New Developments

Zachary is officially 3 weeks and 2 days old today. It's been really fun to see Zach grow and learn that there is a world around him. He still needs to eat about every 2 hours and sleeps a lot but his periods of alertness are getting longer.

His 2 week appointment was on Tuesday, July 15th. The stats are as follows:
Weight: 7 lbs 15 oz (birth weight was 6 lbs 8 oz)
Height: 20.5 in (birth height was 19.75 in)
Head: 38 cm
These measurements were all pretty close to the 50 percentile.

Last Saturday (the 19th) I was changing Zach's diaper in the morning and was surprised to see that the raisin-like umbilical stump was no longer attached. (It'd fallen under him in his onesie). Zach has now joined the majority of people in the world and has a real belly button.

Zach at 3 weeks - yeah! I have a belly button!
(This is a shirt Zach was given at the hospital. It works great as a pajama shirt when it's so hot)

Also Zach can now have real baths (as opposed to sponge baths). He had his first real bath on Saturday also. He's pretty unsure how he feels about them right now. He'll probably like them more once his parents aren't so clumsy in their baby-washing abilities. Here's a picture of Zach's first bath.


This week Zachary's started getting a lot more interactive than he was (still not saying much though :) ). He's started looking at us more and showing some interest in things we hold in front of him. Below is a picture of what we call Zach's space pod. This is where he often spends his time when we're not holding him. Last night Derrick and I had a lot of fun watching him as he would stare at the hanging toys and swing his arms at them. Zach usually missed since he's still working on getting control of his arms so the few times he made contact were happy accidents.


Zach is very active in his sleep. I laid him in the pod facing vertically but he was wiggling so much that he ended up horizontal. This also shows Zach's favorite way to sleep. He needs his arms to be free so they can be above his head and his legs to be swaddled. He's showed an amazing ability to kick out of his swaddling (which leads to crying at night time until I re-swaddle him). We've had to figure out more effective ways of sealing his legs in. He kicks so much that we had to start taping the front part of his diapers because one night he kicked his diaper half off which led to quite the puddle in his bassinet.

For the last note on this post, Zach's eyes have been changing color. They started out pretty dark and slightly green tinted but this week they've changed to blue. The lighting in the picture makes Zach's eyes look darker than they are but I'm putting it in anyway. We definitely love this kid.