She loves sleeping with her hand by her head
This is how we hold her paci in her mouth sometimes because she hasn't quite learned how to keep it in there..
She's just starting to smile when she's happy
This is exactly what I looked like when I was a baby. I love her furrowing!!
Now that we're on week 7 I feel much more like a sane mother than a stressed out person who just had this adorable baby, but who wasn't quite connected yet. I was at a dear friend's birth a few days ago for about 24 hours and I missed my baby so much!! I absentmindedly forgot my breast pump shells when I brought my breast pump so I had to spend about 30 mins in the bathroom trying to hand express milk into the little storage baggies - NOT fun. The hospital was so gracious and set me up with one of their breast pumps so I did not explode from engorgement. I was thinking of Evelyn so often that I kept having let downs. Ouch! The birth was amazing and I kept flashing back to my own experiences weeks prior. It did not make me less present, it just kept me thinking about how I could help the situation with new knowledge about what may help a laboring mother. It was pretty neat!
Evelyn is doing so well. At 6 weeks she weighed 6lb 7oz and was in the 50% range for length, weight, and head circumference. She received her DTaP and Rotavirus vaccine, which wasn't pleasant for either of us.. Breastfeeding is going very well despite our rough start. I'm glad I kept going, to say the least. I do have an overactive let down, plus I have an abundant milk supply. Evelyn sometimes chokes a bit on the milk because she can't get it down fast enough. She will get gas later on if I can't get her to burp during and after feedings, too. It has been so hard to just lay with her, holding her legs up and letting her suck on the paci while she tries to get her gas out.. poor baby. I can tell it's painful but sometimes no matter what I do she won't burp. Lately the gripe water has been working small miracles. She loves the apple flavor so we have no trouble giving it to her in the dropper, thank goodness!
We are cloth diapering 99% of the time and using cloth wipes 90% of the time. She is finally fitting into her GroBaby diapers and I'm thrilled. We are still using her Thirsties covers with the cotton prefolds, also. I really want to get use out of the prefold method before she grows out of them otherwise I'd feel like they were a waste of money. Both diapers look cute on her and in my opinion, aren't too bulky. Sure, they are visibly larger than disposables, but I could really care less. I think her big butt is so cute and I feel very satisfied with cloth diapering. Laundry has been no problem at all - we wash about once a day because I don't have enough time for a 3 hour chunk every 2 days like many moms do. Evie needs me to hold her so often and I still tire easily. We set up a drying rack with multiple rungs out on the deck so the sun can bleach out the poop stains in the diapers. I accidentally pre-washed the diapers in hot one day and it set in stains in about 12 diapers. Hopefully over the next few days they will bleach out and we can avoid using any actual bleaching products. I am having an issue with my wipes warmer which makes it hard to use cloth wipes 100% of the time. It has been getting moldy very quickly even though I am following the instructions. I need to call them or search on some message boards for people with similar issues. I'd really like to do cloth all the time, but I can't put mold on Evie's tushie!
I am beyond tired right now and I must sleep for now. There's so much more I want to share, so hopefully I will have the time to write again very very soon.
~Christine
Christine I loved reading this post. I impressed you have her in cloth already! It took me like 3 months to work up to that. I sympathize with the overproduction/let down issues. We had the same thing around here for probably about 4 months. One thing that I found helped was to just hand express or pump some milk before I put Linnaea to the breast. I was afraid that it would make the problem worse in the long run, but every thing still evened out eventually. I also finally started only feeding her on one side each feeding and that helped a lot too. Of course you probably already know that, since you are so informed! but I thought I'd throw it out there because I was clueless. I didn't even know oversupply was a potential problem until I had it. Well, take care, Evelyn is adorable!
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