Cate is Six Weeks Old!

Cate is six weeks old this week. By the end of the week, she will have attended five birthday parties. It was another fun week with Cate! One of the “Major” milestones this week was sleeping from 11 PM to 6 AM two nights in a row (followed by 11 PM to 3:45 AM and 11 PM to 5 AM nights)—we’re getting there! Another one: Cate hung out calmly in her bassinet, pulled up to the table, during dinner for three nights this week. She picked up a rattle for the first time and … she smiled at us! Here is a photo of Cate holding her rattle from Grandma:

Daddy’s Girl The verdict is in: Cate looks more like Sam than me. I have had exactly one person say, “Oh, she looks like you!” and everyone else says some variation of, “Wow, she looks like Sam!” I thought it was just their matching hairlines, but it turns out people say the same thing when Cate is wearing a hat. It’s a good thing Daddy is so handsome, I say! Cate and I do have the same mouth, which we know because only the two of us can make the “turtle face.” Unfortunately, the turtle face comes only in the split second when one is deciding whether to toughen up or have a teary meltdown. We don’t have any pictures of Cate doing the face, but she does it at some point nearly every day. Besides looking alike, Daddy and Cate are having lots of fun playing (and napping!) together.

Party Time! Cate has been to four birthday parties in her six short weeks of life, and she is going to another one tomorrow! Wow! Cate is always honored to be invited to parties, but she has a limited tolerance for crowds of strangers making lots of noise. At some point, usually about 45 minutes into the party, she makes a little fussing noise which I couldn’t decipher at first but which I now know means, “Mom/Dad, I’m over this. Can you please put me down on the floor on my blanket at the edge of the action and just let me be?” At that point, she will hang out solo, totally content, for as long as we want to stay at the party. Until I became Cate’s mom I didn’t know that babies would sometimes fuss to be put down and left alone. Turns out that as much as Cate loves a good party she also (like all of us, I guess) likes her down time!

Big Foot Cate is very long. When people meet her, they say, “What a tall baby!” or “She is so long!” She has grown more than three inches since she was born, and she was in the 90th percentile for height at her two-week check-up. Even strangers comment on how tall she is. In addition to being tall, she has very long arms, long toes, and long fingers. This week, someone said to me, “She is so tall! Maybe she can be a basketball player and make you lots of money!” Huh. Strange comment, but I definitely heard stranger when I was pregnant. Maybe that’s why people say such crazy things to pregnant ladies—to prepare them for the crazy things people will say about their baby. Apparently that guy was unaware that professional women’s basketball players make, like, minimum wage. Anyway, we measured Cate’s longest toe and my shortest toe this week. My shortest toe is 7/8 inch long; Cate’s longest toe is 3/4 inch long. That means my six-week-old baby’s longest toe is only 1/8 inch shorter than my shortest. She’s long and we love every inch of her!