All About Caroline
- Age: 30 days/1 month/4 weeks 2 days
- Weight: 6 lbs 12 oz.
- Hair Color: Brown
- Eye Color: Grey (the doctor said this will change to her permanent color between 6 and 9 months)
- Expert Skills: hiccuping, sneezing, pooping, stretching, eating, the pirate look (only opens one eye and looks at you questioningly), Elvis smile, rolling her tongue
- Developing Skills: tracking people as they walk by, turning to people's voices, looking at toys, grabbing Mommy's hair, wiggling/army crawling across bed!
- Likes: moving her hands, pooping, sleeping on Mommy or Daddy's chest, getting a bath, getting her hair washed
- Dislikes: Her bassinet/pack-n-play, sunlight, the Prince song "1999"
- Mommy's Favorite: When Caroline and Mommy snuggle after Caroline is done eating. During these moments Caroline snuggles then looks up at Mommy and smiles.
- Daddy's Favorite: When Caroline poops. She makes funny facial expressions, very large grunts, and has very loud sounding poop. Now she is even raising her hands above her head as she poops sometimes. Sneezes; they are just adorable.
- Toys: She just started liking her jungle tummy time mat, mirrors
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| After a bath |
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| The pirate |
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| Mommy loves smiles when we snuggle! |
Caroline's Health
We have seen the pediatrician 4 times since leaving the hospital. Basically we go in to see her weekly. We have seen the cardiologist two times now. I've gotten a lot of questions about the cardiologist. Her cardiologist is HERE in Richmond. He works with the surgeon who is located in Charlottesville. When we see the cardiologist we just see him, not the surgeon. We see him here in Richmond. That would stink if we had to go to Charlottesville for every appointment! We really like both her pediatrician and her cardiologist.
Caroline quickly surpassed her birth weight (Babies loose we weight after birth while at the hospital. They are expected to gain this back in the first two weeks). At her 1.5 week appt. she had already surpassed it! The only problem is her weight has plateaued since then. She has been 6 lbs. 12ish oz. for 3 weeks now. We need her to gain weight. Because of her lack of weight gain the doctors have changed her diet some. She is now getting a bottle of formula that has extra formula in it in order to help her gain weight/get more calories. She is also on two medicines. Because of the hole in her heart, (read about her heart defect again here or when we met with the surgeon here) some of her blood recirculates through the heart which makes it work harder. Right now it is working so hard that she is burning all the calories she is eating. We are hoping to be able to put off her heart surgery until late this summer/early fall. However, if she doesn't gain weight then that means she will be having surgery earlier. So to answer the question, "When is she having surgery?" All we can answer is "We don't know." We are trying to delay the surgery for as long as possible so she can get bigger and so the surgeon has a bigger heart to work with. This makes it easier for the surgeon and a smaller chance of her having to have a second surgery. Please pray with us that increasing her calories and her two medicines will help her gain weight by taking some of the stress off of her heart.
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I'm doing great! I have recovered well from the c-section. Emotionally I'm doing okay. I had some major postpartum depression going on during the first two weeks. Basically leading up to Emily's birthday was really difficult for me. I was crying every day many times for no reason at all. Emily combined with being frustrated with nursing, feeling inadequate as a parent, overwhelmed, tired, sad, etc. I kept saying "I don't know how to love her." It was a horrible feeling. After waiting and praying and wanting her so badly for so long all I could think about when I saw her was "How am I supposed to love you?" After we got past Emily's birthday I started doing better. Now I don't feel that way. I love her so much and feel so lucky to be her Mommy. She is having more alert times during the day now too. I'm not sure what to do with her then other than stare back so I've started reading to her. Right now we are going through a book of fairytales. We are also working on important reading concepts like table of contents, predictions, vocabulary, context clues, character traits, etc. Like I said...I'm not sure what to do w/ her so I'm just doing what I know :) We are also starting to play on her tummy time mat.
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| Don't you love the random sock? |
Philip is doing great too. He went back to work 2 weeks ago. Luckily he was able to work from home some that first week. He is such a natural father. It is amazing to see him in action. Every time he holds her I want to take a million pictures. We have been working really well as a team. She has spent many nights this first month cheering on the Capitals with us. They just beat the Rangers to even the series and Caroline was so excited. C-A-P-S! CAPS CAPS CAPS!!
Zach is doing pretty well, but he is a bit of a worrier. Whenever Caroline cries, he gives us a guilt-inducing look that says, "Why aren't you doing anything to help her stop crying?" It's his own version of Lassie's alert that Timmy fell down into the well. He always has to check on her when we get home from an outing. Amazingly he has done a good job of not kissing her. If you have met Zach then you know this is a shock. It is obvious that he loves her a lot, even though it means he doesn't get as much attention as he used to. We can't wait for her to realize that this white fluffy thing is her buddy.
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| Oh good. She is home safely. |
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| Nap time! Notice Zach on the chair and Caroline in her crib. |
I've uploaded pictures from week 2, week 3, and week 4 to the shutterfly site. Here is the link again.
http://noakesnest.shutterfly.com/ ----Don't forget to check out the videos too!
You need a password to view the pictures. If you would like the password all you have to do is ask :)
Thank you for all the sweet emails and facebook messages. I haven't had a chance to respond to most of them. I hope to have a chance to do that this week. I really appreciate the messages, I just haven't been able to find the time to respond!
Love,
Megan and Phil (he wrote some of this!)
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| First family walk around the neighborhood! |
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