Brayden's Biggest Week Ever!!!

Looking back on it, this has to be brayden's busiest week EVER. Ok, so he's only 3 weeks old, but he had a lot of stuff happen this week. Milestone's this week at a glance:

Tuesday

• First Car ride alone with Mommy - Brayden and Mommy took a trip to the doctor. Checkup went really well. The doc popped off the remnants of brayden's umbilical cord, and told us he was ready for a real bath. They weighed him in at 9 lbs. 6 ozs. Head size 75%, and weight and height at 50%.
  
• First real bath - He seemed to enjoy this much better than his sponge baths, although he still wasn't sure about it. Later in the week, Aunt julie pointed out that we need to relax and not scrub him so hard, brayden appreciated truly appreciated this.

Wednesday

• First day at work - Brayden and Mommy went to NIH to meet all of stephanie's work friends. I hear he was quite a trooper, as he lasted from around 11 until 5pm. Right around 5, all kinds of chaos broke out for the entire deRijke family. I got an email from work saying that I had a conference call that I had to attend to at 5:30, which left me very little time to get the dogs to the park for their afternoon walk. As I leashed up the dogs to take them to the park, I walked out the front door to our landlords staring at a large brown box addressed to stephanie and I. They told us we had received a honey baked ham. This was a fantastic gesture, but raised a couple of problems.......I had about 25 minutes to get the dogs walk and get back for the call, we don't actually eat meat anymore, and the box was apparently not ant-proof. I told the landlords that there were welcome to the ham, just save the card for me (we subsequently found out that the ham was from my work). Just then stephanie calls me on my cell to tell me that brayden is freaking out in the back of the car on the ride home (which he truly was, i could barely hear stephanie over his crying). We decided it was best for her to pull off and try and relax him. I finally make it to the park, and just at that moment i hear sirens blaring from all directions, and coming my way real fast. Shelby decided she would join in the ruckus and proceeded to howl like a hound dog. Cops are arriving from all directions, even driving down one way streets the wrong way to get to the circle. I'm not sure whats going on, but I'm just hoping there isn't some sort of drug bust or something going on. In the end there were 5 cop cars, a full size ladder fire engine, and an ambulance. As I'm walking around the circle I'm looking back to try and figure out what is going on, all I can see is a few of the local bench sitters being questioned. Well, i probably should have been paying a little less attention to the middle of the police activities and a little more attention to what our dogs are doing because the next thing I know my leg was feeling awfully warm and wet, Jack had stopped to mark his territory and I had walked right into the stream. I did my best to shake it off and we were on our way home. I made it just in time to catch the conference call. Here's a summary of the call....Client:"We're not ready to meet, can we call back in at 6:30?...........that would have been fantastic to know 30 minutes ago. So manic monday or manic wednesday, they're all the same.
  

Friday

• Met Aunt Julie - We drove out to dulles to pick up aunt julie who had flown in to meet brayden and party like its 1999 for brooke's bachelorette party (we're still working on Julie's moniker).

• First Trip to the Mall - We stopped off at tysons corner on the way home from the airport to meet up with heather, ciera, adam and teagen
  
• Met the Stanley's sans Aaron - We met up with the stanley's for lunch so they could meet their newest nephew/cousin. You can view the pictures from our outing here.
  

(can you spot the adults in this picture? Also, notice the sorority pose sported by all.)

Saturday

• Met Aunt Kinky Boobie (our the boring verion.....Aunt Brooke)
  
• First Bachelorette Party (the male entertainment for the evening)

although he did not take part in the late night kareoke with mommy and the aunts:

(More pics of the bachelorette party can be found here)

• First night alone with Daddy - For the most part this was fairly uneventful. Brayden slept from the time we arrived home at 8 until around 11. Apparently, a good rule of thumb when bottle feeding......check the bottle to ensure that the top is secured tightly, about half of the bottle was lost.....and found by both brayden and my shirt, lesson learned. He then slept from that time until around 2 am when he decided he wanted to eat again. In my haste to change the bottles nipple from size 2 to size 1 (yeah, apparently there are different size nipples) i accidentally threw the ring which holds the nipple (wonder if there is a term for this part) and hit brayden in the head. He was on the very edge of losing it until the sweet nectar of the breast milk hit his lips. Mommy and aunt julie arrived just in time to help finish the feeding. I wish I had taken a picture of this moment, because both looked like they had hiked across the Sahara Desert to make it home (apparently the AC was out at the greatest Kareoke bar this side of the Mississippi, Peyote).

Even more pics of our weekend can be found in this Link