Emily is 2 Months Old

I really can't believe that it has been two months since Emily joined our family. It has taken a few months to let the dust settle and to find some sort of normalcy here but we are doing great! Everyone seems to have really adjusted and we are now just resuming life like it was before- just now with one more adorable, chubby, beautiful baby! At this point- we can't seem to slow the days down as we have been really busy lately. Emily just goes with the flow and has experienced so much in her first two months. She is healthy, happy, and all ours! It doesn't get much better than that!

At Emily's two month check up, she weighed in at 12 pounds 4 ounces. We have finally figured out the whole 'eating thing' as we encountered some difficulty in the beginning. I was so stressed in the beginning about Emily's feeds that I could hardly write about it. Basically, she is an ineffective, yet still cute, breastfeeder. She loves to latch on but doesn't do a good job at drawing out the milk. At two weeks old, she was one pound under her birth weight (babies tend to be back to their birth weight at this point) which was reason for concern for the doctor. Immediately after that appointment, I started supplementing her breastfeeds with an ounce of pumped breastmilk. Well, this got tedious because I knew she still wasn't getting enough milk from the breast. So when she was about three and a half weeks old, I started pumping exclusively and then feeding her the milk. I pump four times a day and get enough milk for her for the whole day. It has made things easier for me to know she is getting what she needs and it's also great to understand she is more effective with milk from a bottle as opposed to the breast. She is thriving which is all that matters to me and I work hard to make sure that she gets all of her milk from me- so everyone is happy!!!

Emily is a happy and relatively easy baby. She is not fussy and is a good napper and sleeper. She naps in her bassinet and will stretch them out to an hour or more at a time which frees me up so much! At night, she still gets up every two to four hours to eat. Thankfully, she eats and goes right back to sleep. Not a lot of hours spent walking around in the middle of the night with an awake baby (which was the case with Matthew). During the day, she eats every two to three hours and seems really satisfied. She likes her pluggie (pacifier) but only takes it at certain times of the day. She goes to sleep by being walked around or rocked and loves it when I sing to her.

We got to see Emily's first smile this month and she has been melting our hearts ever since! She is so much more aware this month of her surroundings and she gets such a kick from watching her siblings run around and make tons of noise. She is tracking a lot more this month and is just more awake than she has ever been before. She is using her hands a lot and even found them to suck on. Emily is pretty good in the car except for the occasional freak out- but come on, she is after all a baby!

Physically, Emily's eyes are still a beautiful blue color and her hair for the moment seems to be staying the light brown she had at birth. But similarly to Matthew when he was a newborn, we really can't tell what color it is because she just doesn't have a lot of it! Her skin is still so pretty and smooth. Her baby acne went away this month which is a good thing. She still has a few little 'stork bites' (tiny red areas on the skin since birth) on her eyelids, nostril, and back of the neck but those will go away within a few months. In the meantime, I am enjoying them because they remind me of when she was first born! This month has been amazing with my newest little angel and seeing her smile at me has just made me so incredibly happy. I know she has tons of personality in there and is just waiting to figure out how to use it. The kids are getting such a kick out of her and loving her all day long. She brings so much joy to all of us and we can't wait to see what the next month brings!