Life with Madelyn

Here is a little snapshot into our new life with Madelyn :)

Depending on what time we go to bed (usually around midnight), and how much we are up at night, Madelyn and I get up around 10 in the morning. We then come downstairs, usually I feed her, and then she goes down for a nap. Sometimes she'll stay up for a bit and hang out with me, but usually she's right back to sleep. Once she's down, I eat something (quickly) and do some housework.

As the day goes on, she eats appx. every 3 hours. A lot of days she naps a great deal of the day. Today, she was up All Day, so hopefully that means she'll sleep through her fussy time tonight...you may want to know what "fussy time" is- we'll come back to that in a minute.

When she takes her "afternoon nap" I nap too, at least for 30 minutes. I rarely sleep longer than that but I at least lay down and close my eyes.

Then when Matt gets home, he takes over for a little bit and I go shower (yippee!!).

Now, back to fussy time. From about 9-11 every night happy Madelyn turns into fussy Madelyn. She cries and screams and Matt and I scramble to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. We rock her, stand and sway with her, put her in her favorite chair, change her diaper, feed her, burp her, change her clothes, lay her flat, lay her on a slant, anything...I've pretty much accepted that this is just her time to cry and get out that extra energy. After all, crying is really the only method she has to wear herself out. Even with accepting this, it's still frustrating not to know the cause of the cries, but she is so good the rest of the day we really cannot complain.

At night, she sleeps and eats like a dream. She pretty much continues to eat every 3 hours, occasionally she'll go a 4 hour stretch, and rarely fusses, so mommy gets good sleep. Daddy does the early morning feeding, usually around 4 or 5 a.m. so I can get a stretch of sleep before he heads out for the day. This is a Huge help!

In the evenings I try to take her for a walk, sometimes Matt comes too and we bring a drink with us and call it "cocktail hour"--it's the closes thing to happy hour we'll have for a while :) I'm still very hesitant to take her out in public or have her around too many people, but I look forward to doing so in the coming weeks. We still have to get her up to Athens to introduce her to the rest of Matt's family.

All in all I am LOVING my time at home and being a bit of a hermit. It's so fun to spend the day with Madelyn, especially as she becomes more and more alert. My favorite time is when she falls asleep on my chest. I could just stay like that all day, but I don't want her to get too spoiled (riiiight...). Yes there are trying and exhaustive moments, there is no question about that, but the great moments far outweight the difficult ones. I can't believe I only have 9 weeks left of maternity leave--I am trying to soak up every single second because it is going to be SO HARD to go back to work and leave her!!