There have also been some more rough nights this past week - I'm not sure if it's still part of the growth spurt, if it was related to feeling under the weather (we both came down with something this week), or just part of her being a baby, but there were a couple of nights where "putting her down for the night" stretched out for hours and wasn't accomplished until 2 or 3 in the morning. We had only been using the pacifier for car rides and when it would be especially inconvenient to nurse, but we ended up having to pull that out for the rough nights so I could get a couple of hours of sleep in between multi-hour nursing sessions. She has also been more fussy in her sleep this week, with hours of grunting and squirming, although I find it very interesting that the night she didn't go down until 3am, she finally did after I kept her in bed with me after nursing, and she didn't move a muscle for 5 hours. I'm just not sure if that was just because she was so exhausted by that point, or if she was sleeping better because she was right next to me. While I've taken shorter naps with her in bed with me, I was still very nervous about sleeping during the night with her next to me since I sleep so heavily (although I didn't move either, except for the several times I woke up to make sure I hadn't moved and to check that she could breathe/was still breathing), so this probably still won't be a habit but it at least helped get us some much-needed sleep that night.
We're also noticing a pattern that Josie's rough nights are usually more towards the beginning of the week, and since I'm assuming babies don't get a case of "the Mondays" quite the same way adults do, I suspect it may have something to do with my dietary changes on the weekend. I try to stay away from some of the foods that can cause gassiness in babies, but since I eat almost the same thing each day during the week and then eat out nearly every meal on the weekends, I wonder if that's causing some of the fussiness too.
In addition to her first sickness, this week also marked a couple more firsts - her first (and likely last) earthquake, and we began introducing bottles. I had felt like I was coming down with something for a day or two (sore throat, headaches), and then we noticed that Josie's nose was stuffed up on Tuesday and her temperature was a bit elevated. That was one of the rough nights, since she just wanted to be comforted, with meant 4 hours of nursing (with the occasional 10-minute catnap), and then 1.5 hours of her furiously sucking on a pacifier before she finally fell asleep around 2am. Her temperature was back down by that point, though, and she then slept until almost 9am, and seemed to be trying to catch up on her sleep throughout the next day and has seemed fine since then.
For the earthquake, she was contently hanging out in her swing, so she probably didn't notice anything anyway :) I thought it was an airplane passing by overhead, but then realized that the entire house was shaking and the roar was just getting louder. Ryan and I were like, "Is that an... earthquake?!" and I immediately darted to a doorway... but then decided that one wasn't sturdy enough, so I then started towards another doorway, and then was going to go grab Josie, who was a couple of rooms away with Ryan. The earthquake had ended by that point, with the only "damage" to our house being some off-center pictures in the nursery, and my conclusion is that I pretty much failed at effectively reacting to the earthquake.
I also started to work on my freezer stash of breastmilk this week, since some will need to go with Josie to daycare in 5 weeks and the rest will stay here for all those times we need to give her a bottle... which so far, seems like that will not be a common occurrence. We gave her a bottle last week that she took to just fine (yet another instance where her being a "barracuda", as the hospital lactation consultant called her, is perhaps coming in handy since she's not very picky about what she latches onto); however, I of course reacted to this development by getting all weepy. I thought I was maybe a bit ambivalent about breastfeeding - it was something very important to Ryan and me that I do, but I had thought of it more as a functional activity. It turns out that I do really like the connection and time with Josie that comes along with breastfeeding though, since I was a bit sad to see that exclusive relationship end and to see her getting her nutrition and comfort from a bottle instead of directly from me. Then I realized that I get weepy about pretty much every change and the start (or end) of each new phase for her (I still even tear up when she smiles at me), and so I either have to get a grip or it's going to be a very long, tear-filled lifetime for her, and she may end up in therapy to figure out why her mother cries so much when looking at her, even if they are mostly tears from happiness or sentimentality ;)
This week was also the 9th anniversary of Ryan's and my first date. We normally celebrate our dating anniversary with a Sudden Death Mini-Golf Tournament, but thought that might be too difficult this year with a 7-week-old in tow. So instead we took Josie to Potbelly (where she was a perfect little baby, sleeping for the first part of the meal, then awake, alert, and smiling at me while I "danced" to the music for her for the rest of the meal) and then to Wegmans so we could buy yet more bananas (where she decided she was done with being awake, and commenced the pitiful little cry she sometimes does - which is far preferable to a full-blown crying fit, but not as cute as her cry where she says "la" - either way, the rain application on Ryan's phone worked to calm her down).
I also had my 6-week post-partum appointment with the midwives this week. Everything looked great, and so I can resume normal activities now. I had started walking again within a week or two after delivery, but the midwives had asked me to hold off on carrying Josie for the walks, and to wait on returning to yoga (I had gone back once 3 weeks ago, but it turns out that was a bit too soon). So that will be good to have those restrictions lifted, and who knows, maybe we'll be able to get back to the pools before they close for the season to see how much my buoyancy has changed now that I'm not massively pregnant ;)
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