One Trick Pony

It's Monday morning and I'm able to write for two reasons: (1) Declan slept well last night - yay! and (2) Javier has the day off from work - yay!

Each of the boys is in a very different stage (obviously) so my focus for each is so different - with Declan it's still trying to get through some of the newborn stages like eating and sleeping. Saturday night was really really hard - Declan was up probably every two hours for the first half of the night and maybe every hour and a half for the second half of the night. And when he was awake, he was unhappy - crying at the top of his lungs unhappy. How this doesn't wake up Jack, I don't know, but thank goodness for that. We tried everything (rocking and feeding, letting him in our bed, walking around the bedroom) but it was really hard to get Declan back to sleep each time, and each time we did get him back down, it's hard going back to sleep knowing that we'll be up again soon. Fortunately, Declan did almost 6.5 hours last night, I was up with him for about 40 minutes (fed him from one side, he woke up almost immediately, fed him from the other and he was down for the count), and then he slept for another 3 hours. An awesome night's sleep for everybody.

With Declan's feeding, we're trying to transition him to taking a formula bottle every now and then (maybe 2-3 times a week) so that I can have more freedom in getting out of the house without the boys. Last week at the beach we tried to give him his first bottle of formula and Declan freaked out... I was a little disheartened, but since he's taken a few breast milk bottles, I was hoping we'd be ok. Yesterday Declan took 1oz of formula, mixed with 2oz of breast milk and it worked! Today he had 2oz of formula with 3.5oz of breast milk. So hopefully we'll keep changing the ratio until he can take a full bottle of formula. I plan to keep breastfeeding until the 6-9 month range, but we'll play it by ear.

Overall, Declan is a very good baby - he's so smiley and he's even laughing now. He laughs in the bathtub or when we play with his arms and feet. He also talks a lot - much more than Jack did at this age - and he loves to make ooo-ing sounds and talk while he's sucking on his hands and fingers.

Jack... Oh Jack. The stage he's in right now just makes me laugh all the time. His vocabulary is extremely limited to:
daaaww (dog)
dat (cat)
ob (up)
dow (down)
BAAAAAAA (his response when you say the word sheep)
zhoozh (shoes)
jhoozh (juice)

The other night I sang him a song with the word "sheep" in it, and when I said it, Jack just said "BAAAAAAA" - he sounds like a machine gun because he's so loud and forceful. When I asked Jack in the car about sheep, he Baaaa's away. When I asked him what the cow says, he started to whine and cry. So I said "Sheep" and he started baaaa-ing again, happy as can be. Javier said he's a one trick pony.

Sort of. He also bounces up and down saying "ob, dow, ob, dow". He can now climb up onto the couch, and reach things on the dining room table. So yesterday he pulled down a pile of juice boxes, picked one, pulled off the straw and was about to open it, saying "jhoozh".

But mostly Jack just cracks me up because he's just so busy running all day long, stopping every now and then to pick something up off the floor and hand it to me or Javier saying "shhh" (share) - and he doesn't look in the direction he's running so he frequently falls and face plants. Since he's used to it, he usually just gets back up and continues to run without looking where he's going.

So both boys are great.