Hannah Banana

I'm probably going to be one of those mom's who thinks that everything her child does is by far the cutest, most amazing thing on earth and therefore deserving of a photo which should then be shoved down the throats of all innocent passer-bys. Since you are viewing the blog by choice, you can't complain. I imagine no one will anyway--the pre-Hannah blogging comments often requested more pictures (and less of my incessant babbling). I should be able to oblige that request more easily now.

As you can see in the pics, I'm quickly discovering that the Boppy is amazing and has more uses than just helping me to stay relatively ergonomic while breastfeeding. It also works great as a baby napper. I prop Hannah up in it on the bed so she can watch me as I lay around and do nothing--err, I mean, as I lay around and "recover." (The midwife scolded me when I assured her that I was being lazy. She said, "it's not lazy! You're recovering!") Anyway, Hannah eventually falls asleep in a really cute position, a few of which I've captured and posted.

In other news, her belly button thingymajig already fell off. They said it would take about 2 weeks but this advanced child of ours got rid of hers in only 1 week. I found it in the bed the other night during our 3-4 a.m. feeding. That means she can have a bath now, a real bath rather than just a wipe down with a damp washcloth. Not that she really needs more than that at it this point, but bath time is a fun routine that I'm looking forward to starting once we actually have a bathroom in which to bath her.

Eric was pretty quick to give Hannah a nickname: Banana. This stemmed from two things, one the obviously cute rhyming that is Hannah Banana, and two, the fact that she had a little more jaundice than most when born. Even after they discharged us last Friday we had to bring her back to the hospital nursery on both Saturday and Sunday to test her jaundice levels to make sure they were going down.

She is otherwise quite healthy and sleeps a lot, though more in the daytime than at night, unless we let her sleep on our chests, then she'll sleep forever and ever and ever. The problem with that is that I'm not a fan of lying on my back so I eventually want to lay her down in her bassinet, but once I do that, I've got an hour tops before she realizes she's by herself and wakes up screaming. So I usually try to suck it up and stay asleep even while I can feel my tailbone acquiring bed sores because it's worth it. She did miraculously give us a 4 hour stint in the bassinet the other night. We layed her down around 11 and she didn't wake up until 3:30. It was amazing! I jumped out of bed feeling quite refreshed and ready to nurse with vigor. I even finished the book I started reading when I got home from the hospital (It Sucked and then I cried--borrowed from Libby. I loved it!!) before she finished nursing then went back to sleep for a couple more hours before daylight. That was an awesome night. The nights where she wakes up every 45 minutes are hard. I do not prance out of bed on those nights. I lay still willing her to stop crying and fall back asleep, and when she doesn't, I groggily stumble over, pick her up, bring her back to bed, and attempt to stay awake while she nurses.

All in all though, it's been a fun week. The bonding thing took me a couple days (days 1 and 2 were treated much like my pregnancy which is to say that I felt a great responsibility and vowed to go above and beyond the call of duty to take care of the little booger, but I wasn't swooning--I was looking at it as a job that I intended to excel at), but by day 3 I was falling for her and am now obsessively in love with my little Hannah Banana.