Baby Baldness

There are a few of you that noticed James' lack of hair on his head.  The bath picture in particular makes him look totally bald!  I thought I'd post some more pictures that prove he has at least a few hairs, although not arranged in any sort of sensical manner. :)

Look carefully...there's some peach fuzz!  Don't get distracted by the BLUE EYES.

He's got a nice bald spot in the middle of the back of his head...

...right above what appears to be a mullet-in-progress. :)

Don't forget about the long wispy hairs on the top!

And full body cuteness, just for fun. 

Updates!

Sleeping:

There is much improvement in this department in the Davidson household...at least over the course of the past three nights.  Three nights makes a TREND, right??  Three nights ago:  James ate between 7-8pm and woke up around 2:30am.  I went in, changed a diaper, but him in his bouncy seat with his pacifier, and left the room. I hoped and prayed he would go back to sleep.  If he was starving, this trick wouldn't work.  Apparently he wasn't all that hungry because he went back to sleep and slept until around 5am.  Woohoo!! Two nights ago:  Same story.  Ate between 7-8pm, slept until 12:30am.  Diaper changed, moved to bouncy seat with pacifier, went back to sleep until 5am.  Last night---this is where it gets good---he ate at the normal evening time and then slept until 5am!!  No diaper change or bouncy seat or pacifier required!  I'd like to say that I slept that whole time, too, but I didn't.  I went to bed about 9:30pm and then woke up at 4am in an absolute panic because I hadn't heard him all night long.  I tip-toed into his room and put my hand on his chest to feel him breathing.  He was sound asleep, sucking on his thumb.

I do believe his new-found love of sucking his thumb may be the key to him sleeping through the night.  We shall see...  For now, though, I'm so well rested today I don't know WHAT to do!  I haven't slept 6.5 consecutive hours since long before James was born.  Sleep most definitely is not overrated. :)  You people have just been saying that to me to make me feel better about missing out!

Belly Button:

I give you James' new and improved belly button!

Hopefully it is all healed up now.  There's no more oozing or weirdness to it, just a small pinkish part where it is finishing healing (she said hopefully).  

So, you know what that means...

BATH TIME!!

He doesn't look very thrilled with bath time here, but believe me, he loved it.  I'm going to have to master the art of giving him a bath in the tub versus on the counter top.  It's so much trickier in the tub!  Just getting him out of the tub into a dry towel is a test of coordination.  He's so slippery!  Or "slickery", as one of my nieces used to say.

Work:

As expected, things are slowly improving on the work-front.  Scott and I are getting into more of a routine on mornings that we both work.  I have taken a couple of days off to help get our feet under us.  We're getting there.  If James really does start sleeping through the night, the quality of our lives will improve drastically. :)  Figuring how and when to pump at work is still tricky.  Some days it's no problem.  Other days are extremely busy and it's difficult to find 15 minutes to leave the unit.  I'm not sure that will get better with time.  I will have to find time to pump when I can!  So far James doesn't seem to mind going back and forth between bottles and nursing.  I'm really glad about that.  Before I went back to work, I thought if he gave up nursing and preferred bottles, I would just pump and bottle feed him for a while.  Now that I realize what a PITA it is to pump and bottle feed and wash pump parts and bottle parts, my story is changing.  We would switch to formula pretty quick-like if he stopped nursing.  I don't know how women pump and bottle feed for months and months.  Kudos to you ladies.  That is a challenging task, to say the least.  

I have enjoyed NOT being pregnant at work.  As you can see from this picture, my belly was LARGE.  It got in the way a lot.  If I dropped something on the floor, I could hardly reach it (and breathe) to pick it up.  I could only get so close to the isolettes, where the majority of our babies are.  Now I can reach behind the isolettes, pick up stuff off of the floor, walk quickly without waddling and all sorts of other fun things!

These are all the updates I can think of at the moment.  Is there a category I missed?

Comparing

This motherhood thing is no joke.  And I'm only three months into it!  One of the challenges I've experienced already is the comparison game.  It starts even in pregnancy.

Somebody else didn't drink caffeine while they were pregnant, but I did.

I feel like a bad mom already.  I worry my kid will have three heads.

Now that the one-headed kid has arrived, the comparisons go through the roof.  So-and-so's kid can hold his head up already.  My kid can't quite do it yet.  OH NO!  HE'S BEHIND!!  James doesn't sleep through the night yet.  Johnny-sleeps-a-lot does.  ACK!  MY KID IS DEVELOPMENTALLY DELAYED!  I read books to James about once a week, if I had to guess a frequency.  It just happens when it happens.  Other people have an established bed time routine including story time and such (so I'm told).  Somehow I feel like not-as-good-of-a-mom because we don't have our routine all figured out just yet.  Also, since we don't read books every day, I'm pretty sure he's not getting into Harvard.

In my head, I should be an expert at everything I do, including motherhood, the very first time I do it.  Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

A dear friend described one of her family members like this:  Her plate gets full very quickly.  What that means to me is that it doesn't take a whole lot to overwhelm her.  As soon as I heard her say that I realized that I'm the same way.  My plate fills up pretty fast, too.  If I have a doctor's appointment and a lunch date, I consider it a full day.  My dear friend (MDF for short) is nothing shy of Superwoman, in my opinion.  She's a wife, mother of grown children, full time employee, active church member (including small group once/week), elderly caregiver and entrepreneur.  Yet MDF always makes time for lunch with me.  If I have an appointment on the same day that she wants to do lunch, I'm not sure I can make it.  MDF, however, will have ten different scheduled things on the day we do lunch.  Somehow she still makes me feel like she has all the time in the world.  I find myself comparing me to her. Why can't I juggle things like she can?   This week I finally became aware of the fact that I am comparing me to her.  Passing judgment on myself because I'm not MDF.  I'm struggling with balancing going back to work and caring for a child.  Just one child, mind you.  (Mrs. Duggar would laugh at me.)  MDF wouldn't have trouble juggling one child and work.  But then it hit me:  I'm NOT MDF.  I'm me.  And as such, I'm not an expert yet at the motherhood thing.  Definitely not an expert at the working mom thing.  It's cruelty to compare myself to anyone else, so I need to stop doing it.  Just because lots of other people have more complicated lives, it doesn't make my life a cake walk.  This is hard TO ME.  And that's okay.  Acknowledge and move forward.  I'm choosing to quit spinning my wheels in the "but other people can juggle more things than I can" mud.

So today I'm breathing a bit easier, allowing myself a little grace.  My house is messy.  The toilet is some kind of color that it hasn't been in my whole married life.  The pile of mail on the table has stuff from June in it.   But I do have a very happy, healthy baby boy.  I have a husband that is in the trenches with me, not behind enemy lines hurling accusations at me.  I have a gracious mother who is providing childcare for us so I can work.  I have two fuzz-butts (what my dad calls my cats) that don't really pitch in and help around the house, but they do improve the quality of my life.  There's much for which to be grateful.  With all this new-found free time since I'm not wasting time comparing myself to others, who KNOWS what I can accomplish!

ps.-- This article on babycenter.com addresses some of what I was talking about.  Apparently I'm like a lot of other moms in my comparison-tendencies.  Good to know...