Thursday, December 8, 2011

Baby Jo: One Month Old

I remember how it felt when Oliver turned one month old. It's unbelievable how quickly time flies with a newborn, and it seems impossible that our baby girl is now a month old.

Joanna is a happy baby. Of course, she cries and gets upset, but she also spends a lot of her time looking around and doing her exercises (as I call them). She sleeps a lot. I estimate that she's awake for about 8 hours a day. Her sleep at night is pretty good. She sleeps from about 9pm to about 6:30 or 7am, getting up 2-3 times to be fed and changed. Thankfully, she does one fairly good sleep stretch from about 11pm to 2:30am. I'm hoping she'll start giving us a 4 or 5 hour sleep stretch soon!

Our little girl is also very good at nursing. I'm glad she doesn't insist on nursing every 45 minutes like her brother did. She lets me get in about two hours between every feeding, and she usually does one long nap (about 4 hours) in the afternoon. I'm a pretty independent person, so it's kind of nice not having her physically attached to me all the time!

Oliver refused a pacifier when he was a baby, so that's all Andrew and I know. We decided to skip the pacifier with Jo, too. I'll admit we considered giving in during her first few weeks, but we're already happy that we stayed strong. Jo occasionally catches her hand and enjoys sucking on it, but she's definitely OK with not having to be suckling all the time. As for swaddling, well, we're trying to limit that to only at night, but we often end up swaddling her for her afternoon nap as well.

Joanna has taken three bottles of pumped milk so far in her first month. She drank them down easily, and it didn't effect her nursing.

She outgrew her newborn clothes within her first two weeks. She currently wears mostly 0-3 month sized clothes, but size 3 month clothes fit her as well. In fact, she's wearing a size 3 month jumper in these photos. She has big feet, and her feet seem to grow out of her outfits first. I wonder if that means she'll be a tall woman when she grows up. Well, one thing is almost certain: she'll be taller than her mommy.

Here is a current list of Joanna's likes and dislikes:

Likes
*Nursing
*Getting burped
*Watching Oliver
*Listening to the Microwave Vent
*The car seat
*Being walked around by Daddy
*The noise machine, especially on "ocean" mode
*"Pooping exercises" (we rotate and pedal her legs around to help her pass gas)

Dislikes
*Getting her outfit changed
*Bath time
*Her swing

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