In the last couple weeks Alexandra has been rewarding us with lots of smiles and she seems to give more and more every day. No matter how many times I’ve seen them, it still melts my heart. I love this little girl more than anything and parenting is very hard, especially when you are doing all the giving. So when they finally start to show affection for you, its completely priceless! She’s also been doing a good deal of “talking”. She makes these cute little sounds and smiles and even laughs when she’s talking to me. I try to grab a camera and capture some of it, but its like she knows and will not cooperate. So I just try to take every little thing in. Its hard to believe my maternity leave is already half over and I want to enjoy every single minute with her.
Her nighttime schedule has been pretty consistent since she was about 4 weeks old. Typically she only gets up once or twice during the night to feed. She’s been going for longer stretches, though not consistently. The night before last she went for her longest stretch…slept 6.5 hours! When she goes for longer stretches like that I do have to get up and pump because I can’t sleep feeling that “full”.
Her daytime routine is far from it. We’re still all over the board. She seems to have some days where she sleeps a lot and can even go 3-4 hours between a feeding (I don’t ever wake her to feed anymore, I let her tell me). Then there are days when she hardly sleeps at all and gets really fussy as the day goes on. These days are pretty rough. I’ve found sometimes the only way to get her to sleep is to put her in my little sling carrier. Its fantastic that I have it, but it also doesn’t allow me to take a shower and obviously I can’t get in the car and go anywhere like that. It is too bad they don’t make slings so that you can take your baby running with you!
All in all, its slowly getting easier. I’m starting to know more how to soothe her when she cries and sometimes it seems all she needs is just to see me or have me hold her and she’ll calm down. It makes me happy, but also makes it hard when Tim gets home and I want to run and cook dinner and she fusses and cries for him. I try to let him keep trying when I get done running but after hearing her scream for long enough I can’t take it anymore and usually step in. I don’t know, its probably not the best thing to do, but I can’t stand to hear her cry like that and I feel bad for Tim too. I’m sure it will get better with time.
As far as running goes, I completed my first 3 mile run on Saturday morning and surprised myself by running pretty fast. I wasn’t trying in the beginning, but I’ll admit that after I heard my pace the first mile I wanted each mile after that to be a little faster and it was. By the last mile though, I was working pretty hard, but felt good. It felt nice to be kind of pushing myself again. The rest of the day I didn’t seem to feel more physically tired than normal so I probably didn’t push it too much. Even though my incision site is still sore to the touch I feel mostly recovered from the surgery. I know it will take a while for my abs strength to come back, but I feel like I can do most things just fine. I’m not technically supposed to lift over 15 pounds until 6 weeks but when you’re at home alone all day with a baby that weighs just over 9 pounds now and frequently carry her around in her bouncy seat or car seat its kind of impossible to avoid it.
My weight has remained the exact same since 2 weeks post partum. I guess its good that its not going up (especially since I seem to ALWAYS be hungry and let myself eat to my content right now). It still doesn’t look like my body to me. I still have very little definition in my belly and after I eat or drink anything it sort of just puffs out. My hips and butt also seem to be a lot curvier than they’ve ever been before. I feel guilty admitting this, but I’ll be glad when I’m done breastfeeding and my larger than life breasts go back to their “barely there” pre-baby size. Yes, seriously. I just tell myself that its going to take time to get back into shape, but remind myself that I WILL get there.
So that’s what we’ve been up to lately!