Eat, Sleep, Poop REPEAT!

Yara is a great baby.  She is a good eater, sleeper, and rarely cries.  When she does cry its because its her up time and needs to get that extra energy out!  During the day she is "up" or alert about 2 times (early in the morning around 8am and then again during the evening around 8-10pm).  She is also becoming a 1 side breast eater; she will feed for about 20-30 minutes on one side and be done.  If I try to do 15 minutes on each side after the first side she kind of nibbles on the second side.  So I have realized she doesn't like the interruption of eating so I just let her eat as long as she likes on one side.  Its not so bad, this way once we both are comfortable we are comfortable during the whole time!

Her sleeping is great.  She sleeps 2-3hours during the day and then eats.  Around the evening time 6-7pm she loads up for the night and this is also during her awake time.  Then during the night she on average gives me 3-4 hour sleep stretches but last night she slept from 11:30pm to 5:30am.  It was amazing!  Then she was up again at 8:30am.  But usually its 11pm, 2am, and then 6am.  I can so deal with this.  But again I will say its so much easier with a full term baby than a preemie.  Plus, I'm not pumping and then feeding bottles.  With Kau'e I had to pump first to get the milk and then feed that to him.  I would have to pump every 2 1/2 hours for 30 minutes each pumping just to get enough milk for him.  I did that for 5 months until my body didn't produce enough for him.  That was hard!  But this time its easier because I'm only doing one thing and its max taking 30 minutes.  I would be up for a whole hour or longer during the nights with Kau'e.  But I am grateful I was able to produce milk for Kau'e for 5 months until we decided with our Ped dr to put him on formula.  And now I am especially grateful that this baby knows how to suck and has all the development that a baby needs to breastfeed.  With Kau'e we had to teach him with the bottle because his sucking was weaker than it should be but that's because he was born at 32 weeks and then by the time we got to breastfeeding he was smart enough to realize that breastfeeding was HARDER to get the milk than bottle.  So he would just stare up at me and wait for me to give up on the breast and the second I gave him the bottle it was taken and taken fast.

Her umbilical cord fell off during the night Friday.  Now we can officially start tummy time!  And in a few days she will have her first official at home bath; no more sponge baths!  She loves getting wiped down and lotion up.  She is still in newborn diapers and newborn clothing (some 0-3 clothes but depends on the brand).  She has the most beautiful skin - soft, smooth, and light olive skin tone.  Yara has the most beautiful eyebrows that frame her big eyes.  The grayness of her eye color is slowly changing to blue but who knows how long they will be blue.  Kau'e's were blue until he was about 1 yr old and then they have over time changed to light brown.  Yara's hair is dark brown but in the light it has some reddish tint to it.  (Not as dark and black as Kau'e's was at this age.)

Yara loves to sleep with a light on.  The first few nights we would turn off the lights and she would scream until we turned on one lamp.  So since then we have slept with a lamp on; and its not too bad!  She also is used to all the "noise" that is made in our house.  Since we live with my parents there are extra little noises during the day - my mom does daycare - and then in the evening with different family members in and out of the house.  So to say that it has to be quiet for newborns is so false.  She loves the noise and that is great because when she is down asleep in our room I can work away and not worry about waking her up.  Of course I try not to do this all the time but when there's no other time to do it I do!  It's great.

Yara is a lovely little girl and one that we are grateful for to have in our family.