Summer’s Three Month Update and “Schedule”

Well somehow I already have a three-month old! It’s crazy. It feel like it’s gone so fast but so slow at the same time. But then Ben and I were just saying we can’t imagine life without her. Our little Summer Joy is the best thing that ever happened to us, and every single day we just stare at her and can’t believe “we made that”.

I thought it would be fun to share a little update about what Summer is like and how our days go and what our “schedule” is like so here goes!

Summer is seriously the most chill little girl. I kind of expected that because it’s how Ben and I are but you never know, ya know? 😛 She only cries when she’s hungry or tired or hot. So basically JUST like her mom and dad. Where my hangry friends at??? 😛 She is starting to smile so much and make little cooing noises, and it literally melts my heart. I just stare at her in awe. I can’t believe she’s mine! It’s so cute seeing her respond to Ben and I, and I finally feel like she’s SEEING us, and she’s like hey, that’s my mom and dad. It’s the BEST. I sing her this song like a million times a day. It’s to the tune of Do You Know the Muffin Man, but I say “Do you know the Summer Girl, the Summer Girl, the Summer Girl”. Anyways, she gets SO excited. She smiles and moves her hands and legs, and it’s the cutest thing EVERRR. Literally can’t even. 😛 (When she reads this when she’s 15, she’s going to be like, “Mom, who even says that.” Literally everyone, baby girl, literally everyone. 😛 ) So obvi, since she loves it so much, I sing it to her every chance I get. I’m going to lose it when she laughs at things I do. I’ll just be the crazy mom in her house doing whatever it is that makes her little girl smile, laugh and light up. I just love her so. I can’t wait to see more of her personality come out. I just know she is going to be the most fun little girl ever.

Oh Em Gee. You guys. Her hair. It CRACKS me up. She has a little hula skirt fringe of dark just around the back of her head. And the rest of her head is mostly baldish but the little hair she does have looks blonde so I’m thinking she might be a blondie! Her eyes have started to lighten up, and I can’t wait to see what shade of blue they end up!

Summer has also grown SO much! If you’ve followed along, you can probably tell from my stories and posts, but it’s crazy! As of yesterday, my little four pound fragile bundle I brought home is now a chunky 11.5 pounds! She’s getting all the little baby rolls. My favorite thing is this little dimple on the inside of her ankle. Like how. But also SO FREAKING CUTE. Every time Ben comes home from work (since he’s always there for at least 24 hours, sometimes longer) he says she’s grown so much, and I really believe it. She’s turned into the cutest, chunky baby right before our eyes!

I’m officially back at work, and for the most part, it’s been a pretty smooth transition! I’m able to make my own schedule so I’ve only been doing 2-3 days a week, and I plan to keep it that way. So far, we have been trying when we can for me to plan my work so Ben is home with her at least one of the days. We have so much family around that can help, but we would love to have one of us be with her whenever we can, just since she’s so little and because we can. When we do leave her with family, she does so great, and we are so thankful to have the best people to love on her when we aren’t home.

I said “schedule” in quotations in my title because we don’t really have one that we set in place. It’s more just how things go day to day as planned out by Summer. 😛 Kidding. Kind of. But basically our days have been going as follows.

Wake up for the day: Sometime between 7:30 and 8. If she tries to wake up earlier, I typically grab her out of her bassinet and put her on my chest, and rest a little more. Mama tired. 😛

The rest of the day follows the pattern of eat, awake, sleep. Sometimes she eats every two hours, sometimes she goes a little longer. I just pay attention to her cues, and when she’s hungry I feed her. After she eats, we have a little awake time, and in this time, we engage with her by singing songs, putting her on her play mat, going outside and just talking to her. When she’s ready for a nap, we swaddle her up and put her in her crib in her nursery to nap. She’ll nap for anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, and I can usually tell when she’s ready to get up based on her demeanor. If I think she needs/wants to sleep more, I just go back in her room, put her pinky back in, gently rock her body if she needs more soothing, and if she’s still tired she’ll go back to sleep! If we need her to nap on the go, we do. In the mornings, if I want to go to the gym, I’ll feed her at 8 and by the time we get to the gym at 9, she’s ready to sleep so she’ll sleep in her stroller while I workout. And then if we have errands to do or want to go out, we don’t worry about her having to nap on the go. She seems to do just fine with that!

At night, I kind of just go with the flow. Sometimes she’s fussy, sometimes she wants to eat more, sometimes she just wants to go to sleep. But typically she’s ready to go down for the night sometime between 7-8. And then I have been doing a dream feed sometime between 9:30-10:30pm. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. 😛 If it does work, she’ll sleep till about 2-4am, and then I get up to feed her. I will say we have come a LONG way from her needing to eat every 2.5 hours at night and taking an hour to eat. (Yes, you read that right, that was giving me a whopping 1.5 hours to try to hurry up and get to sleep before I had to be back up.) So I’m pretty thankful. We did the Taking Cara Babies newborn sleep class, and it has helped SO much to help create healthy sleep habits for her. She is able to put herself to sleep during naps, and we have started to get about a feverish hour stretch at night! (OMG, and last night she went 6.5 hours between feedings!) P.S. Don’t be fooled. This is still newly happening, and that doesn’t mean mama is sleeping that much. The whole going back to sleep after getting up thing can be quite a struggle, and when your little makes noises etc, you can’t help but wake up and check on them. I’ll update you again when I am actually rested. 😛 All in all, being tired is the only hard thing I’ve encountered being a new mom so if that’s my only complaint, I’ll take it!

We are having so much fun loving on and caring for our little Summer Girl (maybe we should have made her middle name “Girl” since that’s what we call her 😛 ), and we are so excited to keep watching her grow and learn all about the world around her, the people who love her, and herself! We are taking her on her first trip in a few weeks to Hawaii to hang out and meet her cousins and aunt and uncle who lives there, and we can’t wait for our new type of travel as a little family!

Have the best weekend!

xoxo,

Christine