3 Month Update

Our little owlet. 

Greta turned three months old on Tuesday. To be honest, I feel like she's growing and changing, but not in ways that are distinctly notable. When I look at pictures of her at two months, she doesn't look all that different than at 3 months -- I guess I'm just surprised because there was such a big difference from 1 month to 2 months. We're all generally happy and healthy, though.

Selfy-style family portrait. 

A few points of interest:

She has found her hands. She sucks on them frequently and often holds her hands together near her face. Sometimes, she's so excited to suck on her hands, she'll get them in the way of nursing. What a confused baby!

Greta with Ben on the train back from Chicago. Note the  interest in her hands. 

She also displays a greater variety of activity with them. She not only bats at her hanging toys, but she now will sometimes reach out and gently caress them, or after we've put a pacifier in her mouth, she will put her hand on it as though she's holding it in with her hand instead of just her mouth. As I write this, I'm sitting on the floor and she's intermittently reaching out and touching the corner of my laptop and absentmindedly touching the tulle of her pant-skirt combo. She seems to enjoy textures.

She also held her own bottle for the first time last week. It was the early morning and Ben was gently calling me from the other room (where I was putting pump parts in the dishwasher) for quite some time before I realized he was talking to me and not the baby. When I came in, she was swallowing eagerly while holding her bottle with both hands and Ben wasn't touching it at all. I scrambled for my phone and just as I snapped a blurry, low-lit photo, she let it drop off to the side. It was awesome to see, though.

This was the very end, just as she was starting to lose her grip on it. When I first came in, she'd been holding it like a pro for quite some time. 

She's continuing to become more vocal. She still coos and makes adorable noises that sound like "hi" and "yeah" and whatnot, which is super-endearing. She also has started squealing a bit when she gets excited and vocal. She most often coos and squeals when she's interacting with her hanging toys, or with her own reflection in the mirror. She interacts with us too -- especially when Ben makes her laugh (which is another first, I think . . . she'd done happy squeals towards the end of the second month, but no real giggles until more recently). But I really do think there must be some kind of baby drug in those hanging toys. She just loves them so much.

Action shot of Greta interacting with her activity gym animal friends. 

Speaking of playfulness, we're starting to see a little more personality. She is taking a more active interest in things -- rather than just staring at them intently, she's starting to look at things more carefully. She has been taking more interest in her mirror, for example. Yesterday she kept smiling at herself, and then reacting to the "other" baby's smiles. And while she's usually taken an interest in our voices, she now seems to not only react to, but also appreciate it when we talk to her, sing to her, or read to her.

Who's that other baby?

This month we also had a few firsts as a family. We traveled out of town the last two weekends. First to stay at a cabin with the Masons and the Zieglers, where we noticed for the first time just how young and tiny Greta seems in comparison to all the other babies. She seemed like she had lots of fun, though, even though she was clearly not as skilled as the older babies.

Greta and Solveig being friendly at the cabin. 

Greta appreciating the finer things in life at the cabin -- like Asher's bouncer. Note that she's wearing a hat that Casey made for her, and socks that Amanda gave her. And yes, that's a bow-tie and suspenders onesie. What a lucky baby!

It is very crazy to think that from the oldest to the youngest, they are less than 4 months apart. I'm starting to realize that with a lot of the babies that have been born or are going to be born this year. If my sister has her baby "on schedule," Greta will be only 6 months older than her cousin. In a few years, that age difference will be meaningless.

Speaking of my sister, our next trip was to Chicago for my sister's shower. That was an eventful trip. Our train to Chicago was five hours delayed, making for an exhausting and frustrating day. (Boy did I regret having woken up at 4:30am that morning! If only I'd slept in until Greta woke up . . . ) The train ride down was not very pleasant, but the train ride back at the end of the weekend was downright lovely and made me forget the curses I'd made in the direction of Amtrak only two days prior.

Train!

I would love to take Greta on a train trip again, but only if we have lots of wiggle room on either end of our travel days. As I overheard one of the attendants saying to a passenger, "Amtrak is great if you have nowhere to be." (She was saying this in all earnestness, by the way. The passenger had just said that she didn't mind the delay because she was retired and had nowhere she needed to get to. I found it both ironic and amusing, though.)

We also got to try out our new stroller on the trip. It was stressful to get it in time (if you want to know the name of the store we recommend not buying from, just ask). But having something that clicked in with our car seat made the travel so much easier -- to just be able to have her hang out in the stroller while we waited at the train station and to be able to just use one hand to transport baby, breastfeeding pillow, car seat, and pump bag around here and there. Win.

Waiting for our train to depart -- 5 hours late. Thankfully, we knew it was late well ahead of our scheduled departure time, so we only waited at the train station for an hour or so. 

