Life With The Pate's: Four months of Constant Change and Learning

Kyle and I always laugh and joke about how much we have learned in the past 4 months, about each other, ourselves, about babies and being parents! Once you bring a baby in this world you realize you really know NOTHING and there is no book that truly teaches you what you need/ought to know. The books are written for that perfect baby and well quite frankly no baby is perfect or the same. Zeke is super sweet and a really easy baby, but he is still not perfect! He still fusses, gets mad, explodes out the sides of his diaper, and is the quietest spitter I've ever met! It never fails once we get one stage figured out he decides it is time to change to the next phase... Month 3 was awesome, we had a great feeding, napping, play time etc schedule. Every day was nearly the same we just had to deal with the "spit-up" phase! We went through many of bibs and burp cloths and it never failed that Kyle would get ready and Zeke would spit all down his shirt! :) We dealt with the spit up and kept trucking along then we hit 4 months and oh man have things been anything but constant every day! We are partially to blame for this time of change as we added formula to his bottles, so it's 2 oz of formula to 3.5 oz of b milk and as you see we've increased from 5 oz to 5.5 oz but he just wasn't getting satisfied and was wanting to eat ALL the time! We've also started eating cereal for dinner. He loves it, but we have found out that he does better if we feed him dinner before it is actually time for a bottle. Once he gets hungry, he GETS hungry and like his dad wants to eat right then! We have changed/added lots of things to his daily routine; however, I am very adamant about his bedtime schedule. It is the only constant thing we have had for the past 7-8 weeks! I don't care where we are or what we are doing, but we are home by 8 pm every night! Zeke gets his bath at 8:00/8:15, he then eats his last bottle while Kyle reads him a book then afterwards I sing him about 3-4 songs and we say our 4 night time prayers (Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be & St. Michael the Archangel) then within 5 mins he is put down in his crib, some nights he falls right asleep and others he lays there for 20 or 30 mins until he falls asleep, and he sleeps till 5-7 the next morning. I'm thankful we have kept his night schedule the same, I pray we can continue this blissfulness as he gets older! It's the only time of day I can really plan and prepare for. :) We have been pooped on, peed on, spit up all over on, sneezed on and coughed on and every ounce of ooeyness that has been on us is worth it for this sweet guy!

Zeke Douglas Pate
4 months
12 pounds 3 oz.
24"