about Graeme's third week of life (and here are some newborn pictures!)

Graeme is three weeks old today!

He brings so much joy to our life. It's been our greatest adventure yet figuring out this parenting thing one day at a time. (If you think about more than just the day you're in, it's too much to think about!)

Graeme woke up for his middle of the night feeding at 2:15 this morning. I was holding him and glanced at the clock around 2:28. I told him how only three weeks ago we were just two minutes away from meeting him for the first time. It was pretty cool to be awake  with him at exactly 2:30am when he officially turned three weeks old. 





We took him on his first big outing on Friday. We swung by the Caribou Coffee drive-thru (he'll be pretty familiar with Caribou) and then went to Crabtree Valley Mall. The real reason for our trip to this particular mall was so that we could take Graeme for his very first visit to The Disney Store. We tried to plan our visit so that he would be awake for The Disney Store, but despite our great efforts, he slept the entire time.

Aaron was pretty excited, if you can imagine.

But Graeme, in his mouse ears, was dead to the world. Even the Disney world.

There was a SUPER nice cast member (store employee) that was so happy that we brought him and thought he was just adorable. She took our picture with a giant stuffed Mickey and gave Graeme a certificate to commemorate his visit (since the sleepyhead won't remember it otherwise!).

We might have been a little more excited than Graeme for this whole experience.

And we couldn't leave without buying Graeme his very first Mickey Mouse.

Oh, and before we left the mall, we of course had to buy him a couple of cute outfits from Baby Gap and make a stop at one of our other favorite stores that he must also love one day. No Androids or PCs around here.

We had a great week. Graeme is doing very well at night. He wakes every 3-4 hours to eat, but he goes right back to sleep afterwards. We have made the transition to the crib, and he has slept in there every night since Tuesday night. I leave the video monitor on next to my bedside so I can still see him anytime. In the morning, he typically wakes (or I wake him) to start the day between 7:15-7:45. From then on, we eat, have awake time, and take a nap in cycles throughout the day. He's a pretty easy going kid. We get along just fine.

Penny has made this transition pretty smoothly. Every once in awhile she will try to choose a very inopportune time to play (like when I'm home alone and trying to change a dirty diaper she goes and finds the squeakiest toy and paws at my legs relentlessly). She is very patient mostly though, and I think she accepts her demotion in the family well. We still love her to pieces and try to lavish attention on her when Graeme is sleeping or when we do have a free hand. She loves Graeme and the hardest thing for her is the fact that we will not let her attack his face with kisses (she's managed to sneak a few in though!).

I will leave you with a few of Graeme's newborn pictures that they took in the hospital. They send a photographer to your room to take pictures (you can decline if you want). There is no obligation to buy any of them, so we let the lady take them. When she brought back the slideshow later, there were a few that I really liked. Some were not that great. She told us we had two weeks to go online and buy them before they were unavailable. When we saw the prices, we had no intention of buying any of them!

However, when Graeme's two week birthday rolled around and we knew the pictures were to be gone by the end of the day, we went back on the site to at least watch the slideshow one last time. I think we both should have known that was a mistake...

I was holding my two-week-old son and watching this slideshow of adorable pictures from the day he was born. And of course the background music is this perfect song that made me start sobbing. Aaron just shook his head and pulled out his wallet.

He said, "They know what they're doing! They know the dads and moms will watch this again when the pictures are about to expire. They picked that song so that the moms will cry and the dads will have to buy all of these pictures! They are so smart!"

I'm embarrassed to say how much we dropped for the digital prints, but it's our first kid and he's adorable. Oh well.