Sunday, August 11, 2013

Newborn Shoshana


I'm not sure if it is due to the fact that this is not our first rodeo, or if it is just the way she is, but Shoshana is a crazy mellow baby. Perhaps, it is her way of making it up to me for the long pregnancy filled with flu like symptoms and exhaustion that she made me endure. Whatever the reason, she is pretty much the world's chillest baby. Of course, it could also just be the whole newborn thing. Only time will tell.

4 days old
She is a very different nurser than her brother was (btw, I had to wean him around 19 months because it hurt to nurse due to being pregnant with her. We did it gradually and he did just fine with it). She only nurses for about 5-10 minutes and is done. Judah used to just nurse and nurse and fall asleep and still keep nursing. I have an app on my phone that tracks nursing and it is pretty interesting to compare their visual nursing charts side by side.

1 week old
However, she is pretty gassy. She burps and farts with the best of them. And barfs... sometimes immediately after nursing. Everything she just drank is expelled right back on me. Other times, she waits until it is partially digested before she lets loose. As she grows (she is already 4 weeks!?!), she is spitting up less and hopefully that is a trend that will continue.

1 week
Currently, she is getting up 3 times at night, which isn't too bad at all. Especially since she is a quick nurser, which means I'm only up with her for 10 minutes or so. Of course, sometimes she doesn't go right back to sleep, either because she is gassy and needs to burp, or she is still hungry, or just isn't tired, or who knows why, but thankfully that hasn't been happening too often. She even had her first 8 hour stretch of sleep last week on the night of Aug 6th! This phenomenon has yet to be repeated, but I have high hopes. Usually her first sleep chunk (always the longest of the night) is more around 4 or 5 hours.

1 week
We did Elimination Communication with Judah starting around 4 months (which is when I first learned about it). We credit EC with how we are able to have Judah potty trained by the time he was 2 with relative ease. This time around, we started EC with Shosh right from the beginning. It's going well. She will sometimes fuss when she needs to pee, so we unbutton her diaper and she will pee into her open diaper. I find it awkward at this point to hold her over Judah's potty insert. Once she is bigger we will switch to that. She also poos into an open diaper, which is way easier to clean as it doesn't get all over her. 

1 week
Her umbilical stump fell off when she was 6 days old. It was hanging on by the tiniest, gross, little thread all day on Thursday and we kept hoping it would fall off, but it just kept dangling there. We resisted trying to remove it by force, because we know we are not suppose to do that, but she kept touching it and we didn't stop her, as we hoped maybe she would knock it off herself. She didn't. It fell off sometime during the night. When she got up Friday morning, Bill found it in her jammies when he changed her. Her belly button was still pretty gooey and scabby for a while. It didn't really start being an adorable swirl of a button until the last week or so. 

Cute button swirl at 3 weeks
She is gaining weight like a champ. She has even surpassed Judah's weight gain when he was newborn. She is shaping up to be a nice round baby with lots of chub and rolls. Yay! I love those chubby babies and their accompanying cheeks.

1 week
3 weeks
She has another check up on Monday, so we will get to see how much she weighs. Then, on Tuesday, she will be a whopping one month old! She weighed 9 lbs 12 oz when she was 17 days old, so I would guess she might even be up to 11 lbs on Monday. 

1 week
For the first 6 weeks, Shoshana and I both just see my midwives. We had a check up at 1 day, 3 days, and 1 week where the midwives came to wherever we were (the 1 day was at the birth center, the next two were at home). Then there is also a 2 week, 4 week, and 6 week check up which take place at Alma. We got back the results of both rounds of newborn screenings for her and everything looks good.

3 weeks
Her eyes are still that dark newborn gray. Judah's didn't settle into brown until about 3 months. I'm still hopeful that she will get her Dad's pretty blue eyes, but he is convinced hers will be brown like mine.

3 weeks
We had family portraits done the Friday after she was born (the same day her stump fell off). Our photographer was the super talented Posy Quarterman. We got our online gallery of images a few days ago and we should get our set of prints and disk of images in the mail this week. Shosh kept pooping throughout the hour long session. I'm pretty sure it was just one poo, but we would keep changing her diaper only to find she had pooped more a little while later. We had her in disposables for the session, because the cloth diapers were kind of awkwardly large on her at that point and they made her cute little romper fit a bit odd.

3 weeks
With Judah, we didn't put him into cloth diapers until around 2 months. We had her in them at just a few days old. Part of it was with practicing EC it just made more sense, and this time around we are much more accepting of leaks (which really haven't even really been happening with her. It might be since the diapers are have been used already they are more absorbent than when they were brand new and still had sizing in the material). We are using disposables at night though, so that we don't have to change her at all during the night. Night diaper changes just force us and her to wake up more than we want to.

3 weeks
Okay, I need to go to bed. It is later than I want it to be. And I still need to start a load of diapers in the wash. And shower. And get ready for bed.

Before I go, here are some pictures from the other day of Judah holding Shosh, as per his request. Oh, also, when Shosh was 3 days old, Judah told her (unprompted by us, mind you), "I love you, Shoshana" at bedtime. It was the absolute sweetest thing. Ever.










1 comment:

  1. Such beautiful pictures of Shoshana and of Judah and her. She is an easy baby, so we'll keep hoping she stays that way.

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