One Month Old (by Esme)

Please, never mind that I am six weeks old at the time of this posting. Mommy and I started this post over two weeks ago; we honestly did. It's just that we don't get very much time at the computer these days...

Fortunately, it's not necessary to use many words to recap the first month of my life. In fact, just three ought to suffice:

Eat.
Sleep.
Sleep.

(OK, that's technically only two words. If you really must have another one, you can use "Cute.")

Mommy and Daddy are telling folks that I am their easiest baby yet. Matthew was awfully good, they say, but I sleep for longer chunks of the day. I'm also gaining weight at a pace that pleases even our pediatrician, who coined the phrase "The Wilcox Poke" for the rate at which my siblings (primarily Meg) grew in their early weeks and months. The day before I celebrated five weeks of life-outside-the-womb, I weighed 9 lbs. and 3 oz., as compared with my 7 lbs., 13 oz. at birth. Not bad for a Wilcox baby.

At one month, my days looked something like this: Mommy woke me up; I ate (usually sleepily), I had "awake time" for 5-15 minutes; I started to yawn; I went back to sleep for an hour or two. This cycle repeated all day long and into the evening. At night, I was allowed to sleep for slightly longer periods in between feedings, and (ideally) I didn't have any post-feeding awake time. In general, I did very well at night. Sometimes, if I was having trouble staying asleep in my crib, Mommy took me to sleep in the big bed with her for some of the night. But by my fifth week I started to put myself to sleep (or back to sleep) with just a tiny bit of crying, and that was better for everyone (though Mommy says she misses the snuggle time a little.)

The rest of my first month might be better if we go heavy on pictures and light on words. Here goes...

One of my rare awake moments early on:


At the end of my first week, I got to meet my sweet Aunt Lena.


She thought I was decently cute.



These guys were very excited about my arrival.


Sometimes Mommy though I might die of Affection Overload.


And speaking of affection, Mom says Daddy is utterly smitten with me.


Daddy makes no attempt to deny it.


And Mommy really doesn't blame him.


As our first real family-of-five outing, we went to a place with a lot of these:


My brother did this:


while I was quite happy doing this:


Did I mention Daddy is pretty taken with me?


Of course, I do have my moments.


Ahhh, that's more like it.


My big sister really likes to hold me. Sometimes I'm not real thrilled about it...


but mostly I do OK.


Our close-up:


Um, Matthew, do you mind? This is supposed to be my post.


Oh, never mind.