Growth spurt

Joel started his six-week growth spurt Thursday. For the first time he was eagerly eating at every feeding without falling asleep after 3 minutes. Which led to better naps and more peaceful wakeful times, which meant we had a couple of really great days. Especially Friday, which was just about as perfect of a day as you can get with a newborn in the house. Today I'm not sure if the growth spurt is still going on or if he's just decided that eating is fun, but he has been wanting to eat every hour to hour and a half today, and hasn't wanted to take much of a nap at all. It's exhausting! On days like this I come close to thinking I want to give up, but then I remember how far we have come and I decide to stick with it at least another day. I'm really hoping to continue breast feeding for a year. I don't want to have to buy one can of formula. But the main reason is that when it works, it's just such a perfect feeling. He has started sucking on his hand and I'm trying to decide if it'd be ok to give him a pacifier. I've read that I could run the risk of really messing things up by giving a pacifier to a lazy eater like Joel.

We set a busy agenda for ourselves this weekend. Jav wanted to take some big boxes out of our garage and put them into storage (thank you Mike and Susan!) We wanted to finally get all the Christmas decorations put away and back up in the attic. All of this so that Jav can start parking in the garage. He hasn't had a radio in his car since his got stolen months ago. I don't know how he's gone this long. My goal today was to wash all of the pets bedding, and clean off anything that had pet hair on it, like cat scratch posts. I haven't washed the cats' bedding in about 6 months. Yuck! Even though Bones keeps himself really clean, he does have periods of shedding. Zoe is another matter. We call her Pig Pen, because she is not very good at grooming herself and walks around the house in a little cloud of white hair. When I started brushing her every day, though, she got better at doing it herself. Since Joel's been here I stopped brushing them, but have now started up again. It's a good feeling to have at least one aspect of my house clean. I also did four loads of laundry today, which may be a record. Why does one tiny person increase the laundry tenfold? It just doesn't make sense to me.

The funnest thing we did happened this afternoon. We had our first family walk with both boys and Molly. It was a beautiful day and we all enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. (Well, Joel slept through the whole thing.) It felt so good to get out of the house for awhile!

Joel is really looking around at everything now. He started smiling and laughing (on the same day) about three weeks ago, but now his whole face gets into the smile. Gabriel loves it when Joel smiles at him. He's making the wonderful little cooing noises that babies make, and today squealed really loud. He's been enjoying his sponge baths, and I'm so ready to give him a real bath to see what happens, but his little umbilical stump still hasn't fallen off.

I'm wondering if I should give up drinking milk since Joel has been extremely fussy in the evenings. I don't know if you can call if colic, but it seems close. Several things bother me about this. One thing is that I drink milk all day long, so wouldn't he be fussy all day, not just in the evenings? The other thing is that I eat all kinds of food that could be causing his tummy to act up (cabbage, citrus fruits, etc...), so how do I know it's milk? I LOVE milk and am going to be really upset if I have to stop drinking it for awhile. I guess it could just be typical baby evening fussiness for reasons other than digestion, especially on days like today when I know Joel hasn't gotten enough sleep during the day. Sometimes I think all the reading I've been doing on first year issues make me think too much.

And on a very sad note, the devastation in Haiti from last week's massive earthquake is almost more than I can comprehend. My sister-in-law told us about a teacher's aide from Haiti at her school. His mother had gone home to visit relatives and passed away in the earthquake. They still have not been able to contact any of his wife's family, and fear the worse for them, too. That is just one of literally millions of stories of people who have lost loved ones. I am praying for the victims, their families, the rescue workers and the people trying to get relief to them.