She's growing

Much to my dismay, despite my orders for her to stay little, our baby is growing! At a rapid pace!
Here are her numbers:
Birth: 6 lbs, 3 oz
Next day before release (24 hours old): 6 lbs, 2 oz
First doctor's appt at 4 days old: 5 lbs, 15 oz
Second doctors appt at 13 days old: 6 lbs, 11 oz
And her numbers from her one month check-up?

8 lbs, 6 oz!!!!!!!!!!!!!


90 minutes after birth

1 month, 3 days old before the doctor's appt

I'm baa-aack....

Yes, so I took an extended blogging leave. It really wasn't by choice. One of my dissertation committee members agreed to be on my committee only if I could set my proposal meeting before the end of May. So you know what that means? Non-stop dissertating! I worked my butt off and now I'm happy to say that my baby has been handed over to the committee. My presentation was on May 22nd and I could have never anticipated it going so well! YAY!

In addition to dissertation bootcamp, I also was on a wedding marathon. Two weddings in two weeks in Long Island? Sure, no problem! We drove up to NJ on April 24th and then headed up to LI on the 25th for Abhisek and Sujata's wedding (college friends) while Ryan's parents watched Hudson. Our blind faith in technology had us trust the GPS to get us to the wedding. Apparently, Onyx (the car/GPS) decided that we should see the Lincoln Tunnel and midtown Manhattan on that beautiful sunny afternoon. Needless to say, we got to the wedding an hour late and missed the entire ceremony. We did, however, get to catch up with a bunch of Ryan's fratenity brothers (including 3 of his little brothers) which was wonderful. After the wedding, we made the trek back to NJ. Our return trip took less than 2 hours, compared to the 3+ it took us to get there.

Less than a week later, we headed to NJ on Thursday April 30th. We headed to LI on Friday afternoon for Jade and Jerrol's wedding (grad school friends). Since we learned from our mistakes, we took a new route (Oynx was not in control this time). Unfortunately, that didn't help. It took us over 3 hours to get there again thanks to Friday afternoon traffic and rain. Again, we missed the ceremony. Despite of bad luck with driving, we had a wonderful time at the wedding and a much easier return trip that evening.

The following day, May 2, we celebrated Ryan's birthday (which is May 4) in NJ with his family and our good friends, Megan, Jay, and Alex. Meg and Jay brought their adorable little girl, Izabella, too. We had a great time catching up and eating TONS of food (including Ryan's Dad's famous lasagna and sangria and a delicious ice cream cake).

So, two weekends packed with travel and one dissertation proposal have affected my ability to blog. But now I'm back and have updates on Hudson....

• Well, he gets cuter by the minute (seriously).
• He's (finally) starting to grow some hair, albeit more in the back in the form of a curly rat tail.
• He's starting to pick up words. Right now he says: car, cat, ball (although this sometimes means "grapes" if he's also signing grapes), juice, Mom, Da, Pop Pop, on, up, down, shoe, owl, out, puff, banana, and apple. I was SO happy to finally hear MOM!!! For the longest time both Ryan and I were "Da".
  
• His cognitive development has been blowing us away too. He's been doing puzzles for a while now. I still have no idea how he learned that. He also can point out a bunch of things in his books (i.e. if you ask where the butterfly is on a certain page, he'll point to it). Again, I have no idea how he learned some of these random words like bumblebee, owl, and butterfly. Just the other day, Joyce (our nanny) told me that he was pointing out red and blue blocks when she asked. He's our little genius!! CMU, here he comes! :)
• He LOVES to kick his ball around. We're convinced that he's going to take right to soccer, although we'll probably push him to go the Jeff Reed route instead (sans the crazy hair and penchant for hoochie mamas).
  
• One of his favorite games is when Daddy throws him high into the air (much to Mommy's dismay as she prays to Jesus that Daddy catches him and doesn't break his back). As soon as Ryan catches him, he immediately says "UP!!" and is ready to go again.
  
• He's starting to want to do grown up things. I've given him a little responsibility by letting him feed the cats each morning. He LOVES it! He runs to get the scoop, puts some food in their dishes and then runs back for more. If he spills any, he picks them up and puts them in the dish (although sometimes he chooses to put them in the WATER dish). He seems so proud of his little chore.
  
