Our little Julius,

Hello beautiful prince! You keep us busy these days, that’s for sure! We sing to you a lot because it’s one of the few things that actually manage to calm you down when you’re crying. Most of the time you cry because you swallow a lot of air when you’re drinking from your bottle (and sometimes you swallow air just because you’re excited and drinking fast and sometimes you swallow air when you’re being burped… and other times you swallow air when you’re crying)… the more air you swallow, the more you cry. It makes your tummy hurt. We’ve got a little system. It works like this:

1) First we change your diaper. You cry when we do this cause you don’t like your skin exposed to air. We do our best to keep you warm and covered in blankets or putting cloth over your sensitive parts. We usually change your diaper first cause sometimes it’s the only thing you’re crying about. But if that doesn’t work… we go to the next step.

2) Give you milk. The first two days when you were in the hospital, I breastfed you but it was too painful for me. I even had a lactation consultant come in for a couple hours and we worked on getting a good latch but you seemed to always want to grab my nipple directly. This of course, traumatized my poor nipple and I stopped. And to be honest, I think you like the bottle better for a couple reasons: 1) it means other people can feed you when mommy is sleeping and 2) you’re able to get all the milk you need whenever you want it. So anyway, we warm the baby bottle (which is an event in itself - we don’t microwave it. Instead, we microwave water in a cup, then put the bottle in the warm cup of water until it softly warms the bottle.) You love this. Usually it’s just milk that you need and it calms down your crying. However, every time we feed you, we have to burp you because it’s inevitable you’ll swallow air. There are bottles out there with bags inside them that help prevent air swallowing but you don’t seem to like them because the nipples on the bottles are too difficult for you to latch on to right now. Maybe in a month or so, we’ll see if you like them. Right now the only bottles (or pacifiers) you’ll even use are ones shaped a specific way - otherwise you’ll cry and cry until we get it for you. So after every feeding, we have to go to step 3.

3. We burp you. This is an absolute must. Your poor tummy gets to hurting and the only thing we know to do is to put you up to our shoulder and pat your back until you burp. We do this between 5 minutes to an hour, depending on how many bubbles you have in your belly. Most of the time you’ll cry at the beginning and then gradually get more comfortable as the bubbles disappear. It hurts me when you cry. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rocked you, held your head and said, “If I could take the pain away…” or “I know it hurts… tell me what you’d like.” It breaks my heart when you’re in pain and I want to be there for you in any way I can. I love you so much. Right now we’re giving you droplets of Infant’s Mylicon Gas Relief but to be honest, I’m not convinced it’s helping. I’ll keep a look out for different methods out there to help.

4. We sing to you. When we’re burping you (which takes a long time usually) and you’re crying, we’ve found a beautiful way to calm you down, and that’s to sing to you. If we sing really quietly, you’ll stop crying because you want to hear us and your voice will lower so you can hear what it is we’re saying. The softer we sing, the longer you stop crying. When we stop singing, you cry again.

Here I am singing you “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns n Roses - in a lullaby format:

5. We swing you. Sometimes we’ll put you in the baby swing which, ironically, you only seem to like if you’re about to pass gas. We usually put you in there if you’re having a tummy ache and struggling to get some gas out of your system. For some reason the swinging motion seems to relax your muscles and put you at ease which allows the farts to come out a little easier. After you’ve been in the swing for about 40 minutes or so, you’ll begin to cry which means you’ve made a doo-doo in your diaper… and so we go back to step one and repeat the process.

Right now you don’t seem to be a big fan of baths (wow the walls sure echo your vocal chords), but I’m confident one day you’ll look forward to the rub-a-dub-dub fun of baths when you’re older.

Your daddy and I alternate our sleeping schedules so when I wake up, he goes to sleep, and so forth. We’re hoping in a few days, we’ll get someone we trust to come over and watch you for a few hours so that he and I can go on a date and have a romantic time together. It’s so important to me that me and your daddy maintain some degree of intimacy even though we spend very little time together. Truth be told, I miss him very much. We haven’t even fallen asleep together in over 2 weeks and I miss our pillow talk One thing he and I both agree on is how much we love you and how important it is that we devote as much time to you during the first month of your life as possible. It’s crucial to both of us that we keep our little Julius happy

I took some photos of you and your daddy today! You’re only going to be this tiny once in your life, so we’re hoping to photograph some of our favorite moments. We hope that one day you’ll look back on all of this and see a glimpse of how you looked when you came into this world. You sure are a beauty!

Love
Mom

P.S. On Friday, we plan on doing some photos of you, me, and daddy together!