Harper - 1 Month

Well, we've made it one month and have lots of cute pictures and videos to show for it.  But first, let me tell you how the month has been.

The easiest and best part of the month has been Harper.  She has been a very easy baby so far. She had a couple of difficult days (that still weren't THAT difficult) and has pretty much been easy ever since.  At this point, I feed her, she's awake and happy for 10 minutes to 30 min or so before she starts acting sleepy.  Then I literally just stick her in her bassinet, put her binkie in her mouth and she sits there content until she falls asleep.  She'll sleep for a couple hours or so and then we do it all again!  The exception is when she is having tummy troubles or when someone is holding her.  When she is having tummy troubles, she will get restless and grunt a lot and maybe cry, but not constant wailing or anything.  When she is being held, she is also often more restless, but not always  She honestly seems to be happier in her bassinet that being held most of the time, but we sometimes disregard her preferences and hold her anyway. 

I don't know if she's a "good" sleeper or not, since I don't have a lot to compare it with, but I'm thinking she's pretty good.  What makes the biggest difference is not having to rock her or bounce her to get her to fall asleep.  Usually she goes 2 - 4 hours between feeds at night and falls back to sleep right after each one.  The only problem is that she is HUGE grunter and will often grunt for the last hour or so of her sleep period.  So, just because she's sleeping that doesn't mean we are!  It's also kind of difficult to figure out when to feed her.  If you try when she first starts grunting, she's generally still too sleepy to eat.  So, you just have to wait for the grunts to get longer, closer together and more intense and then guess when it's the right time.  She doesn't usually start crying until I pick her up and start getting her ready to eat.  Once she knows she's close she starts freaking out like, "it's so close!  I can sense it!  Just give it to me!"  She is also a total binkie baby.  She almost always want to have the binkie in her mouth.  Sometimes she's really great at keeping it in her mouth and will keep it in for an hour or more and sometimes it falls out constantly.  Usually she's somewhere in between.  She's so cute.

Speaking of cuteness, she was such an early smiler!  She gave me her first real, purposeful smile at around 2 weeks old!  Since then she has regularly given us smiles when we're talking to her.  And her smile is just like her daddy's :) .  She's also a show off and tends to smile at just the right time.  In addition to smiling, she has become very aware of people and loves to stare at everyone.  She also makes lots of great faces and cute noises.  

The hardest part of all of this has been the physical recovery.  Hoooooly cow.  Way worse than I thought it would be.  Even now, at just over a month post delivery I am in looots of pain.  I made an appointment with my midwife again for today because I felt like I should be feeling better than I am.  I mean, I still can't really sit or walk much or anything.  She removed a bunch of my stitches (not sure why they didn't dissolve?) and put some chemical thing on this one spot to basically get it to form new scar tissue (I think?).  It hurt SO bad.  I don't think she realized it was going to hurt that bad.  And it continued to hurt all day and still does.  Booooo.  She said it should start to feel better again in 2 to 3 days.  Hopefully it really does the trick this time and I will FINALLY be on the road to recovery because I am pretty tired of being so infirm.  At this point it is almost impossible for me to remember what it feels like to feel "normal" down there...I just want to be able to enjoy my baby and hold her and play with her and change her diaper and feed her without it all hurting.  

Alright, enough of the misery.  Let's enjoy some cute!

Had to document her wearing the panda onesie that I made.  It's a good thing I took the pic while I had the chance because she has now blown out of it 3 times (every time she's worn it - it's cursed) and isn't looking quite so nice now...

My grandma and aunt came for a visit a couple weeks ago.  Grams sure loves her babies, and the feeling is mutual it seems.

Here's a sweet photo of Harper with Tom's mom.  Harper got lucky in the grandma department.

Harper can be a little escape artist.  This blanket was originally swaddled around her.

I wanted to include some videos in this post, but blogger kept malfunctioning when I'd try to upload them, so I uploaded one and the rest are on youtube.  I included the links.  This first one is just her being cute while I'm changing her diaper.  I love her hands and the sweetness of her clueless little face.

Harper in her swing that my friend Jackie gave her.  Don't worry, I added some head support to it after this:

http://youtu.be/QLcIu_dJyAw

Making funny faces in her sleep:

http://youtu.be/xsPNUHcCYBw

Milk face

One of the few photos of us together.  Burping her is honestly one of my favorite things.  She either snuggles in and falls asleep or lifts her head up and looks over at me with a cute little expression.

