1 Month with Lola

So today Lola is one month old. It's been a busy, tiring month, but Max has gone to "school" the past three days and we realized how much easier it is with her than it was with him. Granted we had a lot more drama with Maximo, but we're much more relaxed now than we were with him. I will say a major difference we notice is not having help. Not the nanny really- I don't think Gloria held Max for at least a month after he arrived home ( Yes, I'm a little nuts, I know.) But the laundry... oh, God the laundry and just keeping up with the house (and ours is tiny!). This kid spits up and projectile poops like no other. So, if we were going to have future children (WHICH WE ARE NOT PLANNING ON DOING), being near family or having house help would certainly be a necessity. Even though it wasn't really planned this way, having John home for these three weeks has been PERFECT. I can't imagine holding it together otherwise. Okay, enough of my mom woes... Onto the little one:

Lola's eating, pooping and sleeping. THE END.

No, to be a little more descriptive, she's doing all those things well, but there is a bit more.

We are doing things a little differently this time, mostly due out of necessity, and I'm trying to just go with the flow. In Japan, most (if not all) families sleep as a family or at the least the babies sleep with the mom. Co-sleeping is pretty common outside of the US, although not super popular in the US. Our choices in our small Japanese apartment, are:
1. Lola sleeps with us.
2. Lola sleeps with Max.

Since Max isn't doing so hot with going to bed as it is, and I'm not super comfortable with him and her in the same room at this point (for example, we thought he went to bed two nights ago, when I heard something in the backroom about an hour and a half after he went to bed - he was naked from the waist down, in our bed, with all the pillows off the bed and had sabotaged John's chapstick, again), we opted for number 1. "Us" has turned into "me". John needs more sleep since he is actually returning to work, so he's on the couch or in Max's room and really I feel like I'm sleeping more/better just being able to easily feed her and go back to sleep. I feel a lot more rested than I did with Max. With Max, I felt like my world was totally rocked for the first couple of months he was home. This one, I'm tired, but functioning well (with a nap when I can).

She's sleeping for 3 hours at a clip at night, sometimes less (sometimes, I can't even tell you, I just know when she cried, she was fed.) But, she does seem to know her days from her nights and wakes up to eat, then easily goes back to sleep. She has gone almost 4 hours between feedings when we're out and about and she's in the Baby Bjorn; she falls asleep almost instantly in that thing.

Oh, the noise. Lola cries when she is unhappy, but this isn't super often - usually just when she's hungry, but is she is so NOISY! She grunts and groans all the time and snores while she's sleeping. We don't know if she's working gas through her little body, but holy moly, she can make a lot of noise. She has a fussy time at least once a day, where she is up for about 3-4 hours (usually perfectly timed when we're trying to have dinner and/or get Maximo bathed and in bed). She acts like she's hungry, but doesn't really eat. She wiggles and fusses and just seems uncomfortable and will settle for small chunks of time either being carried around or with a pacifier. We've come to expect this time each day, so we can deal with it... and luckily this isn't happening in the middle of the night.

She's starting to really follow things (toys and us) with her eyes and I got a half-smirk the other day when she was waking up and I was talking to her. She's becoming less of a blob and more of a babe each day.

She's starting to fill out a bit and we're curious as to her weight now (she has her first check up next week). We're finding it hard to clean out her rolls - as Max didn't have any rolls for the first 6 months of his life. Her eyes look like they'll be blue like her brother's and father's. She's got lots of spiky hair, which Max lost at 4 months and looked like a cancer patient for a couple of months. She has a huge raised raspberry high on her left thigh (I need to get a picture of it). It's pretty big and I'm not sure if it'll grow with her or stay the same size, so it'll appear much smaller when she's bigger. Luckily it's pretty hidden, although she may want to get it removed when she's older.

Today, we applied for her passport, registered her birth as a US citizen abroad, and applied for her social security number at the US Consulate in Osaka. Although it was a bit of travel and a pain in the ass with all the stairs at the Osaka train station and the stroller, it went well and they are going to mail us her passport in the next 4 weeks. Below is one of the "out takes" of the 50+ pictures I had to take to get her passport photo - eyes open and facing directly forward is HARD to accomplish with a newborn. This one was cute, but her head was a bit cut off.