Seven Weeks

My serious little baby!
My nanny's friend stole her out of my arms to coo over her and say adoringly, "Mira a la carita
gordita!" -- "look at that fat little face!"  Girlfriend does have some round cheeks! (And a
touch of cradle cap in her eyebrows, poor thing.)

The details are slipping away so fast, but it's so hard to find a few minutes to sit down and type.

The big news here is that Amelie, the genius, has suddenly figured out how to go six or seven hours at night without a feeding! She just made the jump from 3-4 hours to 6-7 overnight, on the eve of her seven week "birthday."

What a difference! I was already falling for her but now I am pretty well smitten. Sometimes I don't even want to share her cuddly little body when I have the chance. And while I'm hugely grateful for the fact that she mostly puts herself to sleep -- I just plunk her down in the RNP, tightly swaddled, and stick the pacifier in her mouth, turn on the white noise and walk away -- sometimes it's too delicious to cuddle her to sleep. Mostly I reserve that for when we are out and I can't be getting something done.

The sadness from last week has disappeared. Perhaps the placenta pills are helping. Certainly sleep is helping.

Mother's Day, which I was so nervous about, ended up being no big deal, emotionally. We had brunch with some SMC friends, which was great. My SMC friend Talia and I had a date to be mopey together at this brunch (Mother's Day would have been her dad's birthday) but we were too busy to remember.

Calliope, unfortunately, has had a rough week -- tomorrow will be seven days of some kind of diarrhea bug. We are headed to the doctor tomorrow for testing to make sure it's nothing serious. She's been very brave about the whole thing. Luckily she seems to feel fine in between trips to the bathroom, and they mostly seem to happen before breakfast and after dinner... even though she often didn't eat anything at said meals.

Collecting stool samples has been funny in that you-have-to-have-kids-to-appreciate-this kind of way. She's going to the bathroom so frequently that there's barely any, um, output. So we are collecting multiple times. Luckily I had supplies to collect with, leftover from when I was supposed to do the same sort of testing during my pregnancy. Anyway, Calliope is very interested in the collecting and said, "I'm so very proud of myself!" because she managed to produce into the little collection "hat." Then she watched jealously as I scraped the tiny contents into a baby food jar. She was disappointed that she wasn't allowed to help. But asked very politely, "Mommy, can I please be the one to carry the poop to the doctor's office?"

Sure thing, honey!

I can't stand how much I love that look of adoration! First smile at Calliope. 

So proud to hold "her" baby