Here she is wearing her cousin Josie's jacket.  I think she looks like a little cabbage patch doll.  She was just ever so serenely staring at her daddy here.

Bunny ears

More daddy napping

A couple videos and pictures of her having a good time on one of her two playmats:

http://youtu.be/DLEE001IByY

http://youtu.be/XZJ_93yliRE

More mommy burping time.

I figured out a better way to swaddle her.  There aint no way for those arms to escape now!  Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOnsKlluHIg

Making sad faces in her sleep.  This is always accompanied by the most pathetic little whimper.

Making cute hand motions in her sleep.  Have I mentioned I love her hands? :

http://youtu.be/mgJtqESH3G4

Playing on her other playmat:

http://youtu.be/Z-_DlVordkI

In her cow costume, which is still huge on her:

http://youtu.be/qgbH4UU27kk

This is her stretching face.  Love this picture.

Mommy and Harper in the hotel room in Park City last weekend.

As I just mentioned, Tom and I went to Park City last weekend.  They had a great hotel room deal on Groupon a few months ago and we figured I'd feel pretty recovered a month after she was born.  We were wrong, but it was still a good trip.  We stayed in the hotel room the entire time, but it was nice to have a change of scenery and a TV.

Also, my parents came to town this past weekend and we blessed Harper at church.  The blessing was absolutely beautiful and it was great to see everyone at church.  I really do like our ward.  There are so many nice people in it.  It was also really great to have both parents and my grandma here and to get them together with Tom's family for a dinner that evening.  Very pleasant.  I love seeing family members interact with Harper for some reason.  My dad and grandma have left already, but my mom is still here all week.  Thank goodness, because I can sure use the help!!!  She wanted to come earlier, but wasn't able to.  I'm kind of glad she came now instead though, because I probably need her even more now than I did then!  Below are a bunch of pictures from the blessing.  The dress she is wearing was made by my aunt and was worn my all of my female cousins, my sister and even me at our blessings.  Now it is also being worn by some of the cousins daughters.  In fact, most of the time it still hasn't set in that Harper is MY daughter, but seeing her in the blessing dress and knowing that I wore it and other family members wore it caused me to have a nice little moment where I realized, "wait, she is part of MY family."

First family photo.

My mom wanted me to get some pictures of Harper in the blessing dress and with the blanket that she made for her.  I initially thought I'd have to wait a little while after church because it had been a while since she'd eaten, plus she kept being woken up with all the activity going on and I just figured she'd be cranky.  On the contrary, I set her down to change her diaper and she seemed to be in a good mood, so I thought I'd give it a shot.  Boy am I glad I did!  She was in SUCH a good mood and just kept smiling at me!  She is such a doll.  Had such a hard time narrowing it down even this much: 

Can you see a little Tom smile?

Viva la blessing!

4 generations:

Tell me her hand pose (which we did not do) is not endearing.  I love her hands. 

Happy grandma.

Last night we put grandma on baby duty in the living room while Tom and I slept in the bedroom.  The idea was for her to bring her in when she woke up hungry and I'd feed her and put her back.  Usually she will wake up every 2 - 4 hours in the night.  Well, I had last fed her at 6:30 and Tom and I went to bed around 10, so we were expecting my mom to bring her in pretty soon after we fell asleep.  Imagine our surprise (and worry) when we woke up at 4am and she hadn't been brought in at all!  Tom, especially, was freaking out, thinking she must have died or something.  I went out and check on her and saw that both she and my mom were still sleeping, touched her to make sure she was still alive and warm and checked the fridge to see if all the breast milk was still there and that she hadn't just been bottle fed or something.  When I came back and told Tom she was still sleeping and still warm he was like, "is she still breathing???"  I'm like, "well, I'm guessing if she stopped breathing she wouldn't be warm anymore!"  He made me go out and check though, and we ended up waking her up and feeding her just because we were so anxious!  According to my mom she just grunted a few times and my mom would just put the binkie back in her mouth and she's drift back off to sleep!  Hopefully this means she's going to start sleeping for longer stretches at night!  Even if she doesn't, it's ok, but it would sure be nice!

The two of them still sleeping this morning.

Well, that's about all for now.  Hope you enjoyed!

Harper's 1st Week Home

Alright, well it has been one week since we took Harper home and she is 9 days old.  It has been...a roller coaster.

