18 Weeks

I think Ryan summed things up pretty well this week when he noted that Audra doesn't sleep much, but she sure is happy. Poor thing is still a little sick, and while her congestion has mostly cleared up, she's still coughing quite a bit. I'm not sure if that's impacting her sleep at all, but she's still waking up more at the beginning of the night so that she ends up needing to be resettled maybe 2-3 times without nursing and sometimes once with, and there were a few nights where she either woke me to nurse every hour starting at 1am, or just kept going on her own for the rest of the night after I fell asleep... but at least she only did the dreaded "up for the day at 4:30am" once last week. And she had one night where she only nursed twice AND I was able to unlatch her while she was comfort nursing without it causing any issues. Both are rousing successes in my book :)

Audra has been pretty funny this week, though, with her aggressive lip-smacking, constant baby sit-ups, and rather vigorous punching and kicking. I feel like I have even less privacy than before, now that I have baby eyeballs on me whenever I'm in her vicinity ;)

She does seem to enjoy her daddy time, and she was quite delighted with Ryan last weekend, giving him lots of adorable smiles :) I started looking at some books with her too, mainly sticking to the ones with pictures of babies in them, since it's so cute to see her touching the faces ever so gently (right before she tries to gnaw on them). She has also gotten plenty of time in the carrier, and while it's becoming more rare that she falls asleep in it now, she at least seems content being carried around while she's awake now too.

[About to embark on our project that afternoon: dusting the house]

[Multi-tasking at its finest]

Apparently Audra spaced out her feedings during the day and I didn't even notice... well, at least until last weekend. Lately, she's been perfectly fine just being held while we're out to eat rather than needing to nurse every hour or so, but I realized that I haven't nursed her in public for quite a few weeks now after I tried a couple of times to nurse her under a cover last weekend. It was a very different experience from the last time I did that. Now, she was popping on and off the whole time, messing with the cover, and generally just not that into it. Maybe she just wasn't hungry those times, but since I'm not quite brave enough to nurse in public without a cover, hopefully she'll continue to be mostly content while we're out and about so I won't need to try to tackle that again too soon...

Miscellaneous cuteness:

[Getting Josie's shoes on is apparently a community effort]