3 weeks

It makes quite a difference when you know in advance what your baby is going to do. On Thursday, when Gabriel was three weeks old, Gabriel had eaten normally around eight, for about 30 minutes. Instead of being content and just looking around and listening to us, as he would normally do, he started crying soon after, and it looked like he was already hungry again. That was unusual, because normally during the day, he had been eating every 3-4 hours, taking a break of ~6 hours during the night.

Fortunately, all the midwifes who had talked with Michelle about breastfeeding had told her that after 3, 6, and 12 weeks, the baby was going to have a growth spurt, for which it would need to eat more than usual. So Michelle had him feed again after less than two hours, and he was indeed hungry: He ate for another 30 minutes. Friday and Saturday, he kept up a mostly 2-hour rhythm for the entire day, though fortunately, he kept sleeping during the night. Now we're curious what he's going to do with all that food.

In the meantime, we have started to put him on his belly from time to time. Not during the night (there is too much uncertainty about the sudden infant death syndrome, SIDS), of course. Gabriel, who had almost exclusively lived on his back so far, did not enjoy the first few tries - he was just lying there with his knees pulled up and his face on the floor, totally confused that gravity was pulling in the other direction. Now he has learned that with a lot of effort and concentration he is able to turn his head, although he still gets stuck at times to his frustration.