Yikes, sorry for the delayed posting! My how time flies... I can't believe it has been two weeks already! Kiera is doing great and Joel and I are just trying to figure her out (and enjoying every minute!)! : ) We had a dr appt last Wednesday and she had already gained back her birth weight. She likes to spend her time eating, hanging out in the lambie chair or swing, rocking, being patted on your shoulder, and just looking around. She also really likes taking baths now; she didn't like the sponge bath so much but loves it now that we started putting her into the tub and just keeping her belly button dry (her cord did fall off but there's still some crusty remnants we need to keep dry). Grandma Jean was here for the first week to help out and it was so great! We loved having her here to help with Kiera and she cooked lots of yummy meals for us too! It was hard when she had to go back home, but we had to get back to reality sometime! We have had lots of visits from Grandma Barb and Grandpa Peter. They are really enjoying having a granddaughter so close by.
She is on a pretty solid 3 hour schedule with some longer stretches at night. On average I am getting about 4-5 hours of sleep at night and will take a nap during the day if I am really exhausted, although I have had a lot more energy than I thought I would. I used to be an 8-9 hour a night sleeper! Since Joel is working and we haven't introduced the bottle yet (with pumped milk) I am doing all of the feedings at this point. If we want to get out of the house, we generally have a two hour window after she eats to fit in anything we want to do before she needs to eat again. We have enjoyed outings to lunch, dinner, the mall, and running errands. We have also taken lots of walks in the stroller; it's nice to get out of the house even if it's only for a short time. We got the bassinet attachment for the City Select since the carseat adapter is still backordered, and we are so glad we did (we didn't plan to get it initially). Now that we have it I just think about how much more comfortable she is in the bassinet rather than having to strap her into the carseat anytime we take the stroller out since she isn't supposed to use the seat until ~6 months.
She is generally great most of the day, but in the evening she gets a little fussy and getting her to go to bed at night is the hardest! I read Baby Wise and the Secrets of the Baby Whisperer and I completely agree with their ideas... basically that the order of activity should be Eat, Activity, then Sleep, so the baby doesn't get dependent on being fed (among other things) to fall asleep. But it can be much easier said than done! During the day she does pretty well with this but we weren't really sure how to get her to fall asleep at night without feeding her, rocking her, etc. And if we did rock her to sleep she would usually wake up when we put her in the crib. She is just so small we wanted to do whatever would make her happy! So we are trying a new, earlier bedtime routine. We had been staying up until her 10ish feeding to do actually put her down in the crib, but since it takes so long to get her to sleep after that, we are starting the process at the 7-8ish feeding instead. We are also going to try our letting her have a pacifier to get to sleep for now... something I really didn't plan to do! But it seems like a better alternative than rocking her (since she can still fall asleep independently this way using the pacifier) or letting her cry and lots of people I have talked to said they did this and their kids just eventually stopped needing it so hopefully that will be the case. If any moms have advice on getting her to sleep at night, I'm all ears!
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