March 23, 2002 Something happened last night that warranted another update today even though I just wrote yesterday. Natalie gave us a present for her 6 week birthday last night - we actually didn't see her birth time pass by! After getting her to bed at about 1:15 or so last night, I woke up this morning to a very strange thing - sunlight. Very dim sunlight, but light nonetheless. And feeling very, very full. I suddenly realized why: Natalie hadn't eaten in quite a long time! I squinted over to the alarm clock and realized it was 6:30!!  Of course like all new moms the first thing I did was lean over into Natalie's bassinet and check to make sure she was breathing. Yep, she was, and still laying in the exact same position that I had put her in the night before, arms and all.  I laid back down and proceeded to not go back to sleep for the next hour. I think my body just didn't quite know how to handle that much sleep in a row anymore, it couldn't handle any more. :-) Natalie started stirring at around 7:15 and I got her up at 7:30, so she got a solid 6 hours of sleep last night!  I'm definately not counting on this happening again soon, but hey, if she can make it 6 hours without a meal once, it will surely someday happen again, right? :-) I knew she was really tired last night. My mom was over yesterday evening and Natalie fell asleep in her arms. When she left (around 10:30 maybe? I forget.) Natalie slept for about 15 minutes more and then woke up choking again, and she then stayed wide awake (and eating) the rest of the night. Finally at around 12:30 I felt pretty empty so Phil got her some formula. She ate about 2 ounces and then pretty much stopped, but she was still really fussy. I'm really starting to tell differences in her cries now, and this was definately an "I'm just so tired all I can do is cry" kind of cry. (I think I've had a few of those myself the last 6 weeks!) So I just rocked her in my chair and held her really tight against me, and a little after 1 am she was fast asleep.  Usually she starts stirring a little when I put her in her bassinet (if she doesn't wake up entirely) but this time she didn't even move. And that's how I found her this morning! A couple other things I've been forgetting to mention lately: 1- I think I broke my right foot baby toe about a week and a half ago. I didn't know if it was broken or just sprained, but it's now been over a week and it's still hurting just as bad, plus it looks really out of joint, not to mention a nasty looking bruise around that area, so I think I did break it. Unfortunately you really can't do much for a broken baby toe but let it heal. It really hurts though, especially when I have to put my foot into a shoe. It happened during a middle of the night feeding. I had been feeding her for awhile and then I really had to go to the bathroom so I was giving Natalie to Phil. Since I had been sitting on the edge of the bed, it was easier for me to walk around to his side of the bed instead of trying to pass the baby across the bed to him. Well, I must really have been in a hurry because I wacked my toe on the edge of my dresser really hard as I was walking around the bed. Both Phil and I heard a "pop" and I pretty much lunged the baby into Phil's reaching arms as I fell forward onto the bed. Anyway, I just wanted to write this down because it has been one of the casualties of a middle of the night feeding. It still hurts pretty bad, I just usually try to walk on the other side of that foot but when I take a full, flat footed step, it hurts. Hard to believe how much pressure goes onto such a little toe. 2- Natalie is trying to start smiling. I think a full-faced smile is coming any day now.  She's such a cute little angel. Tonight Natalie is going to Grandma's house for the first time. She's going to babysit her while Phil and I go out to see a movie! March 22, 2002 Well, we seem to have gotten into some kind of routine. Unfortunately this routine involves feeding sessions typically lasting over an hour at a time, and this includes middle of the night feedings. I really wouldn't even mind so much getting up to feed her in the middle of the night (I do kind of enjoy getting to hold her again!) but I just wish she would do what all the books say, which is, eat for about 20 minutes to a half hour and then fall right back asleep.  Not our miss Natalie.  She wakes up every couple of hours day or night, and then is awake for the next couple (or few) hours either wanting to constantly eat or in the rare times she actually seems to have a full tummy, she just wants to be awake! Mostly though she just wants to constantly eat; something that's a result of her reflux and not that she is just a little oinker!  The Zantac seems to be helping a little but she's still having lots of big spit ups per day, which is just so hard to see her go through.  