Fast approaching ten weeks!

Time flies when you're having fun.

Piper will be ten weeks old this coming Friday.

I'm going to start sounding like a broken record, everything is going really well. She's still developing, getting more and more aware of and interested in things around here, and more sociable. She loves the changing table, and we can spend ten minutes on it just hanging out with someone, laughing and cutting up. She likes her activity mat, but even more than that, she likes the mobile in her crib, which rotates. She's a big fan of the bright orange monkey on the mobile, but also the yellow giraffe on her activity mat.

She's getting stronger. Her head is still sorta wobbly, but she is able to lift it and look around when she's lying on her stomach. Last night I was holding her in my lap, with her on her back and reclined at about a 45 degree angle, when she started working on stomach crunches, trying to get her head and neck and even shoulders up. She's getting there.

She enjoys bath time. She hangs out and looks around and tries to stick her fist in her mouth. But seems to be having a good time.

Evenings are tough for us, and by us, I mean all of us. She gets cranky, and Krissi and I get frustrated. Some evenings are better than others, but usually around 6PM, she decides that nothing is good enough, and will cry. The only two things that somewhat reliably work are putting her on a breast - a bottle won't do, or walking around holding her - standing or sitting won't do. But if we can all survive until 9 or 10PM, we're good, and she'll usually go to sleep, and we can all settle down. She'll wake up around 1 to eat, and get changed if necessary, and then again around 4. So she's relatively consistent at night about a 3 hour feeding schedule.

Krissi is still breast feeding, and also pumping and storing. She's eating directly from the breast about 70% of the time, and we're warming up breast milk in a bottle the rest of the time. This feeding routine has a couple of odd quirks. It seems that Piper will eat more via a bottle than she will via the breast. She'll suck down three or even four ounces, easy, from a bottle. But on the breast, she'll work at it and then nap or just stop. Of course, then she's crying ten minutes later because she's still hungry, and we either have to give her a bottle, or put her back on the breast. On the other hand, nothing quiets her down like the breast. She'll scream right into the nipple on a bottle, while she'll settle down with the breast and eat some, then drift off, usually.

Oh - her favorite, even more than the activity mat and the crib mobile: the ceiling fan in the living room. Yeah, no I'm not kidding. She'll lay in someone's arms and stare up at the ceiling fan like it's the coolest thing in the world. The other day she twisted her whole head and neck around when I was holding her, so that she'd be able to see her friend, the ceiling fan. We think its pretty funny.

That's about it, that I can think of right now. See you in a week or two!