Happy New Year! Forest is 9 Weeks Old!

Happy New Year everybody! This year’s celebration was a tad different in our household. New Year’s Eve is one of my favorite holidays. I love the anticipation, the resolutions, and that special midnight kiss. However, this year, I loved sleep more. Midnight is a time in which little man is almost surely sleeping which means momma and daddy were too (that is, until the fireworks started). But I hope wherever you were, you had a fantastic time! Next year I’m hopeful I’ll have the energy to stay up til midnight, but who knows. That kinda energy might be a few years off just yet. 

Lots has happened in the past week. Forest was diagnosed with reflux and prescribed daily medicine to ease his suffering. It seems to be making a slight difference, but he’s still his hyper-alert, non-napping self, just with a bit less spit up. Also, he seems to be a bit more cooperative on the napping front in the morning and late afternoon. From noon to 5 though…forget it! 

But the biggest thing I want to brag about is the 8 hours of consecutive sleep he’s been getting at night, which I would trade for daytime naps any day. It’s not fool proof but more often than not, he’s clocking about an 8 hour shift each night. Total, he gets about 10.5/11 hours of sleep between the hours of 8 PM and 8 AM, which is helping to inch his daily sleep totals closer to the recommended amount. 

We still have a terrible night thrown into the mix every once in a while, which is almost harder now that I remember what 7 hours of consecutive sleep feels like. It’s so hard to backslide, but I’ve heard that’s pretty common around this time. We are hopeful that he is on track to consistently sleep through the night. He did so 5 out of 7 nights last week so I'd say that's pretty amazing!

With every week, they are supposedly capable of sleeping one additional hour (6 week olds can sleep 6 hours, 7 week olds- 7 hours, etc) until they reach 12 weeks (3 months) which is when many babies start sleeping straight on through without that pesky middle of the night feeding. That’s why everyone says things improve after 3 months. I believe it. On Saturday night I got 7 hours of sleep followed by an hour long nap and I finally felt like a human again! 

Baby boy got his first round of immunizations yesterday. He had one oral vaccine and two shots and he handled it like a champ. I’m not opposed to Tylenol in such situations and I think it helped to take the edge off. He screamed for about a minute, and then whimpered for about 2 or 3 more before settling down and falling asleep on the car ride home. It wasn’t nearly as traumatic as I feared, though he did have a bit of a meltdown a few hours later. 

He’ll have his next round in a month from now, and then his third and final first year immunizations in February. They don’t do the chicken pox vaccine in Scotland, so we’ll probably be getting that when we return to the states. He aced his 8-week well-check physical exam and got a check mark next to all of his milestones. 

One big milestone that has been developing is his 'talking'. Baby boy babbles all day long. It's kind of nice that he can communicate that he's not happy without screaming at the top of his lungs. Here's a little clip of him chattering away during tummy time. 

He is currently weighing in at 10 lbs, 15 oz and coming in right at the 25% percentile for size of babies his age. That’s up from the 9% percentile from when he was born so he has covered a lot of ground in his first 9 weeks. Here are his 9 week pictures: 

And just some others we’ve taken this week: 

He has a love/hate relationship with that bird.