Southerners in SoCal: Life of Wilder: Week Three

What a little chunky monkey! Wilder seems to get bigger and change a little bit every day. I can't believe the difference between this photo and his 1 Week photo! He is so much more alert these days too. He loves looking at Paul and me and will smile at us if we make funny noises/faces at him, so of course we do this as often as possible. Good thing he has no other parents to compare us to or he would wonder what kind of crazy family he was born into. You should have seen the ridiculousness that went on trying to get him to look at the camera for this picture :) He is obsessed with the dots on his crib bedding so it's been impossible to get him to look at me for the past two pictures, but I had Paul here to help with this one so it turned out pretty successful....

Unlike the following photos. I tried to get creative one day last week and take some professional-looking baby "portraits." Now, I consider myself to be a fairly good photographer. I mean, I almost went to art school on a photography scholarship before deciding to go to MS State with Paul. But babies are apparently a little bit more ~~difficult~~ impossible to photograph than trees and flowers. I will never let Wilder live down these photos because of the trauma he put me through trying to capture his angelic little self and then discovering that this is what I had come up with. I'm morbidly embarrassed of them because they are seriously hideous but they are just too hilarious not to share. I'm counting on the fact that we all know he's way cuter than this, so, behold, my "Uncooperative Baby" series:

"Perfect Time to Spit Up"

"Up Close and Personal with the Chair Cushion"

"Derrrr"

"Total Apathy"

I have nothing but respect for photographers, such as Bill Dabney Photography and Grace Images, who can capture great baby/kid photos and I have nothing but pity for the photographer I'm eventually going to have to hire to capture my unruly "Wild Man."

So anyway, let's see, what has been going on this week? Well, the biggest new development occurred the night of my last post. We were so tired (no pun intended) of not getting any sleep so we decided to try my mom's suggestion of putting Wilder in his crib to sleep at night. He was fine for the first, oh, five minutes but once he realized that we weren't coming back he started screaming his head off. After about 15 minutes we decided that if he was going to cry himself to sleep it probably wasn't going to be within an acceptable time period or before the neighbors called the police on us, but we weren't giving up that easily, so we went back in, swaddled him up nice and snugly, and laid him back down in the crib. Again, he soon began his screaming routine (how is it possible for babies to make so much noise??) but, again, we weren't about to give up (sleep is a very important part of our lives) so we went back in, stuck a pacifier in his mouth, crossed our fingers, and... bingo! That was the magic combination: swaddle + pacifier + oh yeah, and ocean sounds = happily sleeping baby in crib. Hooray! He's been sleeping in there for a week now and we will never look back.

This has been a really hard week because Paul has been virtually MIA trying to finish up the quarter. We calculated it today and, over the past two weeks, he has spent over 200 hours on projects for school. He finished yesterday though and we are SO ridiculously happy to have him all to ourselves for the next three weeks! He has missed Wilder so much and I've missed him being here to help. Out of necessity, I've kind of started to figure out this whole "mother" thing this week though. We're working on getting in a routine and on a schedule and I'm beginning to figure out which cries mean what, how to entertain a 3-week-old, etc. I've discovered that Wilder gets fussy in the late afternoon between about 4:00 and 6:00 and truly the only way to comfort him is to spend the entire time either outside or walking around the house with him strapped to me in the Mobi wrap or the baby backpack. Incidentally, his fussy time today just happens to coincide with me trying to write this post so I'm now standing at the kitchen counter typing with him strapped to my front and every few minutes I have to do a little dance or walk in place to get him back to sleep causing this post to take a retardedly long time to write. I think that pretty much sums up what this "mother" thing is all about.

In other news, Wilder's "Lovie" (Paul's mom) gets here tomorrow and I know she is just going to eat him up! We can't wait to see her :)

Anyway, here are some pictures from this week that, I think, more accurately portray my sweet Wilder's cuteness:

Go! State! Go State!