Lillian's Week 8

8 weeks old today! "Every good and perfect gift is from above" James 1:17

Sleep: On Mother's Day May 12th Lillian slept through the night for the first time on purpose. I say on purpose because one time around 6 weeks she slept from 10-5 but we weren't expecting her to. It was a perfect Mother's Day gift. I felt so rested. Unfortunately it hasn't happened again yet but we are working on it. She still only wakes up once in the middle of the night so I'm ok with that. Keeps me from worrying about her.

Nursing: this week we were nursing solely on the breast. No nipple shield at all! I'm so happy we no longer need the shield however nursing has become uncomfortable again. My nipples are usually tender and raw after I feed her so I use the lanolin again. Luckily no cracking or bleeding. I think it hurts because she doesn't open her mouth fully so she is just on the nipple and not the areola. If it gets really painful I just pull her off and have her latch in again. She has also been spitting up huge amounts this last week. Every feeding we both would end up covered in spit up. I read online that sucking can help keep the milk down so I would feed her on one side, stick her paci in for a few minutes then feed her on the other side then paci again. This actually really helped. We would just have to be careful not to jostle her around too soon after she ate and wait to burp her as well. She is pretty good at getting herself to burp anyways. I thought this might help keep the spit up contained but it actually soaks through the towel so I just always have two burp cloths on hand.

Her nursing time has dropped significantly. For the first month she would nurse for 20 minutes on each side the it dropped to about 12-15 minutes, and now I'm lucky to keep her on for 8-10 each side. While it's nice for me I worry if she is getting enough to eat, but she never wakes up early hungry and still has good diapers. I'm hoping we have gone from quantitative feedings to qualitative. 

Schedule: she has been eating about every 3-3 1/2  hours, she could go longer but I'm trying to get her to fill up on feedings during the day to help her sleep longer at night. We tried a couple different schedules  Here is an example of what we tried last week:

7am wake up, eat, diaper change,and awake time for an hour

8am back to sleep

10:30am wake up, eat, diaper change,and awake time for an hour

11:30am back to sleep

2:00 wake up, eat, diaper change,and awake time for an hour

3:00 back to sleep

5:00 wake up, eat, diaper change,and awake time for an hour (only 3 hours here so I could get an extra feeding in later and she is using hungry by now)

6:00 sleep

8:00 wake up, eat, diaper change,and awake time for an hour, sometimes a bath if she didn't already have one that day. She gets a bath every other day at night unless she has a blowout diaper or big spit up then it is immediately.

8:30-9:00 she sometimes took a little longer to fall asleep here

10:00 one last feeding hoping she would sleep through the night but she would wake up around 2:30 or 3:00 to eat again.

Yesterday and this coming week I am trying the 3 hr schedule to see if that helps fill her up more so she sleeps through the night. It would be something like eating at 7:00, 10:00, 1:00, 4:00, 7:00, & 9:30. This fits our schedule better so I'm hoping it works. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated. 

Other happenings:

- We celebrated Mother's Day this week you can see that post Here

- We took lots of videos this week too:

      This Video shows she has found her feet,and this Video shows Lillian has learned to follow an object with her eyes