She just starts choking suddenly, even if we've burped her a bunch of times, and her little eyes look so scared when she coughs like that. We have to watch over her constantly because she'll just start choking out of nowhere. I just hope she grows out of this soon! Her doctor said it will get better once her esophogus matures and closes up the way it's supposed to, usually within 6 months. Our little girl is so precious to us, we just hate seeing her spit up! In the meantime, I've gotten used to having considerably less sleep per night, but I just can't get used to the 2 or more hour feedings in the middle of the night. You'd think I would just bring her downstairs from the get go and settle in with a good movie, but every night I maintain the fantasy that this will be the time that she eats and falls right back asleep, so I don't want to get that far out of bed! :-) And so, then an hour or two later, I'm waking Phil up and telling him to please take this child downstairs and give her a couple ounces of formula so that I can maybe take a (middle of the night) nap for a little bit. He does, he's a really good daddy, but I always feel bad about it, especially when he needs to get up to meet clients the next morning. The illustrious, all-knowing books say that often babies will start having a more livable eating and sleeping schedule at 6 weeks...I hope in this case the books are right but I'm not holding my breath.  The books also don't mention much about gastroesophagal reflux disease either so a lot of their advice doesn't seem to apply. I'm just glad her doctor doesn't mind getting lots of phone calls.  We've been really good patients though, we even keep a detailed log of all her vomits and spit ups per day, including if they happened during or not during a feeding. (Of course since most of the time she IS feeding, we don't have many of the latter.) :-) I'm going to try to get some film developed this weekend so that I can get new pictures posted. Our cute little bean is growing so fast!  In the meantime, I have a 1-month old picture posted at the right side of this page. (Thanks to my mom's digital camera!) March 12, 2002 I know, it's been almost a month since I last wrote anything. I apologize about that to all the people who check for updates daily, it's just been really hard to not only sit down to write, but then with being at home and having a dial-up connection, I know I have to set aside at least about a half hour to get everything uploaded, and I usually don't have an extra half hour just sitting around. :-) It's amazing how fast this time is going, and it just seems like all the days (and nights, it's not like there's much of a difference these days!) run together and before I know it another week has gone by.  Mostly the days have been filled with marathon feeding sessions, short breaks in which I can sometimes shovel down a bit of food for myself, and then getting ready for the next feeding.  I know everyone always says their biggest piece of advice for new parents is to sleep when the baby sleeps, but that's easier said than done.  I've got to eat sometime, and it's occasionally really nice to actually sit at the table to eat and not eating one handed while trying not to get crumbs on the baby who is nursing in your arms (which is how I often eat my meals these days).   It's been a rough month as far as Natalie's health goes.  (Though I still feel so blessed that she got a whole extra month in the womb after she first started trying to come out, I can't imagine the kinds of things we might be dealing with if she was born on January 9th.) A couple weeks ago we started noticing that she was vomiting or at least having major spit ups (not just a little burpy leak, but losing a lot of food) several times per day, and she wasn't happy unless she was eating. Needless to say this has been hard on me because I'm her food source.  We took her to the doctor last week and he told us he thought it was probably gastrointestinal reflux, something that isn't uncommon in infants. But it was making her want to eat all the time because the only thing that would soothe her throat was putting more milk down it, so that's why she would cry for food all the time. But then that made the reflux worse too because she'd have too much food in her tummy. We've had several sessions of feedings when she nurses for 3 or 4 hours or even more. I'd just keep switching her back and forth and hoping my milk supply was keeping up. A few times, particularly in the middle of the night, after going like this for a couple hours I'll finally tell Phil to go down to the kitchen and make her a bottle of formula, because I just couldn't take it anymore. We feel so bad for her though, she's obviously uncomfortable and we want to do everything we can to make her feel better!  Her pediatrician, Dr. Kern (who we are seeing really often these days!) gave her a prescription for a syrup version of Zantac, which reduces the amount of stomach acid so that she can maybe keep some food down. If she just keeps spitting up or vomiting, it creates a vicious circle where her esophagus is constantly irritated so it won't heal up and mature properly. Up until Sunday afternoon it seemed to be doing better, and then Sunday and yesterday she suddenly got a lot worse. She had several VERY bad vomits, the poor baby, it just killed me to see her so sick!  So we took her back to the doctor this morning and he thinks that now on top of the reflux, she has a stomach virus.  That just has to run its course, unfortunately, but we were glad to hear it doesn't appear to be a respiratory problem or anything else more serious.  So hopefully her flu will go away soon and with the Zantac her reflux will get better. I just hate seeing her so uncomfortable. On the positive side of things, Natalie is REALLY growing! (These marathon feeding sessions are at least doing that, I'm glad with all her vomiting that she's still getting food in. And I've lost 30 pounds, my whole pregnancy weight gain, so it's helping both of us in that way I guess!) At this morning's appointment, we found out that she now is weighing in at 9 pounds 10 ounces!!  