A Month of Ups and Downs

Max is now one month old and is cuter than ever! Everywhere we go people always tell us how cute he is. (Probably just because he's a baby in general, but I do believe he is a particularly attractive one!) It's a good thing too because it makes up for the extremely rough first few weeks with him. It started just a couple days after bringing him home from the hospital. He went from eating every 3 hours to suddenly eating every 1-1.5 hours and would eat for almost an hour at a time and would STILL seem to be starving! You can only imagine how taxing this was on me! If I ever got any sleep, it was only for 20 minutes at a time (45 minutes if I was lucky). Postpartum was intense for me (luckily not to the extent of postpartum depression). Breastfeeding was extremely painful as well and no matter how hard I tried, we could never get a good latch going. I was ready to completely give up on breastfeeding, but I wanted to breastfeed so badly that I kept with it, despite our difficulties. Finally, after calling the lactation specialist at the hospital a second time when Max was two weeks old (the first time she said we just needed some time to work on it...frustrating), she agreed to set up an appointment with me. After gaining weight in his first week, Max was suddenly losing weight again at two weeks. While on the scale crying his head off, the lactation lady noticed that Max was tongue-tied! What a revelation!! She said it's a good thing I came in and that was the reason he wasn't able to latch properly and was therefore not getting enough milk and was losing weight. My poor baby! I felt so horrible!! The next week we visited an ENT who clipped his frenulum and told us Max could extend his tongue out twice as far and that should solve our problems with breastfeeding. Sure enough, breastfeeding was no longer excruciatingly painful and he is now eating every 2-3 hours. He was now doing so well, in fact, that he gained almost a pound in just a week! Now he's almost 2 pounds in a little over a month!

In other Max news: this boy sure does make us laugh! He takes forever to wake-up (just like mommy) and will stretch and grunt and make funny noises for a good 5 minutes while trying to wake-up. I have yet to catch this on video, but will surely keep trying because it's just too cute. He's started smiling for real at us, but will only do it maybe once a day. He spits up A LOT, but the doctor's not too concerned since it doesn't seem to typically bother him and it's not projectile and he's gaining weight really well now. He tends to miss the burp cloth most of the time though. He's gotten on a bit of a schedule, which is super nice. His days are broken up into quarters: starting around midnight, he sleeps through the first quarter, is awake for the second quarter in the mornings and afternoon, sleeps through the third quarter in the late afternoon/early evening, and is awake for the last quarter till about midnight-ish. Of course he naps during the waking time and eats during the sleeping times as well. He LOVES his mommy very much and I'm pretty much the only one who can really get him to calm down when he's crying. This get exhausting for me and discouraging for Bryan, but is sure to get better. He loves his daddy too and will get excited when he comes home from a long day at school. I'm so in love with my baby and Bryan just adores him. I feel so blessed to have such a sweet and wonderful family of whom I can be with for eternity. My husband and my baby are the loves of my life and I could not ask for anything or anyone better than them :D.

(Sorry if you've already seen most of these pictures on Facebook. They're my favorites :)