One Month

Luke is one month old today! Even in the last week or so, I've noticed huge changes in him -- he's much more aware of his surroundings and as my sister put it, "more of a baby and less of a newborn." Most of the the time he is a happy baby, and really only cries if he has a good reason to.

Here are a few things that I don't want to forget about Luke at 1 month:

*He's grown out of all of his newborn onesies and is into the 0-3 months clothes.

*He is doing a pretty good job with his sleeping schedule -- he sleeps in 4-hour stretches at night, and usually goes right back to sleep after eating. During the day, he eats every 2.5-3 hours.

*Luke LOVES music (both when we sing to him and when have music playing) and we regularly have dance parties. His favorite song to dance to is, "Life's A Happy Song" from The Muppets soundtrack. Also, white noise will almost always calm him down immediately if he's fussy. I'm the same way -- I've always needed some sort of white noise to fall asleep too, so we have the white noise sound machine run all night long.

*He is learning to like bath time. The first few times we gave him a bath, he screamed the whole time (although he loves when we towel him off after, especially when we use the great towel that Kaylyn made him). Last night though, he was happy for pretty much the whole bath and just stared at himself in the mirror the whole time. Huzzah!

*He does not like to poop -- in fact, he recently had a 5-day stretch with no poops. Our pediatrician said it's okay as long as he is gaining weight and having lots of wet diapers, so we aren't too worried. But we are not going through our baby wipes nearly as fast as we thought we would!

*We like to play the "Hi" game with him, where we hold him close to our face and repeat the word "Hi" (it's not a very complicated game). He watches us very intently and tries to repeat it back to us (I think?). A few times, he's made the "I" vowel sound, although I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or not.

We love our Lukey and are excited to see what changes the next month will bring!

Peterson Boys

I love this picture of Luke and Richard. My two favorite boys in the world!

Luke is Here! Part II

For Part I of the story, click [here]

I was so comfortable with the epidural that I just relaxed for about 3-4 hours and let my body get ready to push. Around 5 pm, my doctor came in and broke my water and I started pushing at around 5:30. Pushing actually was not hard or painful at all (because of the epidural, obviously), which was interesting as that was the part that I was most concerned about. I pushed for about 45 minutes, and after getting an episiotomy (ouch!), Luke came gushing out! He started crying immediately which was the most beautiful sound in the world.

We cuddled with him for a couple of hours and then moved to a recovery room where we stayed for the next couple of days. The rest of the stay was mostly a blur of cuddling, sleeping, trying to learn breastfeeding and eating gross hospital food. One funny thing: I was sleeping when the birth certificate people came by to get Luke's information. The woman asked me for his first name, to which in my groggy state answered, "Luke, L-U-C-K." The woman looked at me like I was crazy, and I couldn't figure out why. Richard quickly chimed in, "L-U-K-E, not L-U-C-K." Good thing he was there, otherwise our child would be Luck Peterson.

We came home Friday night and since then we've had our ups and downs, but we're getting the hang of it! He already looks different than when he was born just a couple of weeks ago. We love our little guy so much!

Here are some pictures that I've taken on my phone (I'm so bad at taking high quality photos on our real camera):