He's been up and down, some days/nights he's great, some he's horrid. I read that 6 weeks is a growth spurt time and that the hormones involved can get them riled up, so maybe that's it.
He did have a really good night last night, ate at 8pm and then didn't wake up again until 1:45am. Back down by 2:15am and slept until 5:30am or so.
He's also starting to laugh and smile at times... and loves his play mat with all his dangling 'friends' that he talks to sometimes. I shot a quick video of that today, I'll have to upload it to Vimeo later when I get a chance.
Christina and her Mom went out for a while today so I'm watching him now. Her Mom has been a huge help, especially for Christina during the days now that she's back to work. She started back on Wednesday and so far so good - she's not having too much issue trying to make her hours. We'll see what the full week next week brings. Then we get to adjust everything and find another new rhythm in late September when he starts going to daycare and Christina goes back to the office full time.
That's been one of the hardest things for me though, is the shooting from the hip. I like things orderly, planned (somewhat), and neat and clean and with a baby there's not a lot of that all the time. It gets very frustrating when you have two or three really good straightforward perfect feedings in a row and then on the next one everything that can go wrong does. I just look at him and tell him he knows how to do this, why's he messing it all up. haha.
All in all, he really is turning a lot of corners and getting a *little* easier - not a lot, but I'll take what I can get.
Boy the last couple weeks have just flown by it seems.
We completely stopped doing anything extraneous like photos, baby books, things like that because Evan got to be more work than normal and sleep deprivation started kicking in a little. He's not colic or anything really difficult like that, he's just decided the last couple weeks that he likes night feeding every 2 hours tops and fussing a lot all day long.
Turns out most of his fussing was just gas, which we kind of knew. However, what I hadn't done was the math on the Mylicon drops to help him with that. The bottle says up to 12 doses per day. Well in a 24 hour span that's every two hours. Plenty enough to give him some with every bottle. So, we started giving him the dose before each bottle and it's made a huge difference. Of course there's no getting those previous two weeks back.
So now he's a lot calmer most of the time and when he fusses it's because he's tired and doesn't want to sleep. Something he gets from me, I know. The hardest part of this last week is that it was my first week back to work. I do end up missing him by the end of the day, especially when Christina txts me photos during the day. It's been rough for her though having him all day and doing the late late night feedings. She's sleeping from 9pm-3am give or take (mostly take). I have the midnight feeding and he's down by 1am and she gets up with him at 3am (or earlier) and 5:30am and I sleep until the 7am alarm and get up and go to work.
But it's finally the weekend thank goodness. Last night I kept him downstairs and slept on the couch so Christina could get some good solid sleep. All his feedings went perfectly, none longer than 45 minutes total counting changing him, feeding him, and rocking him back to sleep. He slept for 4 hours, 3 hours, and 3 hours for me. Christina ended up getting 9 hours of sleep which I know she really needed.
Now he's passed 5 weeks old and honestly I can see some light at the end of the tunnel. I can't really say specifically why, but he seems to be digesting better, having more of a schedule, he's more of a person in that he's a LOT more aware, coo'ing, smiling, rolling over, he has play time on his jungle mat, etc. Adding up all the little signs he just seems like he's finally getting this whole "life" thing a little. Now if he'd just drop one or both of those late night feedings the worst of this stage would be over.
Like I said earlier, we haven't been doing a whole lot else - it's all sort of about Evan at this point. We've kind of gone numb and just got burned out, so doing fun things like new photos or taking him to get his footprints done at a pottery place... things like that all fell by the wayside for the most part. There are a few new photos from late July below, including one where he and I took a 3 hour nap one morning while Christina was gone:
