Christmas at the Norman's

The past 2 weeks have been wonderful! Last week, my parents came to visit for Christmas. It was so great to see them. I love watching them with Curtis, especially my dad. He turns in to a big teddy bear with his grandkids. He could sit for hours in Grandma Sutphin's chair rocking Curtis if I let him. And mom loves spending time with Curtis, although he wasn't quite as happy about it as he was when she stayed with us when he was born. He's not quite as content as he was, doesn't go right back to sleep after he eats so he needs alittle entertaining and tended to cry a lot, but I think mom finally got to hold him without him crying.

This year, we were blessed with Isaac having both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off. It's always so wonderful to have him home, especially home for holidays. Christmas Eve, we were going to have manicotti for dinner, one of our traditions. This year, the shells were homemade and I think would have been so good. We invited our friends, the Sibeliu's over, but when the oven timer went off, we realized the oven was broken, so no manicotti, just salad, bread and dessert. It was fun, but I was sad about the manicotti. We got to go to our Christmas Eve service and was reminded about God's amazing generosity. I love going to the candle light service, it's one of my favorite Christmas traditions. 

Christmas Day was a lot of fun. Curtis let us sleep until 0730, we opened gifts from Isaac's family. Curtis got some fun gifts, a little baby gym that I know he's gonna have a lot of fun playing in. We had breakfast and watched our Christmas morning movie, this year it was Courageous. We facetimed with both of our families and had dinner and played Smallworld with our friends, the Moore's. I think it was the best Christmas ever! I loved getting to spend it with our little family and I know every year will get more and more fun as Curtis gets older and hopefully more kids are added :)

Today we had our 2 month appt. Everything went well, he's up to 9lbs, 14oz, which is awesome. Curtis hasn't needed a bottle in almost 3 weeks, which has taken off so much stress from Isaac and me. It's much easier to feed him when he's not screaming for an hour.

On Monday, Isaac's parent's are coming in to town, and we are super excited for them to meet Curtis! We can't wait to see them!

Mom finally got her picture in Grandma's chair

This may be the best picture we got, Dad is still trying to learn my lens

Can't believe how much I love this little boy! I am so blessed to be his mama

Christmas morning with my loves

Such a cute little outfit from Uncle Josh

Curtis' stocking stuffer, I hope we'll have a few warm days in the next few months for him to wear it

Curtis' dress blues, now he can look like his daddy :)

Isaac had to get one of me

Starting to nod off for a Christmas morning nap

Curtis' Christmas sleeper from Ya-ya

Happy Due Date, Baby Curtis

Thursday was Curtis' due date. He is finally full term. Isaac and I have had this discussion several times about how old Curtis is. While he is now 5 weeks old (or will be in 5 hours), I have referred to him in his gestational age up until 2 days ago. When he was 36 weeks, that's what I called it, while Isaac called him 1 week old. I did that because, as the weeks went by, he was still developing like he would still in the womb. His nervous system was still developing, so his breathing was still uneven, but has begun evening out as the weeks went on. And his eating is much better, still not perfect, but the closer he got to his due date, the better it got, and is still getting better every day, thankfully.

This week, we had his 1 month appt and Isaac went back to work, so I had my first 2 days with Curtis by myself. The appt went well, he's been gaining about an ounce a day, so he's up to 8lb 2oz which is awesome! So even though he still doesn't like to breast feed all the time, he is eating and gaining weight, so we're pretty excited about that. Our 2 days without Isaac were uneventful, thankfully, although we missed Isaac very much. He had duty yesterday, which means he was on the ship for 24hrs. It was the first night we spent away from each other in over weeks, so the first night I had with just Curtis and I in over 2 weeks, and even then, mom was here to help. The day was pretty good, I actually got out some and did the errands I needed without Curtis screaming too much, although he got hungry in the car so my friend, Karlie got to hear his wonderful scream, saying "Hello" to her :) The night was actually good too. We're working on weaning Curtis off the bottle so he can solely nurse, and I can stop pumping every 3 hours, so there was a lot of screaming, but most times, he only took an ounce from the bottle and then nursed from both sides, so that is such an improvement over just a few days ago, which makes me pretty excited!

Here's a few of Curtis' 1 month pictures:

This particular idea didn't work out very well, I had wanted to use Christmas ornaments from our tree and him be just in his diaper, but he did not like that at all, so we stopped.

After calming down some, I was able to get just a few pictures of him not screaming...

But most of these pictures looked like this, which I love, but he will probably hate me for these pictures some day.

These are probably my favorite. I've seen the idea on pinterest, and was pretty excited that Curtis came before Christmas so I could get some like this. Luckily, he slept through the entire photo session.