Thea Bea

Oh, where to start? I have a lot of 'events' to post about but I wanted to make sure to write a little bit about Thea and what she's like as a baby.

As you might have noticed we picked a name that wasn't on our list. Both of us like names that having a fitting meaning (Henry means 'home ruler' yeah, shouldn't have thought that one over because man is it true) and Dorothea means gift of God. It had come up before, but Johann said he wasn't a huge fan and I was okay with putting it off the list since the only person I knew who had a name close to Dorothea was a Dorothy in high school and people called her some not nice things with her name and she wasn't my favorite person, so my association with the name wasn't that great. But, as the time got closer we just felt like Gwendolyn (which is what we were going to go with) wasn't her name and Dorothea came up again. We waited a long time for this little girl so we both felt that she was and is our little gift from God.

So far, Thea is an incredibly easy baby, especially compared to Henry. She loves, loves, loves to eat and is still a pretty good sleeper, though she is starting to get more sensitive to noise and has a harder time falling asleep during the daytime because of it.

She is obviously not a worry with weight gain like Henry was. According to our scales at home she is already hitting the 12lbs mark at 7 weeks. It is so fun to have such a squishy, chubby baby to love on. Sometimes I like to call her Dough-Thea. =)

6 weeks (she's also a big fan of spit up, esp when I go to take pics)

Cuddly, cuddly! This little girl is all about getting cuddles. She also has a people radar and knows when everyone has left a room and will voice her displeasure about being left alone. Just tonight I left her in the swing in the bedroom, totally passed out after eating and having cuddled her for 20 minutes and watched her sleep in the swing for five, to grab something from the kitchen. When I came back she was wide awake whining about her predicament.

4 weeks

With Henry, the swing was the only place we could get him to sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time but with Thea, the swing won't sooth her if she is upset but she'll sleep in it for naps happily. Her biggest non-nursing soother is being swaddled. She starts to smile every time I do the first wrap and it cracks me up. The paci is ok if you hold it in her mouth for her the majority of the time but overall she won't maintain it on her own.

Which brings me to my next thing about Thea-the girl is definitely not the high-energy, driven baby Henry was. He was always on the playmat trying his darndest to move around, roll, wiggle etc. Thea will go on the mat for 10 minutes at a time or so and then is 'just so wiped out' that she needs a cuddle, a quick feeding and a nap afterwards. It's hilarious.

I just asked Johann what else to put about her and he said, "She's intelligent. She's brilliant." I asked him to qualify that and he just laughed. So, take that for what it's worth. He also says she poops a lot. Which is true. She does seem to poop more than your average baby. She works on those diapers hard with lots of grunting, but now she seems to grunt even when she's not at work; in fact she is just a loud baby overall, always making some sort of noise if she isn't sleeping and sometimes in her sleep too, but most especially when she is nursing. She is starting to move from just making grunting and goat noises to coos and is even beginning to trot out the social smile every now and again. I think 80 percent of her smiles can still be attributed to tummy bubbles though.

If I could get a guarantee that all my babies would be like Thea I would probably have at least 4 more. I absolutely love and adore this little girl!