My Baby Daniel

I wrote this on November 6th but didn’t have pictures to pair with it, so I’m publishing this on December 14th with updates in italics

• Daniel is BIG! He has put on a pound a week so far, weighing in at 13 lbs at his 6 week checkup. He’s in the 90th percentile for both weight and length, and I suspect his head is up there as well. 17 pounds at 11.5 weeks. I feel like I’m holding a toddler on my lap. Sometimes I have to check myself because I think he’s “behind” because he’s not rolling over, etc. Then I remember he’s not even three months old!

Here he is in his carseat:


and here’s Caitlyn at 13 months in the same carseat:


Yep, I’m already looking for a bigger one to buy.

• He has several chins and adorable lips.



• He has thigh rolls. This is new for our little family and it makes baths take longer.
• Unless he just had a bath, he typically smells of cheese. Sorry Dude, it’s true.
• He very, very rarely spits. His sisters were both geysers and our hypothesis is they might have been similarly sized if they had just gone ahead and digested all the milk I fed them.
• He has belly button issues. First, he had an “umbilical granuloma” which is basically a belly button that never heals after the cord falls off. If I had to guess, it was caused by me inadvertently yanking off his umbilical cord stump before it was ready (it was stuck to his onesie when I changed him in the middle of the night. Off came the onesie, off came the stump. Oops.) After a treatment with silver nitrate in the doctor’s office it finally closed up but it meant he couldn’t wear pants for nearly a month.
• He rarely cried for the first several weeks of life. Instead, he showed his disgruntlement by honking like a goose.
• Then he started crying a lot.
• When he cries, it is a HARD cry.
• On what I’m sure is a related note, he developed an enormous umbilical hernia. This is typically benign and closes on its own, though his is large enough I expect it’ll need to be closed surgically when he’s two or three.

You can often see his guts just below the skin, moving around. You can see the ridge from his small intestine in this shot:

It is big, especially when he cries. I think it has shrunk quite a bit though just in the last month since these pictures were taken, so perhaps it will close on its own.

• He smiled a lot to himself starting just a few days after his birth, but he smiled at me for the first time when I started to sing “I am like a star shining brightly” when he was six weeks old and I was putting him down for a nap. One of my favorite things about Daniel is that he smiles with his eyes at least as much as his mouth. In fact, I can always tell a smile is coming by the look in his eyes.



• He started giggling at 10 weeks and I can’t get enough of it. True to form, he picked the best time to start. I was having a rough day in the trenches and that sound was a balm to my soul.



• He is going about 7 hours between feedings most nights, but I rarely catch more than three hours of sleep at a time since he likes to start his nights around 7pm. He then wakes up at 2, 5, and 8.
• He loves to be swaddled and sung to and I get nothing but smiles when I lay him down for a nap.

I love having a little new baby at Christmas time!

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