The longest and the shortest week ever has passed, and Ruben is one week old. We think he continues to improve with age 🙂
It’s been quite a busy week for all three of us – despite containing very few activities (eating, pooing, cleaning, sleeping), these were repeated with amazing regularity. Ruben is becoming increasingly talented at all of these things.
We are particularly pleased with his progress on the eating and sleeping front whilst Teresa, his midwife, gets particularly excited as his poo continues to change colours and increase in quantity. Strangely we find this slightly less exciting. It does make us very pleased that we decided to go with a Nappy Laundry Service, who did their first pickup/delivery this Monday. Ah, the joy of seeing bags of dirty nappies head out the front door to be magically replaced by clean ones. Lovely.
In addition to eating, sleeping and pooing Ruben enjoyed regular swims in the birth pool with Michael (you have never seen a baby so chilled out as he is when he goes for a swim, it’s wonderful). He has been getting a visit every day from Teresa to check on his progress (which has been spot on), he’s met the local GP who also gave him a check up and the stamp of approval, and we’ve had a few visitors stop by to meet him throughout the week. All this without even leaving the house… 😉
Last night he participated in his first ever research project, which we’re doing with some people at Kings (hospital). They’re doing some research on the effects of depression in pregnancy (we’re in the control group) and last night saw Ruben have a neonatal behaviour evaluation, which involved seeing how sociable he is, and how all his reflexes are doing. The research psychologist seemed pretty impressed with his conversational skills, and all his reflexes are doing what they should do. Her overall evaluation was that he was ‘very organised’, which is pretty impressive for a week old baby. Clearly his mother’s son 😉
We’re all doing well and seeming to get a reasonable amount of sleep and developing talents for sleeping at the drop of a hat (‘sleep when the baby does’ is the mantra we try to follow but usually don’t because it’s so exciting to be able to do something other than feed him and clean his butt). He’s managing to put together a few hours of sleep at a time these days though, so he’s pretty easy to live with. Of course, this goes out the window around 2am, but you can’t have it all. Even though he’s awake a lot at night, he’s very rarely whingey and just wants to hang out and chat, which is very sweet… just a shame about the timing.
We left the house for the first time yesterday for a bit of a walk near home – Michael ‘wore’ Ruben in his sling and everyone seemed to enjoy that very much. We’ll have to gradually work our way up from a 15 minute outing if we want to continue to improve Ruben’s social skills though! Plenty of time for that.