Greta also seems to have turned a corner with her meds. For those who don't know, we give Greta a pill each day because of a condition that she has had from birth. It's not easy to give a baby a pill. The way that we manage it is to crush the pill up, dip a finger in breastmilk, and then get her to suck the medicine off of our finger. We have usually managed to get the pill into her with minimal waste, but it's hard work, and there have been days when she is so upset and crying so hard, we end up just kind of wiping the crushed pill on her tongue and washing it down with the breastmilk -- which also works, but is generally more upsetting for all of us then when she casually sucks it off our finger. We're supposed to try to do it when she has "an empty stomach" (as her doctor said, "When a baby is eating every couple hours, how would you possibly know when their stomach is empty?") but about a month ago we first started giving her her meds in-between sides while breastfeeeding, rather than doing it at the start of a nursing session. This produced a very calm baby for medicine time the first time we did it, and so we've transitioned to this routine just about everyday. We still had only about a 50/50 chance of it going smoothly, though.

A few weeks ago, we had two really good sessions with the meds in a row. Then the next day it went well again, and the next. Just before we were headed to Chicago, we realized that we'd made it a week without any rough days with the meds! Now, for the last two and a half weeks, she's had only one or two rough days --- and if I'm remembering correctly, at least one of those was on a moving train. She's really turned a corner. Things aren't perfect, but our little girl is definitely growing up.

She's still sweet when she sleeps . . .

. . . but now she knows she can be sweet and awake. 

Life Cycles

Today is the one-year anniversary of my pregnancy with Greta. 

If you're furrowing your brow in confusion and trying to count backwards on your fingers, it may be because one year ago today is the start of my last menstrual period -- the medically-determined start date of my pregnancy. The egg that became my half of Greta and the sperm that was Ben's half weren't even fully-developed -- much less joined together -- so most of us would find it hard to believe that this is a meaningful day to count as the start of a pregnancy. 

And yet, it's meaningful to me. Perhaps not as meaningful as it is to the friends of mine who celebrated their first wedding anniversary today, or to the friend who today celebrated her 29th birthday. But meaningful nonetheless. 

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has been intensely interested in her fertile and infertile periods since starting to plan a family. For me, that meant tracking my temperature every morning and recording on a calendar the types of bodily fluids that I experienced. The app on my phone still sets off an alarm everyday at 5:45am to tell me to wake up and take my temperature -- even though I haven't been able to regularly sleep in until that late on a workday since last schoolyear, and even though I haven't needed to record my basal body temperature in nearly a full year, I haven't deleted the alarm. Why? Because it is a reminder of an exciting time full of the hope, promise, and fear of embarking on a new adventure. For several months, I saw the start of each new cycle as an exciting new data point to add to my chart. A time that is usually filled with aches, pains and moodiness had a silver lining -- it meant a fresh beginning and another month to learn about how my body signaled its fertility. 

A year ago today, I was attending a wedding in 90+ degree heat, with cramps so bad I wanted to double over. The wedding was perfect, though, and so full of love and new beginnings that my discomfort largely subsided. I also had an inkling (or perhaps just a hope) that it might end up being my last menstrual period for awhile. And it was. 

My first week back at work after Greta was born, I started bleeding again -- very lightly, and only a little, and only after I'd pump. It was startling, since after the postpartum bleeding had ended I hadn't expected to see blood again for a few more months at least. But it was also exciting. I'd forgotten the bizarre joy that I'd sometimes felt at the realization that a new cycle was beginning. When I went home, I even recorded the bleeding on my phone app. 

We're not ready for another baby, of course, so shortly thereafter, I went on the mini-pill, which does not give you a "break" each month and therefore often suppresses menstruation entirely. While the "fake" periods that I used to experience while on the combination pill gave me no joy (who wants to bleed when it's not even informative bleeding?) and I'm happy that this pill will relieve me of that frustration, it feels a little sad in general to not have that excitement of feeling fertile and hopeful. 

The fact of the matter is, though, that there are so many things to be excited and hopeful for these days. Greta is turning 12 weeks old tomorrow. Her three month birthday is coming up next week. This past weekend, we took our first trip with her -- staying at a cabin with two other sets of new parents and seeing all the fun that we can expect over the next few weeks as she grows into a bigger, more skillful baby each day. 

As much as I do miss the days of feeling fertile and excited, the fact is that right now I am not fertile and I don't particularly want to be. So tonight I think it's time to cancel the alarm on my FertiltyFriend app. Nowadays, I've already been up for an hour by the time it goes off anyway, so it's only been serving as a reminder of how tired I am. 

Speaking of which, off to bed.