3 weeks

Elias will be three weeks old as of about 11:14 tonight. He weighed in at a whopping 8 pounds yesterday during his weekly weight check (our next regular appointment, as a result, will be at the 2-month mark...although I'm bound to at least have questions for the phone triage nurse before then). That's a gain of 2 pounds in 2 weeks! And he's grown an inch and a quarter, give or take. Hitting the 8 pound mark seems like such a milestone to me, for some reason. Something about being officially out of those "newborn" clothes and diapers and officially in all things that begin at 8 pounds.

People keep telling me you'll see improvement in threes - at three weeks, 6 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and so on. Neal and I are convinced that nothing actually changes at 3 weeks, but you're more likely to get a smile for it. Elias has been smiling in his sleep since birth and although all the books say it shouldn't happen voluntarily until about a month, we're both pretty certain he's given us the real deal at least a couple of times in the past few days. You have to work for it, that's for sure, but it is definitely rewarding. I'll be sure to post evidence as soon as it's happening frequently enough to document.

Additionally, I probably slept the longest last night than I have in the past three weeks. He was wide awake - and then fussy - after his 9 p.m.-ish feeding. Neal and I took turns holding him until about 10:30. I was so physically tired I couldn't pull myself out of bed to bounce him any longer so I told Neal to snuggle him up next to me. With the help of a pacifier he was out in about 15 minutes. I performed the super swaddle on him and he slept for about 5 hours! Which of course totally freaked me out, especially considering it had been another hour before then that he'd eaten. Kid, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. If he wakes up frequently, I worry he's not getting enough - food or sleep. But if he sleeps longer than three hours, I wonder why and still worry he's not getting enough. I worry the super swaddle is too effective, constricting his will to wake up and demand his grub. Anyway, once he was up he stayed up for a couple of hours. We tried the same tactic and it worked again, although he stayed in bed this time for a couple more hours of sleep. I'm not going to get used to this unusual pattern, but on the other hand, maybe he really was going through a growth spurt during much of this week, when he was eating every hour and a half to three hours. 'Til the next cycle...