Kaden {3 Months}

Technically he is 10 days past his 3 month mark, but I did take the pictures on the right day, and that’s what matters.

He is a little stingy with smiles.  Well, he smiles a lot when you are right next to him and smiling at him and he’s in a good mood.  But when I’m standing two feet away from him with a big camera in my face, he doesn’t really want to smile no matter how many noises I make.  I had Dylan and Sadie trying to get him to smile at me, but he would look at them to smile.  Oh well, there’s always next month for smiles.

Some of his looks crack me up.

I always try to get a belly shot because they are forced to open their eyes wide and stretch out their neck so it's a nice angle of them.  Unfortunately they hate lifting their heads and always look strained.  Still, it cracks me up.

Sometimes when we go shopping, he just sits in his carseat and stares up at me the whole time and he’s so good and so cute I have to pull out my phone and snap a picture.

And sometimes he’s so cuddly sweet that I have to try and take a picture then too.  This was at the car dealership waiting for an oil change.

And he’s always happy in his bath.  He just stares at me and kicks around.  Gosh, he’s cute.

We were getting ready to say family prayers and I came into the living room to this.  All the kids were doting on him while he laid on the floor by Ryan.  The kids sure love him.

Sunday Feb 1^st Kaden woke up with some swollen eyes.  At first I thought they were just sleepy, but they were a little goopy and they didn’t get better.  He looked so sad.

This was when Dylan had his cough but nobody else had really gotten it yet.  Kaden’s nose was sometimes stuffy and he couldn’t sleep very well so we were suctioning it, but there were no real signs of illness.  Until his eyes.  There was obviously something wrong so I called the Dr and took him in that day.  I saw Dr Groberg and he called in a prescription for antibiotic eye drops, no big deal.  But while I was there, he told me about how they are seeing SO MANY sick kids and there’s this nasty bronchiolitis going around and that he is afraid that Kaden is going to come down with it, like the eyes were just the beginning of it and the next day he was going to be deathly ill.  I’m not kidding.  He told me I should make an appointment for the next day just to be safe because with how many kids they are getting every day, he wasn’t sure there would be any open times to be seen, and he was THAT sure that Kaden would end up super sick.  I was looking at Kaden kicking around happily on the table next us with no signs of distress.  Seriously?  But then again, Dylan did have a cough.  And the Dr was saying that in older kids it’s not too bad, just cold symptoms.  But in the little ones, it gets bad and they can’t eat because they can’t breathe and they get listless.  And Kaden at 2 ½ months was just at the wrong age because he’s not getting antibodies from my milk anymore but he’s not making his own yet.

But then I got confused, because bronchiolitis is a viral infection, and there’s not much they can do to treat it other than give fluids and oxygen as needed.  And he was thinking his eye infection was indicative of a pending illness, but he was prescribing antibiotics for his eyes, which treat bacterial infections…  He explained that they always give the eye drops for infected eyes because they are harmless and so it’s better to cover all the bases.  I still wasn’t convinced, but who am I to argue with the Dr?  So I made an appointment for the next afternoon, assuming I would just call in and cancel it in the morning when I woke up and he was perfectly fine still.

And that’s what happened.  He continued to eat well and sleep well.  His eyes took a couple of days but they did finally get all cleared up with the drops.  (He did not like the drops.  I think they must sting a little or something because he would scream when I put them in, poor thing.)  But his eyes went back to his happy, smiling eyes that I love.

Then it was like a week later when Sadie and Kaden both came down with the cough.  It was super sad.  But I knew that as long as he was breathing and eating he would be okay, and he always was.  The cough lasted for a good 10 days in all my kids.  Boy am I glad to be done with that.

At 3 months, Kaden is still not on a napping schedule at all.  On good days he will take a 30-60 minute nap in the morning, and then a 2-3 hour nap in the afternoon, and a couple more catnaps as the night goes on.  But most days are not like that.  Most days I am dragging him along to the grocery store, or to take Kylee to gymnastics, etc, etc.

