It’s already been more than a month since Sophie was born. I have done my best to savour each moment with her, to find time to just sit and stare at her, to enjoy our whole family in its new form as well. We’ve all adjusted much better than I expected. Two kids is do-able. This moment right now is one of the happiest times in my life. I feel so lucky to have to beautiful, sweet girls and a husband who loves us all.
Let’s look at some pictures, shall we?
I love this picture of Sophie because it looks like she is laughing. She’s only a month old, so she hasn’t even given us one of those real smiles that you know is because she’s happy to see you, but she does make the cutest smiling faces sometimes. She’s putting on weight and already looks quite different from when she was born. She’s going to have a chunky little baby-body just like Julie did, and I’m looking forward to that stage almost as much as I’m enjoying the tiny-baby stage. Tiny-baby stage doesn’t last very long in our family since both girls were born at well over 8 pounds and Sophie has pretty much outgrown some of her 0-3 month outfits.
She is very good at holding her head up and it is so cute sometimes to see her turn it back and forth looking at something up on the wall or out the window in fascination. She’s still a great sleeper, although we’re getting longer periods of happy-awake-baby time. I think she’s gotten a little less fussy since I cut out dairy, so I’m sticking with the diet at least for now.
Sophie’s little umbilicus finally healed thoroughly enough that I felt safe giving her a real bath. She needed it! Her hair was getting pretty greasy, and she had started growing cheese in the little crevices around her neck. She seemed to enjoy the warm water and didn’t cry at all until it was time to get her out and dry her off. I was taking a bath of my own the other night and she started fussing in Joe’s arms, so I had him bring her in to the tub with me. I don’t know if it was the bath or maybe she had just tired herself out, but once we got her dressed and wrapped up afterwards, she fell asleep and was out until morning.
Sophie continues to be a champion eater, and now that all our latch issues are straightened out, we’ve tried giving her a couple of feedings from the bottle. She sucks it right down, no problem! Julie even got in on the action. You can barely see it in this picture, but Joe has Sophie on the Boppy pillow while he’s feeding her. I thought that was so cute, I didn’t bother explaining to him that the point of the Boppy is to raise the baby up to breast level to make *breastfeeding* easier.
Julie likes to check Sophie out sometimes. It’s really cute – sometimes she’ll look around and ask “Where’s Sophie?” if she doesn’t see her right away. When she’s napping, I’ll leave Sophie in her car seat in the next room sometimes so that Julie’s stomping and loud talking don’t startle her awake. Notice the cute little hat and blanket? I’m writing up the pattern for that hat right now and plan to teach a class on it this summer. It’s a fun little thing to knit. I haven’t been getting a whole lot of knitting done lately – seems like whenever I have two hands free, they’re needed for folding laundry, cooking dinner, or some other necessary task. I have been sneaking in a few minutes here and there, though.
We had Julie’s second cousin Katelyn over for the day on Saturday while her parents were at work. They generally play pretty well together, although there were some power struggles over who could hoarde the most stuffed animals at one time. You can see Julie’s got an armload in this picture. By the end of the afternoon, everyone was tired and there was a little biting incident over some stuffed toy. Julie was trying to grab something from Katelyn, and ended up getting bit. That’s two-year-olds for you, I guess.
We used the Boppy for bottle feedings as well. I don’t know if it was the familiar texture, smell, or the height, but I say keep doing it if it makes everybody happy.
Sophie is a beauty!