Reuben's Update...Better Late than Never!

Well, I know I haven't done ANY updating on the growth of my little man, but to be honest this whole mom thing is so much more exhausting than I could have imagined! When I do get a few minutes to myself, I'm either cleaning or sleeping. Sometimes I sit on facebook and just let my mind go blank for a while. :)

Reuben is now 9 weeks (and one day) old! He has grown so much that it's hard to believe. His first few weeks he grew at a rapid rate - about 12 oz every week! He's finally slowed down which probably has a lot to do with the fact that we started using a pacifier. I obviously still check first if he is hungry but where as before I was checking every hour, I now give him the pacifier if I think he just wants comfort rather than food. Either way, he's still gaining weight and is as cute as ever.

I can't say that the last 9 weeks have been easy. The first few weeks were great - we had family around and it wasn't until he was 3 weeks old that I was left with him for any amount of time. Around 4 weeks, he started crying a lot. After working through what could be the problem and trying different things like infacol (to help him with wind), gripe water, colief to break down lactose, etc. nothing was really working. I finally tried cutting out dairy from my diet - not only because he was crying a lot but because his poo was green. Not just like occasionally, but for over 2 weeks and at one point there were spots of blood in it. So I cut out dairy about 3 weeks ago and since then he's had normal yellow poo. I realize this is information not everyone needs to know but I feel very accomplished that I made him normal again. hahah. :)

He started smiling at about 4-5 weeks, and since then every day he smiles more. He is very grumpy when he is hungry or tired, and isn't very patient in waiting for food or sleep! It's wonderful though when I actually know he is crying because he's tired because all I have to do is rock him and sing to him and he falls asleep beautifully in my arms. I could stare at his little face forever.

He now smiles ALL the time, (when he's not grumpy), and even sometimes when he's grumpy I just say, "Where's your smile?" And he stops grumping and lets me have a little smile and has the cutest EVER little laugh. Sometimes though, this cute smile and laughter comes at inconvenient times such as this morning at 4:30am. Around 4-5am every morning, he decides that he doesn't want to sleep anymore. So this morning Adam and I put him between us in our bed to calm him down and he had his pacifier in his mouth when all of a sudden I could see it falling out because he was smiling. Then he started laughing. For no reason. It was so adorable, how could I be mad? Yes I was exhausted and wanted nothing more than 4 more hours of sleep, but my goodness, he has the most beautiful smile I have ever seen in my life. When he is like that I can't take my eyes off of him.

Other things he can do:
- Roll over from his belly to his back
- Smile when he sees me or Adam, or when asked to smile
- Hold his toys (for the first time, today!)
- Watch his mobile or other things (He moves his head/eyes with the objects)
- He CAN sleep 7 1/2 hours at night which he did for a week but then decided 3 hours was long enough to sleep at one time.


I can't believe that he's going to be 10 weeks old on Monday. I'm so looking forward to him being just a little bit bigger - we have a jumperoo and a door bouncer all ready for him to play with. Right now his favorite things are:

- Bath time
- His mobile
- Loud music
- TV. He could stare at it for hours!



I think that's all I have to say - I COULD go on for about 10 pages if I wrote down all the details of the past 9 weeks. I'm still breastfeeding him and it's going really well, though at times it can be difficult to know if he is crying because he's hungry. We go to a breastfeeding group every Tuesday which has been extremely helpful and I've met a lot of great people.

Over the next 2 weeks we are going to Birmingham to go to our friend's son's dedication, then we are headed to London on the 24th to go get Reuben's American passport! I can't wait but am also veryyy nervous. I hope he's not as grumpy in 2 weeks!!

Ok, I'll stop there! I'll try to update more often, too :)