What day is it?

The following is the beginning of a post I started over a week ago. Time flies when you have no time to blog!

You gotta love the total chaos, confusion, and mind-numbing exhaustion that comes with having a newborn in the house! It's been an interesting few days to say the least. Our perfect little calm baby we had in the hospital showed what we're hoping aren't her true colors on Saturday. Instead of sleeping sweetly and sucking on her bottle like a newborn should- she preferred to scream her little head off and leave us wondering what the heck happened to our little angel! She had some sucking issues the day after she was born, but had it all pretty much figured out by the time we went home.



On Saturday however, she would get so incredibly mad that she'd scream and cry and not be able to settle down and remember how to suck on the nipple correctly. That led to an exhausting day and night filled with bouncing, running the water for white noise, swaddling and reswaddling, hushing, singing, and pretty much anything else we could think of to calm her down. Good times!

Yesterday was much better and today has been really good as well.



I'd like to think we're figuring her out a little more as time goes by. We've realized that if that bottle isn't in her mouth within 3-4 minutes of her waking up- good luck! She'll revert back to her screaming and head shaking as she tries to remember how to suck. She sometimes has trouble falling asleep on her own (something that is COMPLETELY foreign to us since Jack was just about the best sleeper ever) and needs our help to do so.

.... that's how things were in the days after we brought her home from the hospital....

Things are much calmer around here now! Emma is finally settling in and starting to become more predictable. She still has trouble falling asleep on her own at times, but is much easier to calm down when she's mad. We don't have to run quite so fast for the bottle when she wakes up, she's getting much better at remembering how to suck on the nipple even if she's really mad. She likes to sleep as much as Jack did, it just takes her a little longer to settle down. Last night she was asleep by 10. She woke up at 2:45 and was back asleep 45 minutes later. It sure feels good to be getting a lot more sleep around here.

Jack is doing really well. He really and truly loves his baby sister. He loves to come up and kiss her on the head, give us updates on if her eyes are open or closed when we're in the car, and show her all of her toys when she's playing under her activity thingy. He's been acting out a little bit- and needs his Mama to put him to bed and give him a bath. Overall I don't think we could ask much more from him. His little world has been turned around over the past almost 2 weeks and he's really done a good job handling it.

I have a bunch of pictures to put up. Before I do that though I need to hook up our external hard drive and dump all 74 million old pictures onto it before our computer crashes! So hang in there!

*** On a very different note, we got some really upsetting news late last week. My cousin, Liz, and her family are going through a really rough time right now. Her baby boy Elijah has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. You might have checked out the link to her blog while reading mine- hers is called The Petro Family. We are keeping little Elijah and the whole family in our prayers. They are constantly on our minds and we hope you all will say a bunch of prayers for them too.