Saturday, April 08, 2006

One week reflections

One week ago today, I was in a hospital bed in the middle of labor. At about this hour, they were coming in to break my bag of water. And now I have a beautiful sleeping baby in my arms! (As usual lately, I am typing with one hand.)

We have taken to calling her the Pip because she makes little pipsqueak sounds. Her favorite thing is her hands. She does not like to be swaddled because she cannot access her hands to put them in her mouth or reach for things. Her dad gave her a pacifier one night (we are not in agreement about this one-everything I've read suggests waiting at least a few weeks or it causes feeding probs). When it fell out of her mouth, she reached over and tried to put it back in her mouth! This is pretty amazing for a 3 day old infant to do! But she doesn't have the muscle tone yet to get it to her lips, she was aiming it near her nose, then her chin, etc. It was like watching a drunk try to touch his nose in a sobriety test!

We took her to her 1st pediatrician appt. on Wed. and the doctor said she is very healthy. She grew 3/4 inch! She is now 20 3/4 long. She has "big little feet" which seem very long for a newborn. In mutt puppies, you look at their paws to see what mix they probably are and how big they'll grow. If this carries true for humans, then Lauren's tall Dardani genes are showing up!

We took her for her first walk around the block on Thursday and she slept through the whole thing. She has the kind of stroller where the base is also her carseat, but she hates it as a carseat because it restricts her hands. 99% of the time she cries, it is because she doesn't have access to her hands. In her trip to the pediatrician, she started screaming because she couldn't reach her arms to her face. There was nothing we could do about that, short of illegally unbuckling her, so we just let her cry it out, and then put on some classical music, which soothed her.

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