Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Here are an assortment of pictures of Mia from the last couple of weeks. The fist picture is her first Halloween costume, and she is definitely Mom's little sweet pea! ;o) I figure I only get a couple of year's of input in her costumes, so I decided we had to get her dressed up this year (even if it is only for pictures). The second picture is my top candidate for the page in Mia's baby book entitled "Mad Baby". ;o) Luckily, these faces are usually fixed w/ a quick swaddle! The third picture is Mia on Grandma's shoulder on her six-week "birthday". I can't believe how big she is already! I think she's about 12lbs now, and we've already had to move up another diaper size. The final picture (I know I skipped a couple, but I think they're pretty self-explanatory) is of Mia a few days ago wearing the same outfit she wore in her newborn photos at the hospital. Amazingly, the outfit now fits her... Six weeks ago you'd had to have taken my word for it that she had feet inside those pant legs! ;o) Anyways, hope you all have a happy Halloween!

Five weeks

Mia is now five weeks old. She's hit a couple of milestones this week. A few days ago she smiled her first true smile, and today she lifted her head all the way up for a few seconds while on her stomach. She's getting stronger and feeling steadier everyday.

These pictures are of her dressed up for her second trip to church. For today, this was outfit #2... She defeated outfit #1 after she unleashed her breakfast on it. Last weekend, she defeated our efforts to get to church entirely by unleashing breakfast on two consecutive outfits as we were trying to get out the door. *Sigh*

Mia's a month old!

Here is a short video of Mia at a month old: She is still doing really well. Our biggest challenge is keeping food in the baby... Some days she does great, and on other days she's a walking time bomb. And I'm going to throttle the next person who tells me that spitting up is "just a laundry problem". Uh huh. I get that Mia isn't sick, but I also feel like she might blow at any moment. Who wants to venture out into the real world w/ a kid who might explode at any time?

Mia's First Bath

Since we've been home from the hospital, I've been giving Mia sponge baths b/c we had to wait until her belly button was completely healed before we could give her a real bath. I was not looking forward to trying out the real bath b/c she's screamed bloody murder every time I've given her a sponge bath, and I figured that more water would probably just yield more screaming. And as we started yesterday's bath, I think Mia had the same assumption... Luckily, we were both wrong. You can see from the progression of pictures below that Mia was prepared to hate the bath, then decided it might not be so bad, and finally decided it was pretty enjoyable. In fact, I had timed the bath so that I could feed her immediately afterward b/c that always makes her happy, but she was so mellow after the bath I couldn't even wake her up to eat! :o)

In other news, we had another pediatrician appt yesterday, and Mia is still gaining weight like a champ! She weighed in at 10lbs 8.5oz! And now we have a month before I have to take her in for her first round of shots. :o(

Sleep-Deprived Mommy's Note: This entry has been edited to reflect that Mia gained weight as of her last appt. I'm not even sure where I got the # that typed in the first place... ;o)

Arms Embargo

So how about some updates?? :o) First off, we're all doing well, and Mia is adorable. Here is Exhibit A, in which she makes cute baby noises, looks at the camera, gets the hiccups, and pats her own hair: So here's some info on Mia's progress since birth... We left the hospital on Wednesday 9/20 at around 7pm after her final blood test came back showing that her jaundice was no longer at a troubling range. Our pediatrician's primary concern was that we get nursing off to a good enough start that we keep her post-birth weight-loss to a minimum. Well, that turned out not to be a problem... The following Friday we took Mia in for her first official visit to the pediatrician's office, and she was already back to her birth weight of 8 pounds, 1 ounce. We were pretty impressed w/o ourselves b/c the goal is to get baby back to birth weight by 10 - 14 days of age. (Babies can lose up to 8 - 10% of their birth weight in the first 4 days of life). On our way out of the office, we scheduled our next appt for the following Friday, which meant that we were going to be on our own w/ this little person for the next entire week!! The major challenge she provided us with in the week that followed is that she became a very prolific spitter upper… This translates to much laundry…and much fretting if you are the parents of a baby who is supposed to be eating enough to continue gaining weight. I was sure that she couldn’t possibly be keeping enough down to actually gain weight when I looked at the sheer volume of what came back up. Well, that fear was put to rest the next Friday when she weighed in at a full pound heavier than the week before -- 9 pounds, 1.5 ounces! :o) The funny development in that week was that she began making this weird guttural noise that sounded sort of like she was trying to communicate with pigeons… Jeff was pretty convinced that this was not a normal sound for humans to be making. He polled Mia’s grandparents, and even their reassurance didn’t settle him much until the pediatrician chuckled at Mia’s generous performance of said noise during our visit. She said Mia was just trying to communicate and that it was a perfectly normal sound. I’ll try to post a clip of it if I can catch it on video. And last but not least, you’re probably wondering about the arms embargo, eh? Well, people Mia’s age are entirely too small and immature to bear arms. And I mean the sort that grow out of your shoulders… Mia will wake herself out of a sound sleep by smacking herself in the face with arms she has no control over, and then she starts screaming as she looks around as if wondering, “Who did it??” Then, of course, she continues flailing and hitting herself in the face…all with no clue that she’s the culprit. So we’ve been keeping her in a snug swaddle when she sleeps or when she gets herself worked up, and it’s like turning on a calming switch on the baby. It’s amazing. (I can’t recommend highly enough the $14 paperback The Happiest Baby on the Block, which I read in my last trimester. So far, Mia hasn’t once proved inconsolable, which is worth way more than the cost of the book!!)