8 Weeks

This was the first week I was on my own with Josie since Ryan went back to work last Friday, and it ended up being slightly easier in some respects than what I was expecting, but also more difficult in other ways. Naps have continued to be a struggle, since she's still only sleeping for less than an hour for the most part, so the afternoons have become a repeated cycle of feeding her, trying to get her to have a decent nap, and then her waking up early, playing for a little bit, and then trying again, and all the while both of our moods are deteriorating as I get more frustrated and she gets more overtired. Newborn sleep cycles are apparently only about 30-50 minutes long, so she seems to be having troubles transitioning between sleep cycles because she usually wakes up right between that 30-50 minute mark, but hopefully this is just a (short-lived!) phase.

She still sleeps really well during the night once she's asleep, but it was a bit more difficult to put her down for the night this week too. There were a couple of nights that she went down really easily (before 11pm too!), but then woke up within half an hour and then took another hour+ to fall back asleep. Of course, as I type this, she's currently on the second hour of her afternoon nap - one of maybe only three naps she's taken in the last two weeks that has been longer than an hour long, so I'm excited about that but don't even dare to hope that it will be three hours long like she had been doing for her afternoon naps before. We also took her out to eat and run errands earlier this afternoon, so I wonder if there's some correlation with that and her sleeping better now, since she was pretty tired and slept on me for close to an hour while we were out. Then again, she's been sleepy all day, so maybe I should just stop looking for patterns since she'll change it all up again soon enough anyway :)

Besides that, though, the week went pretty well - one of the highlights of my day is still her first diaper change. For whatever reason, her change table seems to be one of her favorite places, and she's especially happy when she's first up for the day, and so there's lot of smiles, goofy faces, hand waving and feet kicking that goes on after she gets changed and I'm singing silly songs to her. I think she had been smiling mostly reactively before, but this week, I've caught her a few times smiling at me when I wasn't even looking at her, which is awesome to see her looking right at me with a big silly smile on her face.



She also is doing a lot better in her bouncer and on the activity mat, which is good, since I ended up sticking her in the bouncer so she had somewhere comfortable to hang out while I did other things around the house. She's starting to hit her toys more, although it's still not entirely clear whether she's doing that on purpose or not, and she's also chatting a lot more... although she'll coo a bit to Ryan and me, she saves most of her talking for the corner of her nursery or the ceiling fan :)


I've started diligently working on building up my freezer stash so I have some frozen breastmilk to send along with Josie to daycare. I maybe waited longer than I should have to get started though, since I've heard 200oz is a good amount, and I will likely only have just over half that by the end of the month, so I may end up having to add another pumping session on top of the one I already added at 2am. We're continuing to give her a bottle or two each week, and she did better with the bottle this week than the last one before that that she wasn't too interested in and didn't even finish. So hopefully she'll do ok tomorrow when Ryan does the first bottle feeding without me being around for backup, since I'm going to try to start going to yoga on Sundays again.

Also, Josie's hair has increased in its specialness lately - not just because it's crazy thick and long (and super blonde), but because it sticks up in an amusing way in the back. :)