friend Amy, and now he has tons of new adorable 6-9 month things that are fitting him beautifully.

Owen is still following the same sleep pattern that he established a few weeks ago.  He is starting to smile for longer stretches, and he just lights up when he catches sight of me or his Dad (especially me).  He'll go on smiling for a couple of minutes if I get in close to his face and talk to him.  It is super cute.  Tummy time has started to produce smiles too, as he looks at himself in the mirror and lifts his head to gaze around the room.  Noah even got a few smiles and laughs in the bathtub last night.

He's also starting to grab onto things--especially the edge of his toy mirror and his nunu.  There have been a few times when he grabbed his plastic keyring and shook it around.  Anything that approaches his mouth is greeted with an inquisitive lick and sometimes a much more thorough gumming.  Squirming is becoming a full on sport and he can hold his head steady and turn back and forth when he's propped upright. He can stay propped up in a sitting position on the couch or on my lap. 

The big breakthroughs this week have been the leaving-behind of two of the 5 "S's".  Dr. Harvey Karp's Happiest Baby On the Block technique for soothing fussy babies involves swaddling, swinging/shaking (gently), shushing, sucking, and side-lying.  Owen has required 4 of the 5 to get to sleep (side-lying never did him much good) since we learned about the 5 S's when he was 5 weeks old.  In the last two weeks, he gradually stopped needing to be shimmied and rocked to sleep.  Then this week, he quite suddenly stopped napping in the swing.  He just wold not go to sleep while swinging one day, and ever since then he's been napping on his bed.

This past week saw the end of swaddling as well.  Although he still occasionally startles himself out of a light sleep by jerking his arms, he is very very resistant to being swaddled now, and can fall asleep easily without the wrap.  I just sit nearby and hold his hands gently down until he has passed into a light sleep, and he's fine for the rest of the night.

However, he still absolutely needs his pacifier and the loud white noise to calm down when he is overtired at the end of the day.  The white noise has advantages besides calming him down.  It prevents him from hearing outside noises that might wake him up.  And, they say going to sleep with a pacifier is actually good for preventing SIDS.  We won't push for the abandonment of the last two S's any time soon. 

This week has been a very busy one for all of us.  Fitting our work schedules in with our baby's schedule has been getting the best of us.  Noah is at work 5 days per week, and although this is mostly a good thing, he misses Owen terribly.  I am doing my best to squeeze in 10-12 hours of work each week as well.  Our friend Chris has become our occasional nanny for days that I need to be on campus for meetings, and Noah is at home with Owen all day on Sundays while I try to do a full week's worth of work.  This is a full schedule already, but with exponentially increased administrative duties (read: how many f*%!ing times am I going to have to call the insurance company about this?!?!), increased chores around the house, and the usual social calendar of people wanting to see/meet Owen and we're spreading ourselves pretty thin indeed.  We're doing our best to adapt. 

Owen stares down the camera while Malia makes a fool of herself trying to get him to talk for you

More tummy time

Owen has tummy time (12 1/2 weeks)

2 months pediatrician visit

We finally had our 2-month checkup, almost a month late.  Our pediatrician's office is way too busy and cannot give us well-baby visits on time, so we're going to switch to a new office starting at the 4 month visit (at 5 months). 

Owen weighed 14.5 lbs (75th percentile for age) and was 24 inches (60th percentile for age).  His head measured 15 5/8", which is about the 40th percentile.  The nurse who saw him said his cheeks were not even on the charts.

Everything else was fine.  Owen got his first round of vaccines--three shots and one by mouth.  He only cried for a couple of minutes after the shots themselves, but about 4 hours later when he started to mount that immune response, things got pretty ugly.  Poor little guy did not feel good and he wanted the world to know about it.  He slept well once he finally got to sleep, and he was OK by Saturday morning.