Spring?

I don’t want to jinx it, but I think it might actually be spring here in Germany.  It has been sunny and warm for most of the past three weeks and now the trees have started blooming and everything looks so spring like.  Since we’ve lived here long enough to now that spring can turn back in to winter pretty quickly, we’ve tried to make the most of the warm weather by playing outside or going to the park.

  

I realized yesterday that Finn is 5 1/2 weeks old and we’ve yet to take a photo of all four of us together, so before we left for church we took a quick family photo and some pictures of my adorable children together.  I love how much they love each other, I hope that lasts forever.  Finn loves to watch Reese and Reese is always asking to hold him or play with him.  They both make me so happy.

Also, we finally caught Finn’s smile on camera last night.

Finn will be 6 weeks old on Wednesday and I have my final doctor’s appt on Thursday.  It’s a little bittersweet knowing that Thursday will be the last time I’ll ever go in to Dr. Jerono’s office, but I’m excited to start working out and hopefully repair the damage that Finn did to my poor body.  I was just comparing photos of Reese and Finn at the same age and I can’t help but notice how much faster I recovered with Reese, I’m going to attribute it to how much smaller Reese was and how much smaller I was when I was 9 months pregnant with Reese compared to 9 months pregnant with Finn.  Let’s hope a little gym time will help remedy the situation.

Finn is 1 month old

Why is it that 9 months of pregnancy tick by as if every second lasts forever but somehow Finn’s first month of life has sped by with no sign of slowing down?  Finn has already changed so much in a month, he’s bigger (as if that were even possible) and so much more alert.  I’m just loving watching his little personality emerge little by little.  He had his first doctor’s appt when he was 3 weeks old and he weighed in at 11 lbs 7 oz, which put him in the 99th percentile for weight, he was 22.5 in long, which put him in the 95th percentile, and his head was still 15 in, which was the 70th percentile, though Nate claims the technician wasn’t very precise when it came to his head measurement and when we re-measured a few days ago it was 16 in.  Side note:  no I don’t make habit of randomly measuring my children’s heads, but I had my sewing measuring tape out to measure for some online shopping so I went ahead and measured them…I don’t remember what Reese was but I remember it was roughly the same size as my head sadly.  Anyways, back on topic:  Finn is a big boy was the moral of that story, but it suits him and luckily he’s well proportioned and 100% adorable.  When he’s on tummy time he tries his hardest to try and rollover which is really cute, if he could just realize he needs to do something with the arm that is underneath him then he’d have it, but that arm holds him up every time.  He’s recently begun to coo which is super cute, I love his little voice, and last night Reese got him to smile in response to her smile for the first time.  He has smiled before but never because someone was smiling at him, but last night Reese was hugging him and kissing him and she was smiling at him while she said “hey little buddy” which is what she’s always saying to him, and he gave her a huge smile in response, I wish I’d had the camera because it was the cutest thing.   

This week has been the start of our normal lives here, up until now I’ve had someone around to help out.  My mom was here for the first two and half weeks and then Nate had his two weeks of paternity leave so I feel very lucky to have had a whole months worth of help.  It was nice to get to relax and not feel like I had to be running around getting everything done.  Now that Nate’s back at work things have actually been going pretty smoothly.  Reese has gotten used to Finn being around and is back to her old self, and I’m getting enough sleep to function and get everything done.  My house is actually cleaner now than it was the last couple months of my pregnancy.  We were spoiled when Reese was born because she slept through the night almost immediately but Finn wakes up once or twice each night.  Luckily he just wakes up to eat and goes right back to sleep when he’s done so there’s no trying to “put” him back to sleep and he’s beginning to go longer stretches during the night so hopefully very soon it’ll just be feeding him once instead of twice. 

Reese loves to hold her little brother:

 

He fell asleep during tummy time:

Pirate eye yawn:

the remnants of a smile:

trying to rollover, his shoulders stay but while everything else almost flips over:

He may weigh a lot but he’s not a chunky guy: