Five weeks in

Yikes, it is hard to keep up with blogging. Sorry!
So Gabriel is now five weeks old, which for me means we're getting ever closer to that all important six week mark, when things are supposed to settle down a little bit. I know I can't expect any changes over night, but as Gabriel gets older, I do expect the whole sleeping situation to get a little easier. As an example of how our nights have been, I would like to point out that I am typing this up at 5am. Gabriel has some sort of internal mechanism that keeps him awake if it is after 5 in the morning. This means that if he wakes up before 5 o'clock to eat, but is still awake when it hits 5, he'll stay awake. This morning it was particularly disappointing, because we woke up barely after 4am, fed, changed, etc, then I was letting him fall back asleep. At right around 5 I picked him up to take him back to bed - he woke up, and now seems wide awake! So now I'm just hoping he'll fall back asleep at some point. He will, it just takes longer because he wants to be awake. Normally I wouldn't mind, but at this point, I was planning on more sleep, and I intend on getting it!
Because of this tendency to stay awake, I sometimes only get two or three hours of sleep a night. Gabriel has been not falling asleep until midnight or 1am every night, and then if we hit that 5am mark, he won't go back to sleep. So if I wait until he sleeps to go to bed, I'm getting barely three hours. It's no good. So last night I left Gabriel up with Daddy, and I went to bed. Gabriel will fall asleep before midnight, he just will wake up if you try to put him down in his bassinet. So he fell asleep sometime after I did, on the floor in the living room. I got up a little after midnight to feed him, and we all were back to bed by 1:30. Because he was ready to sleep, he didn't wake up when I put him down. I think this will be how we'll work things out from now on. Eventually I will even leave it up to Robert to feed him and put him to sleep so that I can not have to worry about getting up until his 3-5am feeding.
Sleeping has been our main issue for the past few weeks. I was getting way frazzled by the schedule, but I think my efforts to go to sleep before midnight, with or without Gabriel, will pay off. That just means that I see less of Robert, which is upsetting. But for now this is what needs to happen, because otherwise I will go nuts. As soon as I can rely on Gabriel to give me longer sleep periods through the night (and as soon as he can easily fall back asleep after feeding), we'll be able to go back to a more normal (for us) schedule, I think.
**Update on the current situation - his eyes are closed!! I'm going to give him a couple more minutes - I do not want to wake him up again!**
Other than sleep deprivation, life with Gabriel is good. He is getting really good at lifting his head up when he's on his tummy. In the past couple of days he's figured out how to get up on his arms to leverage his head up more. He only does this for a couple seconds at a time, but it's a definite step forward. I caught one real smile from him a few days ago, but haven't seen any since. This one was the real thing though, and it was so sweet! He's going to have a beautiful smile, which is not surprising, since his Daddy has such a wonderful smile. Gabriel can move his hands and arms around with more purpose - he's actually pretty good at manipulating his pacifier back into his mouth if it falls out when he's on his tummy. He only manages to actually get it back in rarely, but he really does try. He also is moving his legs a lot, looking like he really wants to use them to get somewhere!
Gabriel and I started attending a class for new moms last week. It was really good, and I met someone who I have a lot in common with. Her name is Merrie - we went out to lunch after class last week (we were the only two who didn't have other plans - this week all six of us will be going out together), and we discovered that we both have dogs that we take to the Marymoor Dog Park. So for the past two days we have met up there and walked for at least an hour with our babies and dogs. I've been using the Baby Bjorn baby carrier, and boy does that wear me out. I've just been wishing I could soak in a bath afterward. I may be losing a lot of weight because of breastfeeding, but I'm certainly not in good shape! I am really looking forward to when my doctor gives me permission to start doing yoga again. Just taking care of Gabriel works out my back and arm muscles, so at least I'm doing something!
I don't think I have any new pictures this week (crazy!) and I can't think of anything else to tell you about. I'm sure there are lots of things. If I could get around to blogging more often, I would cover more, and not do such long posts!! Maybe I'll work on that . . .
**Okay, I'm going to try to get him into bed again without waking him up. Maybe we can all get a couple more hours of sleep this morning.**

Fussy Time!

I have been meaning to post for a week now, and just haven't gotten around to it. I've been a little bit busy! So now Gabriel is almost four weeks old, if you can believe it!
At three weeks babies start getting fussy, and some get colicky, although we haven't had that problem with Gabriel. But we sure have seen the fussiness! And this kid can scream when he gets pissed, that's for sure. We've had a couple of truly sleepless nights, the worst being this last Saturday, when Gabriel decided that he really really wasn't going to sleep, and he was going to cry off and on for no reason that his parents could figure out. He also insisted on eating every hour, which was really making me crazy (and even more exhausted!). At three weeks babies also go through a growth spurt, so I think we were facing a combination of issues. The third part of our combo was the fact that I drink coffee on the weekends. Not all babies are sensitive to caffeine (supposedly), but I've decided that Gabriel is. So now we know.
We have seen some fun milestones in the past couple of weeks. As I mentioned before, his umbilical cord came off. We gave him a bath last week, and took a couple of videos. (I will try to include a little clip montage that I made with our video software.) Gabriel is interacting a little bit more with us and with his surroundings as well. He swipes at objects, usually the toys on his little play mat, although he doesn't always hit them. He also seems to enjoy being sung to, when it involves direct eye contact. He sometimes takes a minute or two to start reacting and interacting, but once he does, it's obvious that he's taking it all in. He can maintain eye contact and focus on a face. He does okay with tummy time - sometimes he just falls asleep, but he has been known to lift his head and turn it to the other side. He's also grown, although by how much it's hard to tell.
We have our first "You and Your New Baby" class on Wednesday. That should be exciting, and will give me practice taking Gabriel out and spending significant amounts of time somewhere other than home. I have taken him out, but only on brief shopping trips or walks to the park, nothing that involves him interacting with anything (he's usually asleep) or staying somewhere long enough to feed him or change his diaper. So we'll see how it goes!