3 Weeks Old

Wow, how time flies. Andrew is just eating and sleeping and growing and, more and more, will stop and look around a bit. He often makes cute little cooing noises when he sleeps or nurses. He sometimes smiles in his sleep, and even smiled once or twice when awake. He's moved up from Newborn diapers to Size 1. I've trimmed his fingernails three times already.

DH went back to work this week. I'm doing o.k. with that, except that I have to re-learn how to get things done with a baby in the house. When he asked me if I would be all right alone with the boys, I told him yeah, I might not do anything but sit on the couch all evening, but I could manage. Actually, though, I have be able to fix dinner (though I often leave a pile of dirty dishes in the sink for him), do a load or two of laundry, and get the kids ready for bed on a consistent basis. There are still parts of my house that are a complete disaster, but I am gradually reclaiming them. Baby steps, you know.

Andrew has one "fussy" period a day, but he hasn't quite decided when that will be. Last two nights, it's been between about 10 pm and midnight, which is fine, because then he drops off to sleep for a while, and rarely is anyone in this household asleep before midnight anyway, least of all me. The "not fun" nights were when he decided to be fussy between roughly 1 am and 4 am which, since I hadn't gone to bed yet, meant I didn't get to sleep at all until nearly 5 am except for a few 5 or 10 minute stretches when DH was on baby duty. Hopefully we've gotten everything all straightened out. The rest of the time, though, he is exceedingly calm.

The older brothers are doing great. When Andrew cries, they make "shhh" noises at him like Harvey Karp, and Christopher pats him gently. They've not tried to pick him up or feed him peanut butter or anything scary like that, although I do worry about toy footballs landing in the bassinet. Timothy is doing well with the potty training, not completely trained but making progress, despite the fact that his parents have often not had the energy to work with him on it over the past few weeks. He just turned three and his brother will be 5 next week.

I've never had postpartum depression, but I do get the "baby blues" pretty predictably. My tears usually are associated with the changing relationship with my older children - I have a "new" baby, but I am loosing my older "baby". My husband and I are always amazed at how much our other children "grow" on the day we have a new baby. We also look at each other and say things like "Can you believe we made another human being" (at which point my husband reminds me that we only helped), and "Can you believe God actually trusts us enough to give us children?". And with the last one, "Two of us - three of them. Oh no, we're outnumbered!"