6 Weeks WooHoo!!!

He Really is My Son!

Avram has a favorite toy.  It is half a dowel with a black ribbon from a dress I own tied around it.  I hold it up in front of our blinds and make it dance for him.  He is mesmerized.  Except for when this picture was taken.  I was having a jolly good time with the ribbons, doing some amazing moves and really just making those ribbons perform.  Then I realized he has fallen asleep.  Apparently, the show I was putting on wasn't entertaining enough to keep him from falling asleep.  As you can see, he fell asleep on my lap.  I was wearing a skirt which he is using had a hammock as he is cradled in between my knees.  He can and will apparently fall asleep anywhere.  I used to do this quite often myself and not as a baby either.  I used to fall asleep on the floor under the desk at the library where I worked.  I would sleep there for hours.  The old ladies that worked there never reprimanded me.  In fact they used to put blankets on me and check in the books for me.  I was pretty much the worst librarian ever.  I think Avram will be a bad librarian too.

Photo Results

 On Sunday, the lady in our ward that took Avram's picture, gave me a CD with the results of the session.  While I will be the first to say that my son is the best looking baby I ever met, he is not all that photogenic, well at least when professionals are involved.  We had some highs and some lows.  We will start with the lows:

This picture is actually pretty cute and he does have a decent face on.  But there is something about this picture that makes me think of Micheal J. Fox.  Does anyone else see it?

This picture was taken while Avram was being held at gunpoint.  He was very concerned and shocked about the situation.

Oh no, this boy has no neck!

So the in the next few pictures, we were going for something like this:

 Instead, we got multiple shots that look like this:

Between each shot the photographer would reposition him, trying to get him to stay snuggled up in the "snail pose".  He just wouldn't stay.  It was probably because he knew he was supposed to be naked to properly perform this pose, and felt foolish even attempting it when he knew he wasn't in proper costume.  Also, remember the robot diaper I was so excited about getting him photographed in?  Yeah, it doesn't really "read" well on film and just looks like a weird gray diaper.

As a side note, the other day I wanted to look at the first post I ever made, and found to my chagrin that net nanny had blocked it from view due to pornography.  I was alarmed.  Had someone hacked into my blog and placed some lude photos on my post?  I typed in my password and found the post unchanged.  Apparently naked babies count as pornography now a days.  So I fully expect this post to be blocked because of the naked Asian baby above. 

Now for the highlights:

I really like the expression on his face in this picture.  The angle and the lighting kind of remind me of the senior pictures from the seventies where the person is looking off camera and the women are wearing feather boas and the men fake tuxedos. 

This one is my favorite.  It's natural and cute.  Except he looks like he is flipping the bird.  If I put this on the announcements, do you think anyone would notice?

Another good one of him on the blanket that he puked and peed on.

Although he does look a bit like a dear in the headlights, I love that he is sucking his hand.  Probably because I rarely see his hand because I am constantly making him wear those mittens.

New skills and talents

Avram turned six weeks on Sunday!  This week has brought several changes.  Most notably and beloved my me is that he is finally coordinated enough to nurse laying down.  Up until now, when he woke up at night, I had to take him into the other room, turn on the light, and nurse while sitting up in the guest bed.  But now, I don't even have to turn on the light!  Hooray.  I just get him out of the pack and play and lay him next to me and he is magnetically drawn to the nipple.  An added bonus, if I fall asleep while he is feeding, we get to snuggle for a little while until he wakes up again and asks for his diaper to be changed.

Another new skill:  grasping.  Today I put a set of plastic keys in his hand and he closed his little fingers around them.  I don't think he did it on purpose, but he held onto them for about 15 minutes and shook them and attempted to put them in his mouth.  It's funny how something that would seem so boring to one person, can be so amazingly entertaining to me when my baby does it.  I was supposed to make dinner, but I didn't want to leave him until he put down the keys.  Needless to say, we had frozen pizza for dinner.

