7 Weeks

Claire turned 7 weeks yesterday.

Claire at 7 weeks:

• has slept through the night (6.5-7 hours) the last 5 nights in a row!! This is amazing! She's definitely doing this earlier than the norm. Maybe she'll be doing it very consistently by the time I go back to work.
• is better at "being alive". It's tough to transition from the womb to the world! In utero, she ate 24 hours a day, was "held" 24 hours a day, was always warm, could do whatever she wanted with her hands and didn't have to worry about mommy swaddling them at her side. It's not easy to enter the world and be content. But she's getting a lot better at it! She's in the "quiet alert" stage, as they call it, more often and for greater periods of time. She fusses less (I also attribute this to her reflux medication), and generally seems happier.
• smiles ALL THE TIME! She loves to smile. She smiles most often before, during, and after her diaper changes. She is a fan of her changing table that is inside the Pack n Play so this is where much of the smiling takes place. Last night Chris was holding her at my mom's house and she shared a few smiles with him, which made his day!
• eats every 2-3 (sometimes 4, if she's taking a long nap) hours during the day. It's hard to know how many ounces she's eating since I am breastfeeding but when she has a bottle she drinks 3-4 ounces.
• doesn't particularly care for the bottle. We need to remedy this before we go to Brainerd for the weekend and before I go back to work. We're going to give her a bottle every day or every other day so she becomes accustomed to it.
• doesn't hate her car seat as much. She used to have a difficult time during walks or car rides because she hated her car seat. She's getting a lot better though! We go for walks pretty much every day and she either sleeps or is awake and content (which sometimes requires the pacifier, but hey, she's making progress). I occasionally have to pull over while I am driving to climb in the backseat and comfort her because she's screaming her little head off but that is happening with less frequency.
• is very strong! You wouldn't think she is only 7 weeks old by the way she holds her neck!
• doesn't hate baths as much. She still cries here and there during baths but it's getting better for her.
• has a bad case of baby acne. This is normal. It spread to her chest so I called the nurse advisor line at the Pediatrician office and they said that is normal too. We need to keep it clean and dry. Once it heals, we can put Aquaphor lotion on it to moisturize the skin.
• is the love of our lives!!!!