Bron left last week after a two week visit. The time went by much too quickly… She’s now jetting around Europe and no doubt thrilled to be child-free!
This means that we have come to the end of our string of visiting baby assistants so we’re now going it alone. Luckily Evan is an awesome baby so he’s doing his best to make this easy on us. Brynn, on the other hand, is doing her best to make us put her up for adoption. Yes, of course she’s still cute, sweet, smart, funny, charming etc., but she’s also the most tantrum-prone toddler I have ever seen. Just once I would like to leave the park without holding her sideways while she screams, flails, kicks, pulls my hair and all the other parents stare at us. We have not made a graceful exit from any kind of playground in months now. Hopefully she’ll get to a point soon where she understands cause and effect a little more and I can explain to her that when we know she’s going to act like a psycho whenever we leave the park then the result is we never want to take her anywhere fun because we can only tolerate so much embarrassment. How long until they learn to understand these kind of things?? I’m getting desperate here.
So, back to the good child. At 5 weeks, Evan was still sleeping in 2-3 hour stretches and I was losing my mind. By 6 weeks he’d gone up to 4 hours which was better. Then he started adding an extra hour every night until we got to the 8 hour mark. Yes, our delightful seven week old now sleeps 8 hours uninterrupted overnight. Praise the freaking gods, it doesn’t get much better than this. On Sunday the entire family slept in until 8.30am. How many parents with an infant and a toddler can say that!!
He also smiled at me the other day for the first time which was delightful. He has a very good disposition and barely fusses. He loves taking baths and is very keen to drink the bathwater. He has this tricky little move where he slides down so his mouth is at water level and then turns his head very slightly to the side and opens his mouth. He does this all very sneakily and then the next thing i know his tongue is out and he’s lapping up the water. He freaks out when I scoot him back up and away from his precious bathwater.
The poor kid has pretty bad baby acne at the moment so we’re getting a lot of those comments like “oh, let me see the baby!” *pause* “oh, he’s so…. small” or “look at….. his fingers – they’re so long!” Not helping the situation is his hair which, in the sunlight, appears to be undergoing all variations of male-pattern baldness simultaneously. The front hairline appears to be receding at his temples. It also seems to be thinning at the crown and now he looks like he’s getting hair loss on the back and sides that leave that lower ring of hair behind. Most of this is caused by the difference in hair color in various sections. Some areas are very fair so they aren’t really visible when contrasted with the darker hair. I think he’s also losing some where he lies on it. I want it all to fall out so he can just start over.
He’s putting on a ton of weight and is closing in on 12lbs which means he’s up almost 50% of his birth weight. Not bad I think. We call him the Hungry Man due to his voracious appetite. Now that he sleeps so long at night he needs to make up for it during the day so I have to feed him every 1.5 to 2 hours. A small price to pay for a good night’s sleep though!
Brynn definitely likes Evan although I don’t think she likes what his addition to the family means for her. Thankfully she doesn’t take it out on him. She likes to kiss him and tell us that she loves him so that’s sweet. However, she is much more clingy and whiny with me and gets upset with me holding or feeding the baby. We’re hoping she gets over this soon as we’re at the point now where we are enduring her, rather than enjoying her, which is a pity because she really is adorable when she is well behaved. Hopefully this will all calm down in a couple of weeks – she was a little better today.
We had a blackout last night for 10 hours which sucked because it was the hottest day of the year so far – well over 90 degrees and it hadn’t cooled much by the evening when the power went out around 7pm. The kids were a bit of a mess. Brynn was too hot in her room and kept crying so she ended up in our bed where she writhed and thrashed around and had weird dreams “OPEN THE DOOR! OPEN THE DOOR!!”. She was also very sweaty but still wanted to snuggle up to me. It was too hot to swaddle Evan so he was a free-range baby and he did not like it and couldn’t settle down. We ended up with David sleeping on the couch in the living room with Evan in his swing, while Brynn and I shared a bed. Finally the power came back on around 5am. The upside of all this is that everyone was exhausted and both Brynn and Evan took naps that lasted over 3 hours each and overlapped enough that I was also able to sneak in a nap. Very nice!
