Feeling Almost Human Again

There wasn't too much excitement today, which is nice. Henry and I went for a walk this morning and let Kate sleep. We took a different route than normal and saw a coyote fairly close up. Our dogs didn't even notice as they were too busy smelling the Hallmark cards left by all the other dogs. Henry ended up sleeping most the way through the walk. He used to fall asleep almost every walk. However, for the last couple weeks he has been staying awake through the whole walk, except today.

He weighed 12lbs 2oz's. That's down 1 oz from yesterday due to a rather ginormous bowel movement coupled with Kate and my tempering of the fortification of his breast milk. We were getting concerned that he was growing too fast and backed off a bit. We would like to see 1 to 1.5 oz gain each day. Tomorrow we will likely step it up a little more to maintain the gain while trying not to pack on too much too quickly. It's a fine line.

We both were able to go out today at different times to run errands and such while leaving Henry in the others care. I gave the dogs a bath and did household chores when Kate's mother came over in the afternoon. Kate was able to get some work done before we took him for his evening walk. Henry has slept quite a bit today. As I type he is in the midst of 2 hour nap on grandpa out in the living room.

I have been wary of talking about his newly found ability to sleep for longer periods of time, 3-4 hours at a stretch. I felt several times in the NICU that when I blogged about positive progress it jinxed things and then he would backslide. However, I simply must say that having him sleep for much of the night has been wonderful. I can tell that I'm more productive at home and at work already and it has only been two days of getting around 6 hours of sleep a night. I just hope that he keeps it up and we can leave our zombie phase behind us. It's nice to shower on daily basis and not worry about knocking my teeth out on my desk as a fall asleep at my computer.

I've always been one to sleep a lot, even back to childhood when I would miss the Saturday morning cartoons and be greeted by "Good afternoon" when I finally stumbled out of bed. I never would have thought that I could survive with 2-3 hours of sleep a day, often broken up into 1 hours blocks, like Kate and I have done for the last few months.

Hopefully this is also the sign of a growth spurt. He's been in what might be considered a girth spurt for some time now, gaining enough to make it onto the growth curve for weight. He has gained in length but he is still well below the curve in that category. His head circumference has been on the growth curve so it would seem that at some point he will shoot up and grow into his weight and his head. If he keeps gaining weight and doesn't pick up the length it will make clothing a challenge. It is already difficult to get his large noggin through the neck holes of some of his outfits. The newborn size is perfect for length but fits a bit snug around the middle. Now this is a problem I am happy to have.