9/9
All right, so I had a baby two months ago. I have been a mom of two for two months! And as you can probably surmise, this is why I haven’t written more. The kids are great. Fletch is a wonderful big brother and loves his little Gracie so much. And Miss Gracie is my little rock star. She is doing fabulous. Eating well and sleeping well and growing like a weed.
We had her two month appointment today. She weighs 12.5 lbs – Fletch only weighed 10 at his 2 month! This puts her in the 85th percentile. And she is 22.5 inches long, putting her in the 54th percentile for height. And 15.75 inches around her head, which is 79th percentile. So she’s growing well and doing great in general.
She does have some icky baby acne on her head and chest and arms but the doctor said it’s nothing to worry about and should go away on its own soon. And all four of us have got a cold – already Grace’s second! Jack and Fletch were both sick right when she was born and so of course, she got it too. So she’s been pretty snorty and snuffly since day one but that doesn’t seem to have really bothered her or anything.
Grace also got her first round of shots today. We totally weren’t worried about it since when Fletch got his, basically he cried a little bit, I put him on the boob and he was happy again. Not so much with Gracie Girl. She howled and cried much worse than Fletch ever did, and then when I tried to give her the boob, she wouldn’t have any of it. They also had this sugar water stuff that they normally dip the pacifier into, but since, like her brother, G won’t take a paci, we tried dipping our fingers in and seeing if she would take some that way, but no dice. We just had to hold her and talk to her and bounce her until she calmed down. Then she had some boob and snuffled some more and eventually fell asleep in the car on the way home. She’s slept a lot today which is to be expected.
In general, things have seemed much easier this time around. We are not nearly so jumpy and worried about Grace as we were with Fletch. I have been sleeping in her room so I can feed her at night. But unlike what we did (were told to do) with Fletch, we haven’t been waking her up to eat at night. With Fletch, his doctors told us he need to be woken up every 3 hours at night to eat and he pretty much never learned to sleep longer than 3 hours until he was almost two years old. And that’s only because I finally weaned him after I got pregnant. He is still not a great sleeper and is high-maintenance at bedtime and gets up at least once a night. So with Grace, we decided that once she regained her birth weight, which she did by two weeks, we wouldn’t wake her up to eat. As a result, she is a much better sleeper than Fletch ever was! She’s already going 5-7 hours a night which is awesome for me.
And we are also avoiding the other big mistake we made with Fletch, which is always putting him to sleep with the boob. Which worked like magic but also meant it was incredibly difficult for over two years for anybody but me to get him to go to sleep either for nap or at night. Miss G can fall asleep in a variety of ways, but most astoundingly, I am sometimes able to just lay her in the crib awake (but drowsy) and let her fall asleep on her own – something that Fletch never did as a baby. So I feel really good that we are putting our experience to work for us. And also that I am actually getting some sleep which is totally unexpected and awesome.
Unlike her brother, Grace is not happy at all to have a dirty diaper. Where Fletch wouldn’t even blink at a dirty diaper, GG starts fussing the second she’s even a little bit wet. So hopefully that means an easy road when it’s time for potty training! Also, she doesn’t cry much, even when she’s hungry. Fletch would go to Defcon 5 wailing pretty quickly when he wanted to eat, but Grace mostly starts a low-level fussing, followed by chewing on her hand, which turns to a very loud slobbery chomping on her hand and that is the thing that will actually wake me up at night. So far she is a pretty easy baby, although some of that must be attributed to this not being our first rodeo.
