Got Milk?

Liam is a voracious nurser. Fortunately, Annika loves the process as well so they're both happy. The nurses tell us that he and Annika are progressing very well and there haven't been any major bumps in the road yet. Liam is very funny when he is going to cry because he scrunches his face up and gets all red and opens his mouth up in a silent cry. He makes the funniest faces I've ever seen - he gets a look on his face like he just ate a lemon and he's not too sure this whole "outside the womb" thing is all its cracked up to be. Sometimes his cry sounds a bit like a giggle and that always gets me going. Of course, after a nursing, swaddling and burping, he's lovin' life again :)

Now that Liam is getting milk instead of colostrum, he needs to be burped so I now have one more way to participate in the process. My favorite part of this has been swaddling Liam after a nursing and burping him. Swaddling is a wonderful concept, it really calms him down and is pretty easy to do after a couple times of practice. I'm glad I watched all those videos on changing diapers, burping, and soothing babies on youtube - a lot of the techniques work quite well. We've both been happy to have the nursing staff around to help us and answer our myriad questions. That's why we've decided to extend our stay by one day.

We have a TV in our room so we watched the mediocre movie Bagger Vance today while Liam slept. We found that it is as easy to follow while muted (or even while napping) as it is normally. Its an incredibly slow and predictable movie, but it was nice to have something running in the background. If Liam continues these nice 3-4 hour naps, I have a feeling we might be watching a lot of movies. Of course, they might go more like Cast Away did last night, which we turned off during the opening credits because we were too tired to keep going :)

One of the things we've enjoyed to watch is when Liam looks around. He first opened his eyes in the operating room after delivery, and he's opened them more than I thought we would. He likes to look around and will stare up at us out of the corner of his eyes while we hold him and talk to him. I think he does it because he's so curious about what's going on and I think we're in store for a lot of "but why" questions from him in a couple of years!

Mental note: Liam prefers the flash to be off when he's trying to sleep:

	Flash on - looks like an upset Popeye.
	Flash off 2 seconds later - looks like a peaceful baby