Growing by Leaps and Bounds

Thanks again for all of your love and support during Jimmie's test. He recovered wonderfully from it all. No side effects from the anesthesia or anything. The Dr said that he would probably sleep the rest of the day. Well after getting home, he slept for about 45 min and then decided to stay up til 3 am :) that was fun. But since then he has been happy and normal! 

Here he is trying to wake up to get some food. He was really not having it for a while:

Here is our little fighter after fully waking up. Well...mostly waking up :)

A little before the test, Jimmie went through a growth spurt. A physical one for sure, but a mental one as well. Physically, he is about the size of some of his cousins and uncles when they were born, weighing in at over 10 lbs.  The book I'm reading about the baby's development refers to these mental growth periods as "leaps". During the leaps they reach different milestones. Because every baby develops differently they may only choose to develop some of the new abilities with the rest to follow later. I have an app that goes along with it and love it bc it tells me when to expect another leap, for how long, what to expect in behavior, and new skills to look for. So when you hear me refer to a "leap" in the future, this is what I'm referring to. 

Jimmies gone through his first leap a little while ago and picked up some new skills over the course of the leap. 

Social Smile. He's probably been doing this since about 5.5 weeks. But he's doing it ALL the time now. It's adorable. For those of you who don't know what this means, it means he smiles intentionally now. And at least for Jimmie, it means you smile for 90% of the day once you are awake! 

He always would stare at things but now he STARES at things. He will gaze at things so intently, you can hardly break his concentration. Earlier this week he was looking at the fan in his Rock n Play. I pulled him closer to me, but now something on the coffee table was blocking his view so he arched his back and strained his neck so that he could keep looking at the fan. It was so funny. 

He really is more active and playful because he's awake through a lot of the day. This picture was just too cute to pass up :) but of course he still crashes like this every once and a while.

Because he smiles now, it's so fun to see his reaction to things. I have found that I can almost always get him to smile by playing patty cake, or touching him in any way (poking his belly, touching his nose, etc) while making sounds. Daddy is really good at a Donald Duck type sound which Jimmie just thinks is hilarious! 

Like I said, he's always loved the contrast of things, but he is really starting to love all these bright and colorful patterns that he can study 

These things are always in his mouth. Forget the pacifier, we love those hands! Sometimes it's a chore to get the hands away from his mouth long enough to start feeding him. And he grabbed his toes a few times the other day! I think it was on accident though ;)

Now that he's gaining more weight and getting a little older, he has been sleeping longer. He's always been a good sleeper, normally getting 3-4 hours of continual sleep stretches from the beginning. However recently it seems he sleeps longer and goes back to sleep easier. He's become a champ at going down a little sleepy and falling asleep on his own. Last night we went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 6am and he only woke up once for 25 minutes. Woohoo!

I'm sure he's reached many more things but I can't think of too many right now. In the upcoming weeks we have some fun ones to look forward to like first time in the water (besides bath), first airline flight, first family reunion, and first time meeting a lot of family on both sides. We're so excited! Aunt Meg is coming to visit tomorrow so more on that later!