And that is up from 9 pounds 2 ounces which was what she weighed at her one month appointment just last Wednesday.  Her length is now about 23 inches too, up 3 inches from her birth length. Our little girl is already growing up!  I just can't believe it's already been a month. It was weird seeing my due date, February 23, go by with her already three weeks old, but last Saturday was even more strange. Friday night, all I could think about was what was going on at this time just one month ago. She also happened to be up for a feeding at around 4 am on Saturday morning, so we got to see her birth time go by too.  It doesn't seem like a month at all. It's gone so fast.  I know I'm learning a lot about being a mom and I'm starting to feel a little more confident about things, but it was a rough month. Looking back I really wish I would have read up more about AFTER childbirth as I did about what to expect in labor and delivery.  I thought I had read just about all there was to know about childbirth, but when it came down to it most of what I thought I knew was out the window, right along with my sacred birth plan, before I even walked through the doors at St. Ann's.  I now know that as far as childbirth is concerned, whatever needs to happen happens to get that baby out healthy, and probably nothing would have gone differently even if I had never learned anything about childbirth. Not that I regret learning all about it, but I now think there was so much other stuff I should have spent a little more time reading up on. (Though admittedly, I did read "What to Expect the First Year" almost cover to cover while pregnant, and yet now when I re-read the same information, going through the very things they are talking about it, I feel like I've never laid eyes on it before. I guess that's the difference between theory and reality!)  I wish I would have paid more attention to how difficult the first week or two can be, and what postpartum blues feels like. I think I pretty much glossed over a lot of that information because I really didn't think it would affect me that much. Well, it did. Going through it, I knew what it was but that didn't make it any easier. I still get so angry when I think about how insurance companies now make women go home from the hospital before they, or the baby, are ready. For one thing, jaundice starts to develop around the third or fourth day after delivery, peaking between day 5 and 7. And they send you home 48 hours after you deliver. Plus in my case, my milk didn't even start coming in until the end of day 5 and not really until day 6, so they sent us home just when Natalie was starting to turn a little yellow and she had yet to have anything to eat and wouldn't for a few more days. (Except for the formula that I had to feed her because of the weight drop and worsening jaundice, which alone made me feel worse because I was so committed to breastfeeding, and I'd heard all about how early bottlefeeding kills your chances of successful breastfeeding).  Well, it didn't. Things still aren't going completely smoothly (she still most of the time refuses to eat without using the breast shield; I guess she likes the taste of plastic! And the marathon eating sessions wear me out, but that has to do with her reflux and not my milk supply) but she is definitely eating enough these days, her weight gain shows that! It's hard to imagine life without her now. Not that I don't REMEMBER sleeping more than three or four hours at a time and going out on a Tuesday night to see a movie at the spur of the moment, but I wouldn't trade that for our little girl for anything. We love her so much, so much more than we even thought we would. Every facial expression, every single little squeak (like when she yawns really big, at the end of it she makes a squeak) melts my heart, and when she starts to cough and choke because of a vomit or spit up and her eyes tear up and look at me in panic and pain, it just tears me up inside. She gives us this look of betrayal when we plunge the Zantac syrup down her throat. When we do I just tell her, as she's coughing and giving me that "but I trusted you to feed me yummy stuff!!" look, that I'm sorry and I just want her to feel better! :-) When we take her out in the car to go somewhere, I never thought I'd be even more irritated by idiot drivers than I was two months ago. Now when I see someone swerving around the road because they are chatting on the cell phone, or one of the plethora of other idiot things that people do behind the wheel, all I can think about is the precious cargo within our car!  Some people have told me, yeah, just wait until she goes off to college.  Apparently I don't have any idea what mommy worry is yet. :-) All I know at this point is that one of the hardest things about this past month, with all the stuff we've already gone through, is those times (this especially happens in the middle of the night) when I think about how just a month ago I could give her everything she needed, and now, lots of times, there's nothing I can do to make her feel better.  I love our little Natalie Jayne so much. We still look at her all the time and think what a miracle she is. I don't think I'm ever going to stop looking at her without thinking that.