Becoming People

The sixth week of Gavin's life was the best week yet. He grew noticeably, both physically and mentally. And I was able to start getting stuff done around the house. It was a giant leap forward in me feeling like a person again.

Up until this week, Gavin had been alternating a 5-6 hour nap with 5-6 hour marathon feeding sessions. Not that he ate continuously for 5 or 6 hours. But he ate every hour for 20-30 minutes. It was often all I could do to find time to pee and eat between feeding sessions. There was no time for anything else. Though I did watch an insane amount of TV.

But Gavin has finally evened out, and is eating every 3-4 hours pretty consistently. It makes for a slightly more sleepless night (though Kevin and I have a good tag-team set up that helps). It also makes it a lot easier to get stuff done during the day. So on Monday, I was able to put Gavin down for a nap in the afternoon and clean the whole kitchen. Over the rest of the week I managed to clean the entire upper floor of the house. Kevin's been making fun of me for being so excited about this, but it's really nice to feel productive again.

Gavin has also been a lot more fun this week. He's more awake and alert. We've started doing tummy time every day, and I play with him a bit. He's not entirely interested in his toys yet, but he seems to stare at them with intent. At least for a little while. And he has this piano he plays by kicking that he seems to have fun with. It's hard to tell, but I'm sure he's only going to get more interesting.

He's also bigger. Clothes that he was swimming in a few weeks ago now fit perfectly. Which probably means that we only have a week or two of wear left in them. We've got some 3-6-month clothing that he should be able to wear soon. We're also expecting to have to buy some more clothes before we do the Christmas family tour. And he just graduated to the next size up of diapers, which happened surprisingly quickly. We ended up giving a whole bunch of diapers to neighbors because Gavin got too big.

I'm excited for Gavin to learn even more tricks and to get closer to being on a schedule. But for now it's nice to have reliable chunks of time when I can do things, even if the timing isn't entirely predictable. The nice thing about maternity leave is that my schedule is completely flexible right now. And we're so close to smiles and laughs and an actual interactive person. I can't wait