It was great with Zara, she was always miles ahead of what the emails and books said and I used to get a rush of satisfaction knowing my baby was doing everything that was expected. She was always strong from the start and could hold her head well, she smiled early followed quickly by laughing. Ok so she was a bit slow on the crawling and walking front but not too late really.

Zara taken 14/1/10 at just under 8 weeks old!

Oscar however is a whole different matter! He was 9 weeks old on Monday and is still very much a newborn. He can’t control his head yet, isn’t really very responsive and I’m sure most of his “smiles” are due to wind. He spends most of his time just feeding and sleeping and doesn’t show any interest in the world around him yet.

Oscar aged 9 weeks, still very much a newborn!

By 9 weeks Zara was sleeping through the night and Oscar is still feeding like a newborn and showing no signs of increasing the gap between feeds and I’d been finding myself wanting to push him somehow as 9 weeks of having a “newborn” baby is exhausting work and the lack of progress is very frustrating at times.

It’s only when I got thinking that I really came to realise that there was actually a 7 week age gap between when Zara was born at 41 weeks and Oscar born at 34 weeks! So really in comparison terms I should only be expecting Oscar to do what Zara was doing at 2 weeks old (ie being a newborn!). It makes 100% sense really, Oscar spent the first 7 weeks of his life doing on the outside what Zara did on the inside – growing! He has over doubled in size from his lowest weight so it’s not like he hasn’t been developing at all, just not necessarily in the way it tells you on the emails or in the books!

So today I am going to unsubscribe from all those emails and put away the baby books and just let Oscar develop in his own time. So what if he can’t juggle with flaming clubs whilst riding a unicycle yet 