Settling In

Baby holding up his head
5 Week Picture

Life as a mom has now started to settle down. It is very true that your first month with baby goes by as sort of a blur because it's nothing more than survival mode - feed baby, change diapers, get baby to stop being fussy...all the while trying to remember to eat, comb your hair, and shower. These are the days of living in pajamas, avoiding the scale, and at least two loads of laundry daily. There are also a lot of rewards - getting your first smile from baby, watching him sleep (sometimes laughing while sleeping), see baby go from fussy to cooing, watching baby get big chubby cheeks and knowing that I had something to do with it. Some things I have learned the past 4 weeks:
1) Schedules - seems no matter how hard we try to get baby on a schedule he has his own...life became much easier when we just let him have his way on this
2) Nursing - a nightmare at first, very time consuming, but I know it's what is best for him, and how could I feel like a better mom then when I'm nursing?
3) Cluster feeding - something I wish I had known about before, last week he did this and I had no clue what was going on. Basically he was hungry all the time at night, no matter how much I nursed him. He seemed to want to nurse for two hours straight. Turns out he was trying to "stock up" so he could sleep longer at night - a very good thing. When I started feeding him instead of giving him his Nuk out of frusteration, or thinking I wasn't giving him enough milk he ended up sleeping 4-5 hours straight. He's been doing this pretty consistently the past few nights, nursing for a long time and then only getting up twice to feed. Pretty nice!