And we caught a smile on camera, I think.  Mike took the above picture (as evidenced by the fact my nose is in this picture, yeah I made it onto the blog!)  It's still hard to know if he is actually smiling because he always has this delighted look on his face right before he starts screaming.  The screaming thing has been happening a lot lately.  There are distinct phases to his crying.  First stage is when he yells.  A few short loud screams.  I like to call them warning shots.  If his needs are not met within a few minutes of theses warning shots we move into the next phase which is rapid fire yelling.  This is then followed by the horrible heart wrenching  full on sob.  I experienced the full spectrum on Tuesday as we were leaving Target.  He spit out his binky, he was alone in the back and the sun was in his eyes.  Also he was sweating, again.  I drove as fast as I could.  I turned up the classical music channel.  At a stoplight, I unbuckled my seat belt and did some over the seat gymnastics in order to put the binky back in before the light changed.  He spit the binky out promptly and began really crying again.  Usually I can handle his crying.  I feel like if I am able to hold him, at least he knows I am trying, that I care that he is suffering.  But there was nothing I could do for him.  I had to drive, we were only 5 or 6 minutes from home and I had a few groceries in the car.  Also it was a billion degrees outside and no time to be in a car or in a carseat for that matter.  When we got home, he had one little tear in the corner of his eye and he had torn his face apart.  He had even scratched deep enough to draw blood.  It was the one time I didn't put mittens on his hands, and he took full advantage of it. 

Six week sour puss

Dr. Karp says that most babies go through a sort of irritable stage around this time, so I am not too worried and I don't freak out too much usually. But at the same time, when he is screaming and I can't help him because I am in the middle of doing something (usually getting myself something to eat)  I can't help thinking to myself over and over "I am selfish, I am selfish".  I know I need to take care of myself.  I know I can't always fix what ails him, but I can hold him close and tell him I am right here and pat him on the bum.  I wonder if he knows that I am doing my best when I do this.  I wonder if he feels even a little better.  I know I do.

Paper airplanes, TV and male pattern baldness

Hello everyone!  I don't know about where you are, but where I am it is bloody hot!  Junior has gained like 5 pounds because he won't go outside!  Avram spends a lot of time in just his diaper.  I wish I could spend most of my time in a diaper!  This week is week two of the new grouchy phase that he has entered.  We can get about 15 minutes of placid wakefulness from him and then he starts crying.  It has been odd because he is usually such an easy guy to get along with.  He as also decided to take up again one of his favorite pass times:  breast boxing.  The sport of breast boxing is a combination of bobbing and weaving your head, punching your mom in the breast and intermittent screaming.  All of this occurring whilst you are trying to eat.  A favorite strategy of his is to clamp down on my nipple and pull his head way back and push away with his arms.  This always ends in me forfeiting the bout.  I don't quite know what the point is to this game or how one wins, but it always seems that both Avram and I end up losing in every match.
Although the grouchiness and the battles are not the best, this new phase comes with ups also.  He has started cooing a little bit.  Not a ton, but here and there he tells me little things which I repeat back to him because that is what the internet said to do.
Also, I think he smiles.  There was the amazing smiling and laughing he did before while he was sleeping, but this is different.  In fact, yesterday, I swear he smiled at me. It was after a long and intense playtime with Mike while I was making dinner. He saw my face and seemingly beamed. It was like he hadn't seen me in months.  It made me feel really good and kind of tingly, but I can't be sure he was really smiling or if it was just his pre-crying face.  Whatever it was, it has not been captured on film, so no cute pics of that just yet.

Male Pattern Baldness

Avram was born with a full head of thick dark hair as evidenced above.  It was beautiful.  This is the current state of his hair.  All I can say is: Why?

Picture Time!

Yesterday we had a friend come over and take Avram's picture.  I was hoping to get some sweet pictures of him sleeping or possibly a candid photo or two of his new skill.  No such luck.  I really feel like he is an easy baby and have felt very blessed to have such a sweet spirit to be the first to arrive in our family, but yesterday was kind of a disaster.  First he was a grouchy crying mess, which does not for good pictures make.  Then we put him on his belly and he was feeling a little camera shy so he kept turning his head and showing his back to the camera.  We got a few shots of him in a yellow diaper and I wanted to change him into this really cute fuzzy robot diaper he has.  As I was changing him, he pooped on the photographers blanket!  Mike complains of Av pooping and peeing on him while he is changing him, but it very rarely happens to me.  He has only shot pee in his eye while I have changed him.  Nevertheless, poop on the photographers blanket.  Then he puked!  Then he cried some more.  So I paid the photographer a little extra and let her go after only an hour.  She was really nice (she is in my ward and has six kids herself).  Hopefully we'll get some cute pictures for his birth announcement out of the session, but don't be surprised if you receive your announcement with a screaming Avram picture on it.

Blankies

So a friend of mine put me on to these really great swaddling blankets from a company called aiden + anais (thanks Denise!).  They are pretty expensive, but I have found them to be well worth the money.  I bought a pack before he was born and we use them so often that I bought a second back a week or so ago.  Avram loves them because the are lightweight which is great because Avram is kind of a sweaty guy.  Mike assures me the amount of perspiration that he produces is normal, but I've never met a baby that is as sweaty as Av.  Also they are huge, so they are perfect for swaddling. They are so cute I thought I would share some pics of them. 

