Six Weeks

I know I say this all the time, but I can't believe Claire is already six weeks old! It's doubly unbelievable when I think about when Elsa was her age—that's what seems like six weeks ago.

Anyway, not surprisingly, we're really focused on sleep around here lately. Who's getting it, who isn't, when it's happening, and how it was achieved. Claire recently started sleeping in her own bedroom instead of in the Pack-and-Play in our room, and the transition has gone okay. The challenge is always to get her down for the night. We're basically following the same routine as we did when Elsa was this age—waiting for her to fall asleep in the swing or while we're holding her, then attempting to very carefully transfer her upstairs to the crib. She usually wakes up at least a little, so the process sometimes has to be repeated. But once she's finally sleeping, she generally does fine the rest of the night, going back down with relative ease after she wakes up to eat. And I think she's doing slightly better at falling asleep in her crib than Elsa was at her age.

Claire's daily awake time has increased as well, but not on any kind of schedule. Lately she tends to be awake for about five or six hours at a time (which seems like a lot for a six-week-old!) and then she's basically asleep for the rest of the day (other than waking up to eat, of course). The problem is that there's no predicting when her five or six hours of being awake might occur. So, if she suddenly wakes up and is bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 10 p.m., we know we're in for a delightful night. : ) Claire's eating habits have also been extremely variable—she'll eat every 4, 5, or even 6 hours during her sleepy periods, then while she's more awake, she tries to make up for lost time by eating every two hours. There's just no telling what she'll do and when.

Finally, Claire has definitely been smiling, but those smiles still aren't the most frequent occurrence. In fact, Bob hasn't even seen it yet. But Elsa certainly has—in fact, she seems to be the one Claire smiles at the most! So those two are already getting along great, which of course I love to see. Every time I hold Claire on my lap and start trying to coax a smile out of her, Elsa comes over and begs, "Can I look at Claire? Can I can I can I???" (By "look" at her, she means that she wants me to turn Claire so that she's facing Elsa.)

Unfortunately, Claire's been really congested for the past week or so (she got Elsa's runny nose from a few weeks ago), and I think that's probably making her less inclined to smile. Hopefully that congestion will clear up soon—at the moment Claire sounds like a snorty little piglet. But I think it sounds a lot worse than it actually is, since it hasn't kept her from sleeping or eating, and she hasn't been any crabbier than usual.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on getting that elusive first picture of her smiling. I think a gummy, chubby-cheeked smile will go a long way towards softening that tough-girl-with-a-mohawk image Claire's been cultivating.