Jake at 2 months

I know I had rather grand dreams of updating this blog once a week with Jake's new achievements, but it's not really feasible. Partly this is because it's hard to work out what has actually changed in the course of a week, and partly this is because there are some weeks when Jake just carries on being Jake. However, once a month (or later on, once every few months) I think it's a good idea to have a post like this as a record of his (and our) progress.

Jake's biggest development by two months is the ability to focus on faces and smile at them. The first time he does it to you, your heart actually beats a little faster and you instinctively smile back at him. He's also developing preferences for certain things such as songs, places and toys which I find incredible. I know it's meant to happen but my understanding of the baby brain is terrible, so I find it amazing that part of his brain is working along the lines of "ooh, yellow monkey, I like that, activate smile!". He's spending more and more of his awake time looking around and smiling at things which makes all of the crying and grizzling worth while.

The other big change is the settling of a very basic routine which again I find fascinating. After my concerned post about his sleeping habits, he's found a rhythm whereby he's tired and ready for bed around 9 and will sleep through until around 4 or 5 depending on when we last fed him. Whilst getting up at that time is a pain, I'm now on summer holidays so I'm hoping that by the time that September rolls around we can convince to get up with me at 6 or so instead. During the day, he spends up two hours awake at a time then has a nap, wakes up hungry, feeds and repeats the cycle. These timings are little less precise but it makes it easier to work out whether he's likely to be hungry, tired or wet when he cries.

For us, I think the big change by two months is the slow realisation that this not just a stint of extended baby sitting and getting used to having Jake as part of our lives. We turn 30 today and were talking yesterday about how our lives will never be the same again while age is just an arbitrary number. You get used to the idea that your free revolves around Jake and my worries about how the frick you play with a baby disappear when he's on his changing mat wiggling and smiling away.

The big lesson for me is that constant reminder that for right now, nothing he does is "on purpose". It's hard to find the right words because I know he smiles when he likes something and cries when something is wrong, but at 4am when he starts to cry and refuse his milk, I have to repeat the mantra "he's just a baby" to help me deal with those feelings of frustration and tiredness. Once you've got that in your mind, you can deal with anything because you're then "on his side" working together to find out what's wrong and to fix it. There is no better feeling than to calm down a screaming baby (even if you are the one who made it scream!)