12 Weeks

Annie's 4th Trimester is officially over! NOW she is ready to enter the outside world :) Not quite sure if SHE got that memo yet, but oh well! Ben and I have been remarking every single day just how HUGE Annie seems! I swear, just in the past week or two, she has gotten WAY bigger. We weighed her yesterday, and she was 12lbs, which is just average, but she just seems to have grown a ton recently! Looking back at her 10 vs. 11 week pics, her head seems a lot bigger too :) We took a pic of her wearing the outfit she came home from the hospital in to compare - yup, she's WAY bigger now :)

Along with getting bigger, Annie seems to have figured out that she has a little bit of strength in that body of hers. All the sudden early this week she realized that while on her tummy, she can actually LIFT her head up and SEE things - amazing!! :) It was almost as if you could see the lightbulb go off in her head...... ooooooh, THIS is what they were trying to make me do all those times! She also loves to stand - every time we try to have her sit on our laps, she straightens out those little legs and forces herself in a standing position. She's getting more and more stable - less of a little bobble head :) One of her favorite things this week is getting her diaper changed - she gets SO excited and kicks her legs around like a maniac. We also have found that if you blow on her face, she does a quick inhale of breath, and makes a hilarious face - no matter how many times you do it in a row :) It's quite entertaining, to us at least :)

I know 3 or 4 months is supposedly when babies get way less fussy - Annie really still hasn't hit that yet. She certainly is WAY better than she used to be, but still has her fussy times, especially in the evening right before bedtime. She also has a habit sometimes of fighting naps, but sometimes I think that is more because we might have missed her "tired" cues and tried to put her down for a nap when she's overtired and thus cranky. She still can only handle about 1.5 hours of being awake, sometimes slightly more in the evening. Sometimes she doesn't actually yawn though, so it's hard to tell if she's actually tired. It's great when it's timed right, we can put her in her swing and she will just sit there and fall asleep without a peep, but if not, she REALLY gets pissed and needs some consoling before she'll take a nap. We TRY to explain to her that it's just a nap and she'll feel better later - she doesn't quite seem to get it yet though ;)

Annie slept great at night all week - for some reason, she rarely fights going to sleep at night and is able to be put in the crib awake and she'll just drift off. It's strange that daytime can't just be the same! Today she even slept from about 8:30pm til 7am, and wasn't even crying then - she was just wiggling and smiling in her crib - so cute :) Annie is such a wiggler in her sleep - frequently she will turn herself 180 degrees somehow, even though she is tightly swaddled. One night, we heard music over the monitor at about 5am - she had kicked her legs up and hit her rainforest soother and turned it on - ha! Luckily it didn't seem to wake her up.

Ben and I tried the moby and the Ergo again this week - Annie is at a weird stage with the ergo where she is slightly too small to be in it without the infant insert (she can't quite spread her legs around us yet, and her head control is still kind of iffy) but WAY too big to be in there comfortably with the insert. The moby she fits in well, but she can't seem to figure out that it's acceptable for her to fall asleep in there. I walked around with her in it for 30 minutes at home at around her nap time and she just looked around and got pissed until I took her out. I think she's fine in those if she's awake, but we want her to be able to fall asleep in there too so we could take her places! Maybe with some more practice... I get very jealous when I see people wearing babies out and about - I know Annie would NOT stand for that for longer than 20 minutes at this point!

So, the big news this week is that my maternity leave is over. As I have mentioned before, I am excited to go back to work, but I am DEFINITELY going to miss Annie a ton when I'm gone. We visited daycare on Wednesday for a few hours, and Annie did well - there are 8 other kids there, 4 who are in school. I'm glad she is the only infant, but I fear that the first week or two will be QUITE rough especially with napping. Sue, the daycare provider, has been doing this for at least 20 if not 30+ years, so obviously she knows what she's doing, but it's still hard to leave your baby and KNOW that there will be a ton of crying the first few days as she adjusts. I do hope that it trains her to be able to sleep better during the day! Sue is definitely a rule follower, and seems very well versed in handling new babies, so that makes it much easier. We'll see how it goes... This is so stupid, but one of the main things I'm "worried" about is that Annie's smell will change since she will be at daycare most of the time - I LOVE the way she smells right now and I wish I could bottle it up so I won't forget it!

Annie got her first bath where we didn't use the little infant hammock in the tub


Annie insists on standing up even in the bath :)

I have everything pretty much ready for work - I ordered a hands free pumping bra, got an extra set of pump parts, got my hair cut, washed all my work pants.... fun :) I really hope pumping goes okay at work - luckily my work is very supportive of it, and with the hands free bra, I can even still work while I'm pumping since I have a laptop. Right now, I pump every day after the first feed of the morning since I am SO full - I plan to continue to do this before I leave every day, which will be kind of annoying, but right now I get enough for almost 2 bottles from this pumping session so it'll be good to have that for the freezer stash. I would estimate that I have about 200oz of breastmilk in the freezer right now - I'm going to rotate that in so that the older stuff gets used.

Sucking on BOTH fists - how fun!

Breastfeeding has been kind of annoying this week at times - especially in the evenings, Annie does not seem to want to eat very well, she just starts screaming sometimes. Once and awhile, gas drops will help, or just burping her, but other times it's completely unexplainable because she eats fine the rest of the day. I REALLY hope that ends sometime because that will be the only time we have together and I'd rather not spend it trying to force her to eat! You'd think maybe she's just not hungry, but often times after a break she will eat for quite awhile, so who knows. It's baffling, that's for sure! I do feel that breastfeeding has gotten easier somewhat, but I don't like that I still have to wear a bra at night still, because at times in the morning there is some leakage. I hope that resolves itself someday.

Still hasn't quite figured out how to keep her head up when sitting :)

Annie seems to be a real fun baby now - in the first few weeks, I felt like this whole parenthood thing would never be enjoyable and Annie would stay a tiny fussy infant forever. It seems so much easier and more manageable now, probably due in large part to the fact that Ben and I were both home the past 3 weeks. I'm so glad we had this time together NOW, when Annie was getting fun and interacting more! Alas, now the fun is over and we must get back to reality...