Bonnie & Clyve: December 2017

***Emmett is now 4 months old, but I wrote this back when he was 2 months old. I wanted to finish the rest of his birth story before I posted this one. He’s a little more advanced than this now, but I still want to remember how I felt about all of his accomplishments at 2 months old. And I already feel really bad for any other children I might have, because even though I know I'll feel the same way about them, I know I won't have the time to document every little thing like I will now.***

Since Emmett was born, I have wanted to document every little milestone. The first time he sneezed, first stroller walk, first time he rode in the car, first bath, first time nursing at home, first time nursing in the car, etc. I am the cliché over-obsessed mom and anyone who watches my Instagram stories knows it. I finally realized how out of control I was when I pulled out his first booger (it was MASSIVE) and I went for my phone to take a picture. I’ve tried to scale it back a little bit, but I’m still a psycho stalker mom. I’ll just be looking at him and I’ll start bawling because I love him so much.

Billy and I were both a little worried about having a newborn. Don’t get me wrong, we have always been obsessed with kids, but our favorite ages are from about 1.5 to 6 when they are just discovering the world and so fun and interactive. Newborns are always so tiny and precious and cute, but I would always get bored holding them so I would try and wake them up to play with me. Which doesn’t really go over well with the baby or their mom. Now that we have our own, it’s completely different. We spend hours just watching him. We freak out over every little thing he does. “Did you see the way he just blinked? It was SO CUTE!” “Look at what his hands are doing!” “His poop face is adorable!” We should be embarrassed by the things we are entertained by, but we totally aren’t. And now that he is 2 months old, he’s starting to interact with us more and it’s even better than I imagined. I love watching him start to figure things out even if it’s just little things like how to push out a poop.

These two months have already gone by so fast. Again, I’m such a cliché, but it’s true. He’s like a completely different person than he was when we brought him home. I love to see him grow, but I also miss my tiny scrawny newborn. I don’t miss it enough to get pregnant anytime soon though. Billy already wants to start saving for our next IVF baby, but it’s gonna take me a few years (at least) to be able to repress my awful pregnancy. Even if I have the world’s cutest baby that will make me want 10 more just like him. Plus, how in the world do people have more than one child? I can’t imagine having a newborn while also having another kid to take care of.

Anyway, since I’m still in shock that I have a 13-pound baby, I want to make sure I remember everything about him from his first two months of life.

These are the things I never want to forget about Emmett at 2 months old:

The way he will be screaming in his crib and he calms as soon as I pick him up. To know that all he wanted was me, is the best feeling in the world. And I’ll just pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with my milk-filled boobs.

He is the loudest eater you have ever heard. When we were in Seattle, I went in the car to nurse him because it was pretty chilly outside. Stephanie was in there trying to put Teagan (his darling cousin who is one month older) to sleep. I started feeding him and then come the grunts and the gulps and the big breaths. I knew he was loud, but I had never really tried to feed him in a place where we were trying to be quiet. Poor Teagan probably had nightmares about those noises.

He is also the loudest sleeper you have ever heard. I had every intention of keeping him in our room until he was 6 months old as the AAP recommends. But he is just so damn loud in his sleep, I can’t be in the same room as him or I’ll never sleep. I even have to turn the baby monitor down to the quietest level so I can only hear him when he starts crying. He makes these grunting noises all the time and then he also makes this weird noise kind of like a sheep. The first few nights we had him home, we thought he was dying. But nope, he just is a spaz.

He HATES being swaddled. It’s funny, because while I was pregnant, I knew he would hate it. He was so active in my belly that I always got the sense that he just wanted to be sprawled out. And anytime I would push at a spot on my belly, he would push right back, like I was invading his space and he was angry about it. Whenever my bladder was full, he would push into it because it was cramping him. Whenever I got ultrasounds, the technicians would remark on how he did not like the probe—usually babies move away from the probe, but he would always push back at it. I’m really hoping that all this doesn’t mean that he will hate being cuddled as a toddler. We still swaddle him because he sleeps so much better when he is, but it takes a few minutes of him fighting the swaddle before he’ll fall asleep. And the times when we haven’t swaddled him tightly enough (usually Billy’s fault, because he feels so bad doing it), Emmett will fight it and never fall asleep. If he feels any leeway, he will never back down.

He HATES being burped because it interrupts his meal. But sometimes if he has a big bubble caught in his chest, he has started to try and help me burp by pushing out little breaths of air from his mouth. And I obviously melt at that.

