Smiles and breastfeeding

In the last 2.5 hours, I've done two loads of laundry, loaded and run the dishwasher, ordered diapers and bottles from www.diapers.com, finished vacuuming the pool, caught up with my friend Heidi AND written this blog. This is Piper's first long nap during the day that hasn't been in the car since she's been sleeping well at night and I'm taking advantage of it!

The most exciting update at this point is that Piper has started smiling! Now the little grin in the picture above isn't her big toothless grin that absolutely melts our hearts, but it is close and it's the closest we have to anything resembling a smile on camera so far. When she first smiled, my heart just about burst. And my emotional reaction hasn't changed since I've seen her smile since then. It's what I imagine heaven to be like. Pure joy.

Before Piper was born, I hoped that I was one of those people that would just love to breastfeed - and in fact, I was pretty sure I would be that way. Unfortunately, that just hasn't been the case. I'm still breastfeeding her and my goal is to do it for the first six months, but I definitely wish that I felt the ooey gooey sense of bonding and joy that many people speak of while nursing their baby. Instead, it was super frustrating at first because it took both of us a while to learn how to nurse well. In particular, she did not latch well for a while ... and the jaundice didn't get us off on the right foot, but the challenges did continue from there for I would guess a couple of weeks. So nursing took FOREVER. Now we're down to about 45 minutes for each nursing session, but without the ooey gooey feelings, it can still feel very time consuming. During the day, she nurses pretty much every two hours, so once I've fed her, we have 1.25 hours until she eats again. That combined with my apparent phobia of nursing in public makes it pretty hard to get out and about, which is SO important in my opinion. So I do try and get out, at least four or five times a week. We just make the trips quick. Thank God we don't live far from the grocery store or Target! I'm hoping that since she's getting older and better at nursing that I'll enjoy it more.

Oh, and there's a cry so I'm logging off - to go nurse!