Samuel Snippets

Samuel will be 15 weeks old tomorrow. So, I thought it was time for another update for you all:

 As he approached the 3 month mark, he suddenly decided to be a normal baby and actually start having fussy periods that weren't based on being hungry and needing a lot more attention when it's time to get to sleep. He also decided to start eating faster and to sometimes only want to nurse on one side. All that combined to make his mom and dad feel pretty confused and tired and frustrated. And I of course spent more time again worrying about whether he was getting enough food. But now that we've accepted it as the new normal, it's not so bad. I think I'm starting to understand that he's always going to be surprising us with new normals and I need to learn how to roll with it.

As I mentioned, Samuel started needing more attention when going down for the night and naps. I don't know if moving him to his crib caused that or if it's just a coincidence, but either way, I'm pretty happy that we made the change. I think it was easier than it would have been if we'd waited longer and he got more used to being in our room. While it can sometimes be frustrating that he doesn't go down as easily, it does mean I get more quiet time just singing to him and rocking. He's not the most cuddly of babies; he loves to hold himself up to look around when he's facing my chest, so I do appreciate when he's sleepier and just content to be in my arms and looking at my face. In those moments, I'm often reminded of just how long I waited to have them, and that makes the hard nights when I just want him to get to sleep a little bit easier.

He rolls over more of the time now, but still not every time. And he's more likely to roll right than left. And it's only from his tummy to his back; so far it doesn't seem like he'll be rolling from his back all the way to his tummy anytime soon, though he does sometimes turn on his side. But once again, only one side. In fact, if I turn him on the other side, he wont' stay on it. But Jacob being the observant guy he is has a theory about that being because Samuel needs his swiping arm free.

What do I mean by his swiping arm? While Samuel does use both arms/hands for all purposes, he's displayed a very clear preference. The right arm/hand is for shoving in his mouth and sucking on (and gagging himself, unfortunately), while the left arm/hand is for swiping at and grabbing things, and also wapping daddy in the face apparently. We find this clear preference amusing, and I think it will be interesting to see if this might be an indication of his handedness. (Jacob is left-handed, or at least he writes with his left hand; he does to a lot of other things with his right.) We're also just excited that he's hitting the milestone of swiping at things and grabbing them. It really is so awesome to watch these developments in him.

He's been adding more sounds to his vocabulary, and he and I have nice back and forth exchanges and chats quite often. He even has the beginnings of a laugh, and I can't wait for it to develop more. His smile continues to be adorable, and I feel like he's even developing different smiles for different situations. We get some of his biggest smiles when we play his latest favorite game, which consists of us slowly getting our face closer to his until our nose meets his, accompanied by the right sound of course.

He loves it when we hold him up to sit and stand and is even getting pretty decent at sitting up on his own if he has support behind his back, so we're pretty proud of him for that. In fact, sometimes he gets pretty frustrated when he's laying down and can't sit up on his own to see what's going on, hard as he tries.

His reflux has been bothering him more lately, so we took him to the doctor to increase his meds and hope that it will help. He's still growing, but he hadn't gained quite as much weight as we expected or even as much as our scale at home indicated. Of course, weighing him with me on our regular scale isn't the most accurate. I'm hoping when we go in for his 4 month appointment in a couple weeks he'll be back on track, but even if his percentage stays a little lower than it was, that's okay too. He's still had plenty of wet diapers, so I try not to be too concerned.

He's starting to take slightly longer naps, but since he can still only last two hours top between naps, his day is full of more frequent, shorter naps. At first I worried about that, but I do think he's getting enough sleep, just in smaller bits. He now takes most of his naps up in his crib, so I do feel like I can do more of my own thing down here during them, and that's nice. He still sleeps better when he's swaddled, but only his legs. From a very early age he didn't like having his arms swaddled in tight, and that hasn't changed. In fact, we discovered early on that if we swaddled both arms he was extremely restless until he got one free, so we started leaving at least one free on purpose. Generally you can find him sleeping with both arms thrown up on either side of his head. And at night when he's not swaddled, he often has his legs kind of splayed too. And it's so cute. Just like pretty much everything else he does.

Anyway, I think he's waking up from his nap now, so I hope that was a nice little update for you. At the very least, I'm glad blog posts give me a way to keep a record for myself.