How much he LOVES his activity gym. He laughed for the first time on September 28^th (yes, I wrote it in my calendar) and it was while he was looking up at his activity gym. While I was a tiny bit disappointed it wasn’t in response to something I did, it was the most beautiful sound in the world. He will just happily lay on his back and bat at the toys and give them the biggest gummy smile. I have hours of footage of course.

He LOVES his bath. He gets so relaxed and his eyes roll back in his head and it’s just the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. One time he even fell asleep in the tub. He gets cold pretty easily which may be because he was a preemie or may be because he is my son. The only time he has ever fussed in the tub is because we took him out of the warm water to soap him up. He FREAKS out whenever we take him out.

His gummy little smile. Sometimes he’ll be nursing and he’ll stop, pull his mouth back, look up at me, and grin. And I cry every time. It’s like his way of saying hi to me. The first time he smiled at me (and it wasn’t a poop smile), I was sticking my tongue out at him and making a weird noise, so I kept trying to do that for the next 5 days after that. Now, I have a few tricks that will get him to smile every time. And I use and abuse them for sure. He will also get this big smile on his face (with the nipple still in his mouth) once his belly is full and that’s how I know he is done eating. Boy loves his food. He has also started cooing and squealing, and it is so much fun. He is the loudest and smiley-est when playing with his activity gym. I think he also likes my messy topknot wobbling around on top of my head—he cracks up at it. So that’s all the motivation I need to never do my hair again.

He started sleeping 6-7 hours at night at 6 weeks old and I love him even more for it. What I didn’t realize before having him is that when people say their baby slept through the night, they mean 5-6 hours. I don’t consider that sleeping through the night, but it does feel amazing when you’ve been getting 1.5-2 hour spurts of sleep for the first month. Now that he is 2 months, he technically sleeps about 8-9 hours at night, but I don’t count the hours before we do his dream feed at 11 PM. I count the hours when I’m allowed to sleep, because that’s all that I care about.

At his 1-month appointment, he weighed 10 pounds and 5 ounces and was 22 inches long. At his 2-month appointment, he weighed 13 pounds and 1 ounce and was 23 inches long. Not bad for a preemie! We’ve started putting him in 3-6 month clothes and size 2 diapers (although he can still wear newborn pants). He’s just a chunky, short little man with a huge dome and we think he’s absolutely perfect.

Emmett is a pretty good hybrid of the two of us. When he was born, people that know me better all thought he looked exactly like me and people that know Billy better all thought he looked exactly like Billy, but now that he’s getting older, everyone has flip-flopped their opinions and seeing each of us in him. He definitely has my head, hairline, and butt crack (it’s unusually high. Sorry, bud.) And I think he has Billy’s eyes, nose, and ears. After he was born, Billy commented how Emmett’s ears stick so close to his head and he remarked that people have always told him that his ears were really flat on his head. I had never heard this before or noticed this or even knew that was a thing. But then, my dad commented the next day how flat Emmett’s ears are to his head, so I guess it really is a thing. Almost 7 years of marriage and we are still learning things about each other.

He can fall asleep pretty much anywhere. I don’t know whether this is because he’s a city baby or because he’s just lazy. Just yesterday, he fell asleep on his activity mat. At the end of a feeding, he’ll fall asleep while I’m forcing him to sit up and burping him. It makes me really jealous. I have a hard enough time falling asleep in my own bed, I can’t imagine being able to fall asleep when someone is smacking me on the back. We have a noise machine in his room to block out some of the city sounds, but it still gets pretty loud in his room. Sirens and motorcycles and engine brakes all day and night long, and it doesn’t even bother him. Our downstairs neighbor is a DJ and he’ll be working on his tracks during the day (is that how you say it?) and Emmett doesn’t even mind. The other day, I accidentally set off the smoke alarm right outside his room just as he was falling asleep and he didn’t even budge. If he’s crying in his car seat while I’m driving, I just turn up the music really loud and he falls asleep within minutes. Hopefully this all means he’s just a really good sleeper and not deaf.

He got his 2 month shots and it was the saddest thing ever. I made the mistake of looking into his eyes when the nurse jabbed him, so he probably thought I was doing it. I thought he would be tough about it cause he got poked so much in the NICU, but he's also more aware. He cried for about 2 minutes while I tried to comfort him and then he just had this sort of dazed look like he was thinking, "did she really just let that happen to me?". He was pretty good for a few hours after that, but then his legs really started to hurt him where he got poked. And he wasn't smart enough to know that it hurt him to move his legs. We finally figured out we needed to swaddle his legs so he couldn't move them and gave him some tylenol and then he slept the rest of the night. He was the saddest I've ever seen though.