But he is sleeping well at night.  For the last few weeks he has been dying to go to bed around 9-9:30, so I feed him and put him down.  And he has been waking up around 7:30-8 every day.  Consistently.  10 hours every single night.  It’s seriously crazy, and I feel a little guilty whenever people ask how he’s sleeping and reminisce on their sleepless nights with new babies.  I have NOTHING to complain about there. (It had been weeks of him sleeping 10 hours and then last night he woke up at 3:30.  But still.)  Though I have had to change wet sheets from other kids a few times this last month, which is weird because we hadn’t had accidents for so long.  And I’ve been woken because of nightmares.  But even when Kaden was coughing, he usually slept really well.  And he goes down so easily.  Even if I lay him down and he squirms and opens his eyes, I will leave him.  Then I will watch him on the video monitor and he will often squirm around with eyes wide open for quite awhile, but eventually fall asleep without making a peep.  That is SO NICE!

There were quite a few nights a month or so ago when he had problems going back to sleep in the middle of the night.  I think one week was because of his shots (I may have wrote about that last month) and he did it again when he was coughing.  He would be eating and falling asleep, and then cough and gag and be completely awake again.  He coughed so much :(  But I can handle those nights because otherwise I get plenty of sleep! (When I’m not staying up until midnight trying to blog, that is.)

Because he sleeps so much at night, I feed him every two hours during the day.  There are times when he naps for longer so he goes three hours, or maybe even close to four.  But generally, if he’s awake and it’s possible, I feed him every two hours.  I feel like he needs it since he goes so long in the night.  He’s kind of a mama’s boy, and I think this might be why.  He’s hungry a lot.  Or tired.  So I feel like everyone else doesn’t really get to see him happy and cute.  He’s tired or hungry around other people.

He spits.  Quite a bit.  Sometimes more than others.  I’m not sure how he compares to my other kids, if I had to guess I would say similar to Kylee.  Not ALL the time, but most of the time and sometimes really drenches us.  While he was sick, he full-on retched and emptied his stomach a few days in a row after his morning feed.  It was freaking me out.  I hate when he spits up a significant amount.  My body works hard to make that milk and he’s just wasting it.  I can’t pinpoint a reason or a trigger.  I would say he’s just getting too full because I have too much milk in the mornings, but it’s not always in the mornings and I don’t always feed him that much in the morning.  I don’t know.  But I don’t want to medicate him and he seems to still be gaining weight so I guess I will just not worry about it.

He still likes his pacifier, but he isn’t obsessed with it.  It’s enough to distract him sometimes.  And when he’s tired and you’re rocking him, he will munch on it.  He likes to such on his hands.  I remember going into his room in the middle of the night when he was crying once and he had been sucking on his hands because his hands were really cold and his face was all cold where he spread his slobber all over it.  I turned up the heater at night, and it was then that he started sleeping consistently through the night so I’m guessing it was just a little chilly for him since he obviously can’t keep a blanket on himself.  Now he stays warm.  Anyway, he sucks on his fists quite a bit, and we’ve seen him with his thumb in his mouth maybe twice.  But he hasn’t decided that he likes his thumb.  And he doesn’t take a pacifier at night ever.  If I try to put a pacifier in when he’s done eating he gets mad and ends up awake and mad.  I will give it to him for naps, though.  It will be interesting to see if he ends up latching on to the pacifier as he gets older, or if he just won’t care about it.

I remember at 3 months babies generally start trying to use their hands more purposefully and will reach for toys.  So I decided I had better pull out some toys for him!  We hadn’t had any sort of toys out at all until a few days before he hit 3 months.  I put a toy on his carseat strap and we pulled out the little floor “gym” (I think that’s what they call it).  My friend Liz gave it to us and it has a little piano where his feet kick and a mirror hanging down and we added a few more toys hanging down.  He likes it, and the kids like to lay with him and help him turn on the piano or pull on his toys.  It’s cute.  He still hasn’t really gotten the hang of grabbing toys, but if something is sitting in front of him, he will slowly inch his little fists towards it.  And he occasionally ends up grabbing one of the rings hanging down.

He really likes music.  I was feeding him and he was mostly done and I was watching American Idol so I started singing along and he stared at me and studied me and smiled at my singing.  Often when he’s fussy I will turn on Pandora as loud as my phone will go and it often at least calms him so he’s just a little fussy and not screaming.  And he loves the loud music at church.  Of course, like any baby, he loves all loud noises.  I’ve told Ryan if he won’t calm down for anything else, turn on my blow-dryer.  Works every time.