The Furless Lorenz: 5 months, 4 weeks

Over the last couple of months, my enrollment for night school had been waaaay down, allowing me to more easily update this blog and how things are going with Max. Last week, I had an influx of new students, and a lot of them are pretty needy, so my posts may be shorter as I work with getting them acclimated to the courses they are taking, and build up their confidence to get through a chunk of work before needing my help. I'll continue to update while on my 20 minute pumping break!

Max is now 25 weeks old. Next week, my baby will be 6 months old. It's been almost a year since we first got to see our little man on the ultrasound screen. It was a surreal moment. Yes, we had heard his heartbeat with the doppler by this point, but to actually see him squirming around, looking like a real little person was astounding. During that visit, we learned that he was healthy and that our chances of him having Down Syndrome or Trisomy 18 were 1 in 10,000 (basically the best odds they can give anyone). Now our squirmy baby is SO close to crawling, it's still hard for me to really believe that Luke and I made him, and that he grew so much in the 40 weeks he was couped up inside me.

I've been uploading videos off my phone (apparently being a new parent means that you use up all the space on your phone regularly, so you need to upload everything to the cloud frequently!), and thought I'd share a few recent ones of Max:

The last week has been pretty eventful in Max's life. On Saturday, Luke and I were supposed to have our first baby-free date since October. Granny was going to babysit, and since we didn't want Grandpa Lorenz to miss out on seeing Max, we brought in him to Byerly's to see Gampa at work. Max is at the developmental stage right now where he doesn't give away his smiles to strangers as freely as he used to. Now, he looks at them with a bit of concern while he tries to figure out who they are. He was a bit wary of Gampa at first, but then warmed up to him right away, so it was nice to see Max hanging out in his lap, looking at him as he talked, playing with the wrapper of his breakfast sandwich... It warms my heart to see Max interact positively with his family.

Then, just as we were about to leave to go drop Maxwell off with Granny, she called to let us know that we needed to get over there ASAP so that we could drive her to Becca's house. We had been on Lewis Baby Watch for the last few weeks, ever since she was placed on bed rest. At just over 36 weeks, we were no longer nervous about the arrival of our newest niece. At 36 weeks, developmentally, she would require little to no medical interventions. It was go time. I had a feeling that this was going to happen. I had been emailing with a friend the day before, and I had mentioned that I thought that there was a good chance that our date would be canceled anyway, and low and behold, it did get canceled! We picked up Katy to take her to Becca's so we could watch Lily while waiting for their friend to arrive. By the time we got to the Lewis house, we saw Mike and Becca tearing out of the neighborhood, and we saw their friend's car in the driveway, meaning that Lily was taken care of. Since Luke's mom didn't have a car, we drove her to the hospital.

Little did we know, that despite being only 5 minutes behind them, by the time we got to the hospital, our newest niece would already be born. Adeline Marjorie made a fast and exciting entrance into the world- she apparently feels the need to keep up with her big sister already! We had no intention to have Max meet his little cousin so soon, but since we were already at the hospital, we took advantage of the fact that we didn't have anywhere to be, and hung around until we had a chance to say hi to Becca, and meet Baby Ade for the first time. We are so happy that they got to bring Ade home yesterday, and that they all got to leave the hospital together, rather than spending weeks in the NICU. Once they are all settled in, and the influx of visitors dies down, we'll take Max to go see Lily and Adeline at home.

On Sunday, Max got to see his friend, Penny again! The last time we got our babies together was back in September. Penny is about 3 weeks older than Max, so it was fun to see how much they have both grown since her last visit. I'll have to add photos from this meeting later, as they are all on Luke's phone.

One of my all-time favorite photos!

First time sitting in a restaurant high chair (At Key's Cafe)

Sitting up in the bath

He absolutely LOVES frozen bananas in his mesh feeder

Hop on Pop?

His chins crack me up!

So happy

Awesome sweatshirt

Sleeping habits have been a bit better lately, though we do end up co-sleeping at some point during the night. He at least has been spending the first part of the night in either the crib or the pack 'n play. For foods, MaxJack recently tried pears for the first time, and love them! We also reintroduced sweet potatoes, and he likes those as well (not as much as banana or pears, but he'll still eat the entire tablespoon- though a decent amount of it winds up on his face or hands). It's cute- when he eats he likes to shove his little fingers in his mouth at the same time. He has also learned that slapping his palms against my skin (mainly my chest) makes an awesome thwap sound. It's cute right now, but I'm sure I'll have to put a stop to it, and stop laughing at it so that he doesn't think that hitting is an acceptable thing. For now, we'll allow it as he explores cause and effect!