More baby info

If you aren't interested in babies or whatever, maybe just go read my archives for a while, because I haven't really thought about anything else since Thursday afternoon. (Don't just stop reading, though! I love you! Have you seen my extensive archive?)

So. Here's a little more about this baby, and our time with her so far, as it comes to me and in no particular order.

• She was a month old on Friday. 
• She was almost certainly a preemie, as she weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces at her checkup on Friday. Many of my friends' babies were significantly larger than that at birth.
• She practices smiling when she's waking up and falling asleep. She smiled at Andy the first night she was here, and now she owns him for life, I think.
• Andy is a natural caretaker, which means things have been pretty smooth, as these things go. He also needs less sleep than I do, so he is happy to get up with her in the night (as long as I wake him up and tell him to). He also is doing extra work to take care of me, like making sure I've got enough water around and that I've eaten recently, because:
• For the first time in my life, I've been forgetting to eat. Usually when people are all, "Oh, I forget to eat sometimes!" I'm all, bullshit, lady, that's called anorexia. But my sleep has been so messed up that my body is reacting by just being sort of confused, which means I haven't really felt hungry much. I forgot to eat lunch on Saturday. Just realized at, like, 5 p.m. that I hadn't eaten anything since a piece of baked oatmeal that morning. So Andy's been working on making sure I've had enough food. Also, writing this bullet reminded me to eat breakfast.
• I have always been a very deep sleeper, so it's a huge shock that the instant the baby fusses, I am on FULL ALERT - wide awake and ready to fix things. The FULL ALERT takes a little while to wear off, which sucks. Like, sometimes she just wants her bassinet jiggled for a minute, but then I lie there, wide awake, for another twenty minutes. That happened last night and Andy was lying next to me, snoring quietly, and I was actually really jealous of him.The FULL ALERT also makes it really hard for me to nap during the day so far, even when Andy has the kid in another room and I know everything is cool.
• We know the baby has a three-year-old brother who we're pretty sure is with the grandma. The matcher told us part of the reason they picked us is that if it comes to that, we could take the brother too (we're certified for up to three kids). We've discussed it, and obviously we'd take him too if they ask us to.
• To further confirm my belief that people give you things when they find out you're fostering, so far:
• A good friend stopped over with two bags of newborn clothes, some of which her kids have outgrown and some of which she stopped and bought for us when we told her how tiny the baby is.
• My aunt and uncle overnighted us a stroller. Their last name is McLaren, so their go-to baby gift is a MacLaren stroller. They didn't know if we had a stroller, so they had one shipped to us. What the what? (The funniest part, to me, is that a kid needs to be able to support herself to sit in the style they sent, so we can't use it for another five months or so, if we get to keep her that long.)
• On Friday, some good friends of ours ordered our favorite items from our favorite Mexican joint and came over with several bottles of wine so we didn't have to cook. When we were done eating, without me or Andy even noticing, they cleaned the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. 
• My brother and his wife and her sister (so my sister-in-law-in-law, I guess) stopped over yesterday. My brother's wife and her sister are both pregnant (and due three weeks apart!) and while the sister was out shopping for some baby stuff, she picked up a few newborn-sized sleepers for the baby, just to be nice.

Okay, this post has gotten a lot longer than I expected. Let's blame that on sleep deprivation and coffee, shall we?

What else do you want to know?