When they say "everything changes after you have a baby," this is the truth. After a baby, you are automatically put into that club, the "had a baby" club. I always noticed it with my coworkers, how different I was because I didn't have a kid. We had a fur baby (our cat Fred), but of course that's not quite the same as birthing a baby.
Everything changes. Everything. The way you think. Suddenly you're thinking about all sorts of protection for your child. How you need to make sure that by the time they're crawling and walking, you better have soft corners on all the furniture. You better learn to keep bad things out of reach because you know anything they can get their hands on will be going into their mouth.
Of course, we're not at that stage yet where he's putting things in his mouth, or even crawling. He wants to crawl, but right now he's just working on getting his neck strong enough to hold his head up. We've been giving him tummy time, and he kicks his legs and moves his arms like he's swimming. He'll lift his head for a minute but then it's back down and he's eating the blanket.
6 weeks old. So hard to believe. Hard to believe that 2 months ago, my stomach was an extra 40 inches outwards, I had a growing person inside, and now, NOW this little bundle of joy is here in our world, we can hold him anytime, we can see his precious face and kiss his little hands.
And I keep reflecting back on our days of labor. Yes, I said days. This post isn't going to be a birth story, so don't worry, no gruesome details just yet, hehe. But a little bit about how we were hoping for a home birth. I'm not sure if I made this clear in my other blog posts about us having a home birth: we are not against hospitals, we feel they are great in the case of an emergency. We are not against anyone having their baby in a hospital if that is where they feel most comfortable. We only hoped for a healthy home birth, which in today's day and age is just as medically advanced as having a baby in the hospital (as long as everything is normal).

Unfortunately, things never go as planned during labor. Thankfully we had many options and backup plans and were ready for anything. We ended up getting transferred to the hospital after 40 hours of labor and delivering a healthy baby boy after 48 hours total. God had our backs (as He always does) and wrapped his arms around us as we feared the worst.
 |
Ethan teaches Ben a thing or two. |
And here we are, 6 weeks later, with a crying, hungry, poopy, and sometimes smiling baby. He's starting to sleep more during the night (hooray!), starting to smile more when we talk to him, trying to talk though finding it difficult to get sounds out, is confused about the raspberry sound (you know when you put your lips together to give someone a raspberry on their tummy and it makes that funny noise...yeah he doesn't know whether to be scared or to like that sound).
<3 <3 I love that smile. <3 <3