We are terrible bloggers!

Megan here! Alright, I will admit that we are not particularly diligent bloggers. It's always forgotten with the huge list of other things to get done! Having a baby in need of eating, changing, bathing, or entertaining takes up a surprisingly large amount of time! We will try to post at least a few times a month - I swear!

Watching Silas grow and change is amazing. Every week he's doing something new that just blows our minds. He's grasping for things now and having little sporadic bursts of laughter. His favorite things to do right now are to stick his tongue out and to hang out on his changing table kicking his legs around completely naked. I sometimes get a very loud protest when I have to dress him again!

Early intervention came last week with our developmental specialist and the director of the program. The director, who was super nice, couldn't say enough good things about Silas! She was really impressed with his movements and social interactions with us. We were very happy to hear that from someone official! Early intervention will be visiting with Silas every 1-2 weeks for the next 6 months to a year. We are happy to have specialists to give us suggestions of how to help Silas meet necessary milestones. I'm having fun doing right and left brain connecting movements with him during diaper changes! I even make up little songs about it (shocking, I know).

We are working hard to keep him on a nighttime routine to try and encourage longer stretches of sleep. He gets a bath (some nights), baby massage, PJs, and a bottle or nursing, then bed by 7:30. It's working out pretty well so far! He usually fusses on and off for an hour or so, but last night he slept from 8PM to 1:15AM straight! That may sound like not long, but it was heaven for us! He then just eats and goes right back to sleep, so it's not too bad. He then usually wakes up 3-4 hours later, and gets up for good around 7AM. It's keep us functional, but I can't wait for 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep! When he gets bigger and can eat more it will happen.

Grandpa Warren visited Friday to Saturday and my mom is coming tomorrow until Tuesday. Silas likes to take snuggly naps on all of these visitors!

Silas has a quick doctor's appointment on Tuesday to get his synagis shot (antibodies for the super-scary RSV) and early intervention is coming on Friday. Otherwise, just lots of songs, smiles, playing, and love!

I'm sharing a couple great pics from bath and bedtime tonight!

February

I realize that we've been delinquent about blogging for the past few weeks, so this will probably be a long catch-up post. I can't believe it's February, which means that Silas has been home for more than a month! Our household entered the new month with a bang, as poor Megan was completely down for the count with some awful bug on Saturday. That meant that Silas and I hung out on the couch for most of the day, watching all of the shows on Tivo that I've missed. Well, I watched and he slept on me under the new blanket made by my cousin Chessie (thanks again!!).

Sleeping- our favorite topic of late. I think Megan and I have both become acclimated to sleeping only 3 hours at a time, which is slightly disturbing. Silas did not nap AT ALL yesterday, but did mostly 3 hour stretches in the night. There just seems to be no real pattern to what he's doing, but then we haven't imposed a schedule on him yet either. We've read and heard different things- some friends resisted sleep training for a long time but then finally were happy they did it, some started their newborn on a sleep plan immediately, some parenting sites say to wait until the baby is 6 weeks old (with adjusted age Silas is not quite there yet) etc. etc. We haven't decided what to do yet, but I think some consistency would be nice!

Early Intervention came last week to set out a plan for the next 6 months. One of the main goals is to help us understand where Silas is in terms of development, and what we should expect. We can't really go by the "typical" baby timeline because yes, he's been out of the womb for 4 months now, but only reached a full term 5 weeks ago. We're pretty impressed with him so far, haha, but it will be nice to have some sort of benchmarks for him, and to know what things we can do to help him.

Silas has had some important milestones in the last few weeks- being home for a month, being 4 months old, smiling at his mommies for the first time (we cried), and having a giant diaper blow out while sitting on my lap! (Nonnie was visiting at the time and thought that was hilarrrrrrrrious.) Megan got him to mimic her sticking out her tongue, which he now does all the time. He seems to be "talking" much more now- in between crying and his noises that alternately sound like a baby goat, a goose, a cat and a dinosaur, he's making many more babbling noises. The soundtrack in our house is pretty funny on a daily basis.

Cooper is still obsessed with the baby, and barks at us if he's crying. On Friday night we put Silas to bed upstairs, and came downstairs, leaving the dog on our bed. (It's his favorite place; he's so lazy.) We could hear the baby start to cry through the monitor, but before we could even make a move to go to him, Cooper came flying down the stairs to find us and tell us something was wrong with his baby! It's ridiculous. At least he doesn't want to eat Silas, and as you can see, lets himself be used as a baby pillow.

We have some various appointments coming up- more ophthalmologists, an otolaryngology specialist and our regular pediatrician visit. The otolaryngology appointment is in response to a letter we received from Children's Hospital shortly after Silas had his PDA ligation surgery. Apparently, there is a high incidence of vocal fold nerve injury following that procedure, so researchers at Children's are reaching out to the parents of patients who have gone through that surgery so the kids can get screened for any problems. I figured we might as well check out everything, so we made the appointment. Speaking of research, we received the video from the women who were performing the brain study in the NICU. For those of you who don't know, we let Silas be used for science, muahahahahah! :) Really though, it was a totally non-invasive procedure that will help researchers understand the blood flow in the brains of preemies, and might help some other kids in the future. The researchers decided to use Silas as their spokesbaby, because he's awesome, obviously, and their work has been accepted to an academic video journal. He's only in the video for about 15 seconds, but it's pretty neat. We'll share the link when it goes live! It is strange to see him so small in the video, since he's now our giant 11lb baby.