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Monday, January 7, 2013

Three Wks Old, Three Wks Late!

I started writing this three weeks ago! I never finished it and never posted it, so here's what I had. I'm sharing it anyway!
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Hi. Long time. I can't believe it's been three weeks since I've blogged, and so much has happened in that time, and yet so little. We are now a family of four. On one hand I feel like this is all still so new, and on the other hand, I feel like Addison has always been in our lives. I remember this feeling from when we had Gavin. This feeling that I had known him forever and could barely remember what life was like before him and certainly couldn't imagine it without him. I feel that way about Addison. The moment I saw her, I knew her. She was familiar to me, like I had always known her. My only thought when she was laid on my chest was, "Oh, there you are. Hi."

That said, life did certainly change for us when she was born and we are all still adjusting. We are tired, we're emotional, we're running on little sleep, we're short on patience, and we're desperately attempting to maintain the balance that I'm not sure we had even found before Addison was born. Addison is sleeping about 2 hours at a time at night now, but struggles a bit to go back to sleep after she's been fed and changed. She loves to be held and wants that closeness all the time. She must have an internal monitor that tells her she is no longer being held, even when she is sound asleep. Typically when she wakes in the night, I change her diaper and then feed her. Some nights I feed her a little, change her, then feed her some more, depending on how hungry (mad) she is when she wakes. She almost always falls asleep either while eating or being burped and I lay her down in her bed. After laying her down, it's only a matter of minutes before she starts stirring, having realized no one is holding her. I assume she senses that the warmth from our body heat is gone, the sound of our heartbeat and the feeling of our breathing are both gone, so it makes sense she would wake I guess... it's just so predictable! It's nearly always just as I start to drift off to sleep! Most nights now, she goes to sleep sometime between 9:30 and 11:00 and wakes up around 12:30 or 1:00, then again around 3:00 and again at about 5:00. Some nights she stays up later and then doesn't wake as often. We've had a couple of doozies though too! We had one night that she didn't even go to sleep at all until 4:30am and another night that she was up at 3:00am and didn't go back to sleep at all.

Daytimes aren't a whole lot different from the nights yet, except that we have places to go and people to see! Addison has certainly experienced more than her fair share of Christmas shopping already! She goes everywhere I go, so when we drop Gavin off at preschool we often run errands, which has included Christmas shopping lately! She's been to Target a few times, Fleet Farm, the grocery store, Gymboree, Michael's, and Carter's for starters.

We had Addison in for her one-week appointment and she had gained 4 oz since she was born. Typically babies lose a little weight that first week, but she didn't, which was great! Although we weren't sure at first. When we first weighed her, the scale apparently registered her weight before we had her diaper off, and it said 7 lbs, 10 oz. After we got her diaper off, we picked her up and laid her back down to reset the scale and when we did, the scale registered 6 lbs, 4 oz. We were immediately concerned. Had she really lost a whole pound? One pound isn't a lot to us adults, but when you only weigh 7 lbs to begin with, that's a huge percentage of your weight. We talked to the doctor about it and she asked all kinds of questions. She asked me if I can hear Addison swallow when she is nursing, if she cries to let us know when she is hungry, if she's pooping that seedy, yellow breastmilk poop, etc. It was YESes all around. She was doing all of those things. Our Doctor suggested I try pumping and giving her my milk in a bottle to see how much I'm producing so we know how much she's drinking. We made plans to come back and have her weighed again in a few days. During all of this conversation, I was still holding Addison. When it was time for our Doctor to actually examine her, I handed her to the Doctor and she paused, looked at us, and said, "This is NOT a 6 lb baby, this is a 7 lb baby. I hold a lot of babies, and she sure feels like a healthy 7 lbs", so she took Addison back out to the scale and weighed her again, twice. Both times it was 7 lbs, 8 oz. We have no idea what happened the first time, but she was definitely 7 lbs, 8 oz and is still growing!

Her cord fell off when she was five days old, which seemed a little early to us, but the Doctor said it looked great when we were there, so no worries.

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...and that was three weeks ago!

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