The one on the left has paper airplanes and the one on the right has dogs with capes flying through the clouds.  No he is not swaddled in either picture and yes the binky leash is a strangulation hazard.  I was a little disappointed when we heard we were having a boy, because I thought a girl would be easier to find way cute things for.  And while it is true that there is more sweet girl things out there, it is also true that there are very cute boy things in existence.  Also, I wouldn't trade my boy for all the girl clothes in the world.

Big TV News

Also since this is a family blog, I'll tell you about the big news for Mike and I this week.  We bought a new tv.  A flat rectangular one.  We went to the furniture store, wandered around for a little while then bought the cheapest one.  This is a big step for us.  We have been resisting this move for a long time citing things like energy cost, time wasted, money etc.  But what finally pushed us to the edge is that our families will be coming out in a few weeks and we would like to be able to watch a movie on something larger than our laptop.  All though it is fun to have two people gathered around the Mac watching an episode of Foyle's War, it is not so fun to have five.  So in the name of family togetherness we purchased a TV.  We also got an antenna so that we can watch the Olympics!  I have already watched two hours of regular tv like a normal person.  I was stunned to be able to watch anything on CBS, since they don't upload their shows onto Hulu.  Also, I saw the news for the first time in 5 years.  Granted the headline story was "man drowns in pool", but still, at least I can claim that I am keeping up with local current events.  I do feel like a bit of a sell out.  It was always so satisfying to tell people that we didn't have tv and to see the shock on their faces.  But we did it so that we can lure people over to our house, both family and potential friends.  So just think of it as a giant bribe that I keep in my basement.

Here's your cute fix... maybe.

Happy one month Birthday, Avram!

What do you know, I've kept this kid alive for a whole month!  How amazing!  He had a great birthday.  First he slept in.  Then he ate.  Then he took a nap.  Then he woke up and helped with the laundry.  Then he ate and then took a nap.  Repeat this same cycle for about 6 hours.  Around 4 pm, I got dressed and we went to TJ Maxx and found a rug for his room and then we went to Bed Bath and Beyond and got a shoe organizer which I will be using to organize all his bottles and bottle accessories.  Then we went to Ulta and got some shampoo on sale.  All the while he was a good little boy and snuggled me in his carrier which causes both of our core temperatures to raise about 40 degrees.  So since the only person that got any gifts today was me, I have decided to do a tribute to him in lieu of a toy.  Because what child wants a birthday toy more than a birthday salute?  So here are the highlights of Avram's first month.  While viewing these pictures and videos please hum "You are the Wind Beneath my Wings" to yourself to make it more meaningful.

First picture

First Bath

Visit from Grammy

The Thinking

The Sleeping

The Genius

The downs

The Ups

More ups (I couldn't decide which picture was cuter)

The Snuggles

The man and the legend -- Avram

Yes, our boy has lived a full and eventful life thus far.  We can't possibly imagine what tomorrow will bring.  Probably more sleeping and pooping.  But for now cheers to our boy for making it this far.

Welcoming myself to social media?

Alright, I have broken down and decided to create a blog for our family.  I didn't do it before because all I had to talk about was myself and I thought that would be really a boring blog.  But then on June 10, 2012 this arrived:

Avram James Gravett 6 lb 9 oz 19 in

So now I have something to talk about!  I wanted all our family and friends to be able to keep track of the little tyke at their leisure and feel like they can be part of our lives even though we are far from most of you.  Wow, I am looking at that picture of him right now and he looks like he just lost a boxing match, and I suppose labor could be construed as a fight of a sort.  Here is what he looks like right now this very second:

He was handsome before in that red, swollen, drunken baby sort of way, but now he is much handsomer. And what do you know?  He is sleeping!  Astonishing!  Also, yes he is wearing the worlds largest diaper.  Today is a washing day and all the regular diapers are currently out on the clothes line, so he is wearing this one that is 3 sizes too big.  Thank goodness for the adjustable sizing on this bad boy or the diaper would be down to his ankles.  Yes sleeping is what my boy does best.  I like to think that he got that from me.  Also he does this:

And we make him do things like this:

This is probably the most entertaining thing he does.  We call it naked tummy time.  We have video of him during these 5 to 7 minute periods of happy nudity, which I will post later.  Mike and I always have plans to do something else while we lay him on his tummy and take off his diaper.  Like finish watching a movie or putting in a load of laundry, but once that bum goes in the air, we are both mesmerized and completely useless.  Well, now you pretty much know everything so I am going to take my shower now.  Oh wait he is pooping.