I was feeling really really great while we were still in the hospital.  I was still feeling great about 24 hours after we came home.  But, then Tom came home from the gym and walked in hunched over, having thrown out his back (if you read the last post, you know I was blogging when this happened).  That was a very bad thing to happen.  It meant that instead of having Tom cook and clean and get whatever I need and just, generally, be at my beck and call, I actually had to take care of him!  Well, as you can imagine, I became overwhelmed fast.  Pretty soon, we were in emergency mode at the Armstrong home.  If it was absolutely essential, it wasn't going to get done.  It was even hard to make eating happen despite the fact that we were brought ready made food by both generous people in the ward and my angelic friend Jackie.  It was just one more thing to do.  So, that situation, combined with postpartum hormones provided for an interesting few days.  The only thing that wasn't hard was the actual baby.  Lucky for us, she is an angel child.  More on that later.

About the time Tom threw out his back, I was actually starting to feel pretty good, physically.  Because of this, and because of Tom's condition, I was up and about and doing a lot.  Then, three days ago or so, I started to really hurt again.  It was bad and just kept getting worse each day.  Last night was the zenith and I was about ready to go to the emergency room or something.  As a result, Tom had to take over and do things for me because I became the one who was worse off.  It's tricky though, because if he does too much his back with get worse and if I do too much, my pain will get worse.  It has been a delicate balance.

Because my pain has been so bad, I decided to see my midwife today instead of waiting til my appointment on Wednesday.  I'm glad I did because she gave me a few things that might help, but also because it just put my mind at ease.  Also, fortunately, I started feeling a little better today.  Hopefully it will last.  I'm tired of not being able to blissfully enjoy my sweet, little baby because I'm in too much pain.  I'm also tired of being cooped up the couch.  I am not much of an inside person.  On the other hand, I think I'll just appreciate these things so much more now, once I am able again.  I have a couple of friends who gave birth recently and who also had a rough recovery who have given me sweet sweet hope that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Hallelujah!

Finally, I want to talk about Harper.  Harper is WONDERFUL.  She has been such a cute, sweet, funny, easy baby so far and I'm always saying, "bless you, child" to her.  If I had to pick one word to describe her, though, I'd choose "sleepy."  For instance, it is 10:15pm right now, and she has been asleep since 6:15pm.  She is almost never awake, and when her eyes are actually open, we pretty much jump on it and stare at her nonstop.  She only wakes up when she needs to eat, and then she always falls asleep while she's eating.  As in, not once has she stayed awake through an entire feeding.  She is only really awake when we change her diaper.  At first, I was worried about how infrequently she often eats and how short of a time she often eats for.  However, I went to the pediatrician 4 days after she was born and she had already regained her birth weight (that usually takes 10 days or so).  Then, she was weighed again today and is already up to 7 lbs. 2 oz.  In other words, at this point she is gaining 2 oz. / day.  Newborns are supposed to gain 4 - 7 oz. each week for the first month.  I'm going to say she's getting plenty to eat!  So, win win.  I have a baby who doesn't eat often or long and sleeps the whole time in between while still gaining more than adequate weight!

I also wanted to mention that, so far, Harper is very patient.  Even when we are basically torturing her while changing her diaper and clothes and so on, you can tell she doesn't like it, but she just deals with it.  She doesn't cry much, even when she's hungry.  Usually she'll just let out one little "wah!" and that's how we know she's not just grunting for no reason, she's finally hungry (because she grunts all the time).  

I have had lots of fun this week (despite being simultaneously in pain) playing dress up with her and taking pictures of her with my new lens.  Here are some photos I have taken.  Enjoy!

We bought her at Carter's.

My fabulous friend, Jackie, who came to visit and brought us food and gave me the opportunity to talk about all this new mom stuff with someone who is a mom.

Harper in the swing that Jackie gave her.

My view when I hold her.  And no, that is not a boob, despite the similarity in color.

They're both actually asleep here.

This video is of, what we call, Harper's "gang signs."  Basically, she often does this hilarious thing with her hands where she just extends all her (very very long) fingers and throws her two hands together all shakey-like.  On second thought, we took the video because it's hard to explain.  So just watch it!

This is a dress that I wore as a baby.

Finally, a picture of the two of us together.  Too bad I just don't like pictures of myself at the moment!  Good thing it's also just about the last thing I care about right now.

That last picture was taken just after I burped her.  Burping her is my favorite time because I just get to nestle my head against hers and snuggle.  There's just something about it.