Seven Weeks!

We've reached the 7 week mark.

Little Man is growing and growing. He's got to be over 10# (4.5kg) now. He's discovered that he can gnaw on his fist, and he's started moving his fingers independently of each other, rather than just keeping his hands in fists. He's holding his head up quite a lot now, bracing himself up on his elbows, and even pushing upward/forward with his feet. With all the hardwood floors in the house I think he's going to be an early crawler.

He's still a quiet baby, though he's beginning to make cooing noises and such, and his smiles fill my heart so full I can feel tears in my eyes. He's an active, fidgety baby. I could tell that about him in the womb. He's often awake for 3 or 4 hours at a time, his hands and feet moving around, and his eyes following everything. When he's like that I tend to put him in the Baby Bjorn and bounce him around as I do housekeeping and gardening chores. Honestly, I wish he slept more, because there are days I don't get to shower or change out of my pajamas and end up brushing my teeth in stages.

When my back gets tired of carrying him, I've been putting him in the baby carriage (minus the car seat) and wheel him around the house. The added bonus is the carriage has space to put things, so I use it to ferry stuff back and forth along with the baby. It's been great for when I'm working in the kitchen and I want him nearby but not on the counter. I even put him in it when I'm (trying) to take a shower, because he's at a good height to reach out and adjust the pacifier or touch him to try to soothe him.

Yesterday we went to the library for a couple of hours. I'm going through book-withdrawal, so I've decided to try audiobooks. He was very good--but then I've gotten very good at reading him, so I fed him and changed him before he even had a chance to fuss. The loudest thing he did was burp.

With M away at work this week I've been getting into more of a routine staying on top of the housekeeping. It's difficult to quietly while away 4, 5, and even 6 hours with the baby when we're waiting for M to wake up, and now that he's usually out of the house by 10am, I'm able to vacuum and scrub and bang around to my heart's content. Yes, crazy as it sounds, I enjoy (to a point) housecleaning -- mainly because a clean, organized home is one I can function (and relax) more easily in. If I don't keep up with it, every horizontal surface in the house would soon be covered, the way it was when M lived alone. Living with him I've become much more tolerant of disorder than I used to be, and I expect that with the baby I'll become even more so -- or have a nervous breakdown ;)

What else? I'm still lactating, and so I've got all those hormones going -- which means I'm more 'sensitive' than my usual self. Last night I actually told M that I didn't like him very much right then because he was being mean to me ;) At the time it seemed true, but in retrospect, I think I was just tired and overly sensitive. He's pretty good about helping me when I ask him to -- partly out of gratitude for not requiring him to help with the baby at night, I think. And M has been great about doing what he can to lighten my load or make things more efficient. For example, he noticed how much time I spent outside watering the 60ft planting bed alongside the patio, so he asked me if I wanted irrigation installed. Our landscape service wanted just $250 to install it and hook it up to our existing timer, so we got it done last weekend.

The plum tree in the back yard is dropping the sweetest cherry-sized plums right now. I set up a tarp to collect them -- partly to keep the mess off the lawn, and partly because it seems a shame for such bounty to rot on the ground. This week the peaches on the peach tree have started to get their blush. The tree is so heavy with fruit -- even after considerable thinning -- that the espaliered branches are bending. The fruit should be ripe in the next three weeks to a month, I think.

So far, things are going remarkably well. I'm learning how to plan the things I do to minimize back-and-forth, and to plan for those times when Little Man is napping in order to get things done (like now). M and I get less snuggle time than we used to, but that makes the moments we do catch even sweeter. Seven weeks into this new world of unintentional parenthood, I can say that life is (still) good.