First Bath

Since Luke's umbilical cord stump came off on Tuesday, this morning J and I gave him his first full bath (instead of a sponge bath). We filled the tub with a little water and put him on the bath board thingy (I don't know what it's officially called) and J got in the tub with him. In some ways it felt a lot like the sponge bath, just a little easier because we had the water right there easy to hand to soap him up and rinse him off and didn't worry about him sitting on the hard counter. I think Luke wasn't quite as impressed but he wasn't too squirmy so we were able to get through the bath fairly well. Here he is all wrapped up in his towel after his bath:

One thing you also might notice in this picture is the pacifier in his mouth. We wanted to wait to introduce a pacifier until he was well established with breastfeeding (since using the paci involves a different type of sucking that breastfeeding) and he seems to be doing really well, so we bought him his first pacifiers yesterday. And as I expected, he really has taken to using one (and is still breastfeeding just fine).

Usually during the nighttime feedings, I would feed him first, then J would burp him and change his diaper. We hoped that by doing that, we would get him to wake up a little more and have a second helping (and thus perhaps sleep longer between feedings). But he didn't seem to want the second helping as much and doing the diaper change right before putting him back to bed seemed to not go well because then he was too awake to go right back to sleep.

So last night we decided to reverse the order and this time J changed his diaper and then I fed him. Since he usually drifts off to sleep when he's done feeding, this seemed to worked rather nicely and he went back to sleep much more easily last night. Also, he didn't use the pacifier a lot during the night but it was helpful the few times that he started to get a little fussy between feedings. So although it was still a night of broken sleep (eating every 2 or 2 1/2 hours), the time in between feedings seemed to go a lot better.