5 Weeks

Every week that goes by seems to come with a new lesson. This last week it was learning that it is not about what I want Jillian to do, it is about what she wants. I'm sure this lesson will come in handy when she goes to college and decides to major in art history rather than pre-med.

If you've read my blog, you realize that I'm a bit of a type A personality, and because of that I read as much as I could before Jillian's birth so that I could be the best mom possible. So I came into this whole motherhood thing with certain expectations about Jillian's behavior. For example I expected her to feed at consistent intervals like every 3 hours, and I tried forcing her into that which only resulted in frustration for the both of us. Jeramy, on the other hand, was much more willing to go with the flow and adapted to whatever worked well for her. Once I finally gave in and began imitating some of his techniques and approaches, she became a much happier baby. Feedings are starting to go much better, and during the past day or so we have been much more successful in preventing gassiness.

Night time sleep has gone quite well (I'm knocking on wood here) as she has consistently gotten a 5 to 6 hour stretch of shut-eye in for the past couple of weeks. Daytime sleep has been another matter entirely as daytime naps have been spotty at times, which inevitably results in a fussy baby. So working on daytime sleep is the next focus, which will likely involve increased use of the miracle blanket and swing. We'll see how things go.

Every day is now a baby fashion show at my house too. Jillian just has so many clothes and is growing so fast that I've gotten in the habit of changing her into a daytime outfit. Otherwise I'd just keep her in pajamas all day and all of these cute clothes would go unused. Here is a sampling of her wardrobe from the week. (I just love the expression she has in the second picture, and you'll see that she is now fully sporting the mulhawk hairstyle...half mullet/half mohawk).