Week 19

Ahhh...a summer day at the winery!

Nothing beats lounging at a winery on the weekends.  Since its a super baby friendly activity, we've gone a few times this summer.  Austin enjoys being outside, and there are always plenty of adults and kids for him to watch!  This weekend's trip was back to Sugarloaf winery for another working parents meetup event that we hosted.  While I had several people interested, the threat of bad weather kept people away and only one other family came to join us.  They were super nice, and live close to us so it turned out to be quite a good afternoon.  The rest of the weekend was pretty low key.  We had our friends, the Dahlems, join us at our pool for a dinner bbq and an evening swim.  Austin wasn't as thrilled this time, but it wasn't nearly as hot out so maybe the water wasn't quite as refreshing as last time!

In feeding news, the past few weeks I've started to wean from pumping and have been doing 3 breastmilk bottles and 2 formula bottles a day.  As my work schedule started to get busier and busier, my supply started dropping and I was breaking in to my freezer stash of breast milk to get to 3 bottles/day.  So, with mixed emotion last week I decreased my pumping to 2x per day and quickly realized that by the beginning of the week I was able to go 48 hrs without pumping.  Austin officially got his last breastmilk bottle on Tuesday, and from there on out he's a formula baby.  While its a little sad to stop, 4.5 months is more than my initial goal and I'm really proud to have stuck with it for so long.  We thought about starting solids this week, and I did buy cereal to try but with the upcoming trip to NYC on the calendar it seemed easier to wait until we return to start.  Its more about getting him used to the idea of eating solids at this point, rather than him actually getting much nutrition out of it, so the timing doesn't really matter.  We're pretty sure he's ready though - his increasing interest in what we're doing at dinner time is a big clue!

In other news, we suspect we have a teething baby on our hands.  Although, everyone says people blame any behavioral changes to teething so who knows.  On friday night at bedtime, Austin refused his bottle for the first time and starting crying and screaming.  Unsure of what to do, we restorted to googling on our phones and decided maybe teething was the culprit.  We applied some baby orajel, which resulted in more intense screaming.  But, 20 min later he was calm and happily took his bottle.  Several times later in the week he would cry and cry after drinking his bottle at night....definitely quite sad.  But, eventually he would fall asleep and sleep through the night so we hoped it was just a stage.  He has no interest in teething toys, but definitely puts his fingers and blankets in his mouth constantly.  We keep hoping to see a tooth break through, but we suspect it might be a while. 

Unfortunately, no more pictures this week.  Its been a busy one!