One Month

Little miss Mary is one month old today!  It's been a good month, I think my favorite part of this month has been watching my two girls start building a relationship.  Avery loves Mary so much!  The first thing she does when I bring her downstairs in the morning is call for Mary.  "Mamea!  Where aaa you?"  It's really sweet.  Avery loves holding Mary and giving her kisses and stroking the top of her head softly.  Whenever Mary is crying Avery says "Oh no!  Shh shh shh!"  It's very sweet watching the two of them.

"Oh no!"

Mary has fallen into a pretty good routine.  She eats every 3 hours then is awake for anywhere from 1 to 2 hours then goes to sleep.  She's not to good at the falling asleep thing yet and I'm afraid she's getting too dependent on her swing to sleep.  We live in a two bedroom apartment and so she sleeps in a pack n' play in our bedroom.  The only problem is with Louis' work schedule he has to sleep during the day so she doesn't actually sleep in the pack n' play very often, but in the swing instead.  I really wish we had a room for her so she didn't have to be in the swing.  Or that we had two pack n' plays, one up in our room and one downstairs.  She sleep pretty well at night, right now she'll sleep 5 hours at a time.  I feed her at 10:30 then put her in bed around 11:00 and she sleeps until a little after 4:00 then straight back to bed and I wake her up for the day at 8:30.  She is also already a complete binky baby!  She almost always needs her binky to fall asleep!  I don't mind, but it will be nicer once she can keep it in her mouth better.

Mary is nursing so well!  I was very worried about this before she was born because nursing with Avery was HORRIBLE!  I tried and tried for 6 weeks with Avery and it wasn't getting any better, it was taking about an hour to feed her and it would usually end with both of us in tears.  What I ended up doing for Avery was pumping and then giving her a bottle.  It was hard work and I didn't want to have to do it again.  Lucky for me Mary has been a champion nurser from day one!  She did have a hard time latching on right for a while, but we got it worked out really quickly and easily.  I feel so blessed that it has gone so well.

She is a pretty good baby, I won't lie, Avery was much better.  Avery was such a chill baby, she would be happy to just sit in her bouncy chair looking at everything going on.  Mary is another story, she's pretty whiny.   She has her happy moments of course, but mostly just needs to be held and rocked.  It's funny as I'm typing this she's laying on the floor happily looking around!  She really loves to be held by her dad.  His kisses are her favorites!  They make her stop crying in an instant.  Maybe it's the feeling of his scratchy face.  

Or probably just because she loves her daddy!

She's very strong!

On her first Sunday to church

Huge eyes!

Mary and cousin Isaac

Meeting her great grandma Steele

Now as for me, I'm doing great.  I feel 100% back to normal.  I haven't started exercising yet, I walk, but nothing more than that.  With nursing though, my stomach is shrinking very nicely!  Here are a few pictures of me, the first is at 5 days postpartum the second was 8 days postpartum and the last was taken last night.  It crazy how fast it shrinks down!  Also I must really love all of you because I hate this first picture of myself and I'm putting it up for all to see!

So things are going great over here!  The adjustment from one to two kids has gone a lot smoother than i expected it to.  We sure love Mary and are so happy she chose to be in our family!