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Today my husband had a gastroscopy, which is an endoscopic look at the insides of his esophagus, stomach and intestines. As you can imagine, something of this scale takes place in a hospital; the very same hospital where Nina was born, as luck would have it.
That hospital holds nothing but memories of Nina for me. We took our birth classes there, had our version attempted there and finally gave birth there. It was the first time that we’d been back there since February 18th and it brought back all kinds of memories for me. I remember the excited yet scared and nervous anticipation I felt that morning as we drove through the dark city to the hospital. The way the front desk woman looked at me with big eyes and asked if I was alright. Waiting in the registration area and telling the woman who checked us in that we were going to have a baby girl that day. The walk down the same hallway that we walked just two and a half short months ago.
It was very powerful to go back to the hospital, this time carrying our sweet baby with us. As I toted little Nina around the hospital with people cooing over her, I realized for the thousandth time that she is for real. We returned to the hospital for the first time no longer anticipating the arrival of our girl, but basking in the glory of her. We’ve finally got what we always wanted so much.
While gazing at our beautiful daughter a few weeks ago my husband said to me
“I never knew how much I wanted a daughter until I had one.”
Sometimes my husband is wrong. In this case he couldn’t possibly be more right.
Nina is almost eight weeks old…here’s where we’ve learned about her so far.
Nina hates a wet diaper. She also dislikes a dirty diaper, but strangely enough, she seems more bothered by having a wet one than a poopy one. She’s also a champion pee-er. Two consecutive days in a row, she peed three times in 20 minutes. It’s times like that when I’m so glad we cloth diaper. Even though each diaper individually is pretty cheap, it would still piss me off to know how many of them were “wasted” within seconds on being put on and how much more waste we’d be generating.
Speaking of diapering, my baby girl is growing up!!! Her adorable newborn diaper covers are one heck of a tight squeeze these days. She no longer fits into newborn outfits, but that hasn’t stopped us from squeezing her into them for the past week or so since we’re not ready to retire her first set of clothes yet. She no longer makes that adorable little “O” face that all newborns seem to make. For the past few nights she’s only gotten up once per night to eat. She stays awake for a good couple of hours in between daytime feedings, looking around at her surroundings and taking everything in. She’s become more vocal while she’s awake, making little sounds if for no other reason that just to let us know she’s here. I can’t believe how quickly she’s changing right before our very eyes.
Nina is a champion breastfeeder…sort of. She’s really good at latching on, and has been from the start, so I give her huge credit there, but she’s not super efficient at eating. She’ll eat for ten minutes or so, then decide that it’s time for a little break and rest for a while. Then she’ll eat again for a few minutes and rest a little bit. She’s always been a poky little eater and her pediatrician suggested that rubbing along her jaw bone could help to encourage her to eat better and keep her focused on what she’s doing. The trick works like a charm, but I seem to lack the dedication to actually DO it because I’m too busy surfing for baby deals, reading blogs or playing games on the DS. Because of both of our laziness, feeding Nina can take anywhere from 30 minutes all the way up to an hour and a half.
This girl is a loud eater. Not loud as in slurping and sucking loud, but she makes a lot of sighs and grunts and just general vocal noise while she eats. It is quite entertaining . Also entertaining are the incredible burps she lets fly after she’s done eating. I’d heard that breastfed babies don’t ingest too much air while eating and therefore don’t often have to burp. I can wholeheartedly say that this is not true for my child. This girl can burp with the best of them (much to daddy’s delight).
Nina will not fall asleep on her own. She just plain won’t do it. Try putting her in her crib when she’s awake and you won’t be out of her room for more than five minutes before you hear her hollering. She simply must fall asleep with someone. This fact means that after she finishes eating, I have to wait a good 15 minutes to a half hour for her to get into a deep enough sleep that I can take her to her crib, swaddle her and shut the door without her waking back up. If I fail and she wakes up, then it’s time to use the five S’s in an attempt to get her back in a nice deep sleep again. All told, middle of the night feedings can stretch up to a two hour process, depending on how dedicated she is to eating, or how hungry she is.
The only exception to the above rule is falling asleep in the car. The car is the only place that Nina will fall asleep on her own and usually that’s with a lot of crying and repeatedly putting her Soothie in her mouth (she’s not very good at keeping it in for much longer than a minute or two on her own). If she’s just recently been fed, however, she can fall asleep without any intervention from us. We like those times.
Nina’s got some serious gas issues, which seem to occur on a completely random basis. She will be happily eating away and all of the sudden she will pull away, here face will get bright red and she’ll let out the most pitiful scream I’ve ever heard. We’ve found that a combination of gas drops, gripe water, tummy massage, jiggling and pushing her feet towards her head will usually get the gas moving out. We recently discovered that the bouncy chair with the vibration turned on seems to help as well. Of course it’s always anyone’s guess as to which combination of those things will be the one to work on any given day…
We have loved getting to know our daughter over these past eight weeks. Here are some of my favorite pictures of her so far.
Week One
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Week 7
One Small Wish...Granted 