• He's still 100% obsessed with vacuums. Thanks to my Mom, he has two loud play vacuums that he pushes around all day. But as soon as he spots one of the real vacuums he comes running and just wants to push it all over the place. He even knows that our small Dyson is for cleaning the couch, so he grabs it off of the charger and takes it over to the couch. Hopefully his desire to clean lasts through his teenage years!
• He's getting really good at going down the stairs. We tried to teach him to sit on his bum and "scooch" down. As soon as we say "scoochie", he starts to go. Unfortunately, he's getting a little too brave and is starting to go without Mommy or Daddy there to supervise or he tries to walk down. For those of you who have been to our house, you know that there are 50 stairs (literally, we counted), so this gets to be difficult.
• He loves to empty Daddy's wallet (Mommy taught him well!). He'll sit there forever just taking credit cards in and out.
• As for his sleep, I wish I could say it's great, but sadly, it's not. We did make alot of progess with our sleep training (see previous sleep posts), but we kinda plateaued and didn't move forward. In fact, it seems that we're actually regressing at this point :(
• On a better note, he is eating MUCH better. He's finally eating real food and not just crackers! Still not drinking milk, but he LOVES cheerios in milk, so we're getting some in. I think the kid could eat 2 adult sized bowls of cheerios in one sitting!
• He's mildly obsessed with dandelions. If he sees them in the grass, he will stand there and yell and point at them until you pick them. Every. Last. One. Of. Them. He's getting brave and beginning to touch them himself.

• He just had his 18 month doctor visit. He was in the 70th percentile for height, but only 20th for weight. We so glad that the summer is here so that he can wear shorts and stop rocking the floods!

I hope to find some time soon to post more pictures. I just need to download them from the camera. I haven't even sent out his monthly batch....I know, I'm slacking....

15 month doctor check-up

Off to the doctors!

One of these days I'm going to insert info from all of Hudson's appointments so that you can see how he has grown. But that's going to have to wait until I have "spare time" (hahaha, yeah right!). So I guess you're just stuck with an update from today's appointment.

Hudson is weighing in at a mere 23 lbs (30th percentile) and measuring 31 inches (50th percentile). And his head circumference still is in first place: 65th percentile (48.5cm).

The pediatrician said that he looks great. At his 12 month visit, they took blood to check his iron levels and screen for lead. He was borderline anemic then, so she scheduled more lab work today. I cringed when I heard that because that meant holding him down so that she could draw blood from his inner elbow. It just broke my heart last time...tying his little arm, looking for a vein, draining his blood. So I was prepared for the worst. (Thankfully Ryan was there with me!). Well Hudson laid down and sat there calmly, watching inquisitively as they drew the blood. He never made a peep!! I was so proud of him!!

The two vaccines in the leg were to follow. He let out a little whimper, but then was laughing. Whatta tough little guy!!

An update on the peanut

Hudson has his 6 month checkup on May 23rd. He's doing great. He weighed in at 17 lbs, 15 ozs (50th percentile) and was 26.5" long (50th percentile). As for his huge head....it's not so huge anymore! His head circumference was also in the 50th percentile. Even though he's measuring as "average", he is far from it in our eyes!

The doctor was really impressed with his sitting ability (not sure why since I thought most babies were sitting by 6 months). Because of this, she gave us the okay to start him on baby food meats (EWWW!). So far, he has had rice cereal (which we started on Mother's Day), bananas (loves), butternut squash (REALLY loves), apples (loves), pears (loves), sweet potatoes (not a fan), oatmeal (loves), and prunes (loves - surprisingly, they are not as gross as I imagined). I guess you can see that he is Ryan's son - he loves to eat as much as Daddy does! I've been making all of his baby food and the thought of pureeing some chicken turns my stomach. It may be a little while before we turn that stone.

Another doctor's appointment also means another round of shots :( He did pretty well - let out a scream as they jabbed him (each of the 4 times), but then nursed with his Mommy and calmed down. He was a bit fussy for the rest of the day and the following day, but I guess that comes with the territory of vaccinating.

Outside of the doctor's appointment, Hudson is becoming quite the little boy, rambunctious as ever! He loves to play with his LeapFrog table and his LeapFrog drum. Lately, instead of sitting to play with his toys, he turns himself onto his hand and knees and starts to hump the floor in an attempt to crawl. He can move his legs and also his arms, but has yet to coordinate these moves. Instead, he has taken to pushing off of his hands and sliding backwards on his belly.

Speaking of his belly, he has also learned that he likes to sleep on it. Every morning we get a kick out of the new position or location in the crib where we find him. Unfortunately for us, he eventually gets frustrated on his belly and just "swims" until we come in and flip him. While we're on the subject of sleep, I should mention that Hudson is waking up about 2x/night. Some nights are better and some are worse. I've read that many breastfed babies don't sleep through the night until they are weaning from the breast. I've already come to terms with it. Thankfully, my wonderful husband gets Hudson in the morning and gives me 45-60 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. And let me tell you - that's some of the best sleep I get!