Sylvia is 1 month old!!

Our little girl is a whole month old today!! Thanks to our good friend Tess' food scale, we can estimate that as of this morning, Sylvia weighs about 8 pounds, 12 ounces (a 10-ounce gain over 9.5 days). She can still fit in all of her "newborn" clothes, but they're a little more snug, and we've started being able to pull out some of the "0-3 month" stuff, as well as moving up from "newborn" diapers to "size 1".

In her first month, Sylvia has probably gained around 1.5 pounds, has gone through no less than 240 diapers, has had many hundreds of pictures taken of her, and has met many friends and family members. Her laundry has probably been done at least 10 times, and her nails have probably been clipped at least 5 times. She has spent most of her first month sleeping, but she has longer and longer periods when she's wide-eyed and staring around at things around her. The poor kid also seems to have more frequent and longer periods of discomfort.

The past week was a big one for little Sylvia. We took her on her first overnight trip, to San Diego. On the course of the trip, she was reunited with most of the relatives she'd met so far and met some new ones and some new friends. She also had her first bottle feeding and attended her first wedding. Pictures will come soon!

Sylvia is 3 weeks old!!

Today marked Sylvia's 3-week birthday. It's hard for us to believe that it's been 21 days that we've been responsible for this tiny little person. She's definitely a different baby than she was 3 weeks ago. She was strong from the beginning, but her mini-pushups have only gotten more impressive, and we can't even really give her 'tummy time' anymore because she immediately just rolls over. Speaking of her tummy, she's developed a sizable gut for such a small person! It seems to give her some distress, and she sure does makes sure that we hear all about it! She's also deeply annoyed unless at least one of her parents is totally incapacitated in an effort to keep her happy, and she's very hard to fool.

Thanks to our friend Tess who has a food scale, we can estimate that as of this evening Sylvia weighed 8 pounds, 2 ounces, which would represent a 12-ounce gain over 10.5 days, which is plenty.

Sylvia is 2 weeks old!!

I am unabashadedly ripping off our good friend Jayne, who blogged pictures of her son Kurt in a particular chair each month over the course of his first year, usually with a little update about how he was doing. So far, we've been taking pictures of Sylvia in the rocking chair that her grandparents and a few of her great (and great great) aunts and uncles bought for us every day since the day after we got home from the hospital. I figure we'll post a monthly update like Jayne did for a while, but that the first 2 weeks were momentous enough to warrant their very own post...

Sylvia is 2 weeks old today! She still sleeps most of the time when she's not eating (and most of the time when she is eating, too). Watching the little faces she makes when she's sleeping, you'd think she was having very intense dreams. When she's awake, she's usually either crying (apparently with a tummy ache) or looking around the world with wide eyes. She loves to snuggle and does NOT like to be put down. She's ambivalent about the outdoors and the car, but so far she has a perfect track record of good behavior in stores and supermarkets.

Sylvia's parents were VERY happy today when her little belly button stump finally fell off because the 3 of us were all feeling pretty traumatized by the experience of having to wash it multiple times a day, and soon we'll be able to give her a bath without worrying about getting water on it!

She's still exclusively wearing her "Newborn" clothes and is not yet fitting in the "0-3 month" outfits, but her legs are filling out enough and spending enough time uncurled from the fetal position that we can finally put pants on her, which is good because she seems to prefer a slightly warmer temperature than her parents, who always seem to want the house to be about 10 degrees lower than anybody else would.

It's been a great 2 weeks! Max & I are both exhausted and totally feeble-minded, but we're mostly just deliriously happy with our precious little girl!!

And here are a few more pictures:

11-day Progress Report

At her check-up today, Sylvia Rose weighed 7 pounds, 6 ounces, meaning that she has gained 6 ounces since her last check up one week ago and has surpassed her birth weight! They were looking for her to gain 0.5 - 1 ounce a day and to catch up to her birth weight by the time she's 2-weeks-old. She's doing good by either metric, and is generally "perfect" according to her pediatrician. Her next checkup will be at the end of September when she's 2 months old. Knowing that there aren't going to be any medical professionals looking at her in the next 7ish weeks gives me the same sort of feeling that I had leaving the hospital of "What are these people thinking trusting me with a baby?!?!?!" but she's doing really well so I guess we must be doing something right...

Right now the little girl is asleep in my lap, so I might actually have a minute to write a little about her first 11 days...

She's met all 4 of her grandparents, as well as other relatives and friends. My parents and brother were able to make it to the hospital before she was born and meet her before she was whisked away to the nursery for tests and procedures. My parents came back the next day and a few time since then.

Max's family had a longer drive and more difficult time conflicts, so his parents came up the next day and his sister came up a few days later. It's harder to make day trips from San Diego, so they each stayed a while and got to have some good quality time with little Sylvia.

Little Sylvia is quite the social butterfly. She has also had visits from 2 great aunts (Connie & Christine), 1 great uncle (Matt), and 3 cousins (Michelle, Tom & Amelia). Technically the cousins are 1st cousins, once removed, but I think we'll go with Aunt Michelle, Uncle Tom & Cousin Amelia. Why the inconsistency? Well, here she is with newlyweds Aunt Michelle & Uncle Tom:

And here she is with Amelia, who is enjoying her summer break and will soon be starting the 4th grade:

Incidentally, here's Amelia when I first met her when she was around that same age that Sylvia is now:

If you can't tell, I've been fond of her since the beginning!

In these first days, Sylvia has also met several friends, some of whom will undoubtedly also don honorary "aunt-" and "uncle-" hood, as well as one honorary cousin, another star of this blog, Mr. Kurt.

Kurt seems pretty unsure about this new little creature with whom he is suddenly having to share the attention and laps that have almost exclusively belonged to him since he was born. But he's being a trooper!

Apologies to any of her visitors who weren't pictured &/or mentioned, but she's starting to wake up now, so I'd better hurry up if I'm going to write about anything else...

In her first several days, Sylvia rarely cried. She cries more (and more fiercely) these days, but she still spends a vast majority of her time snoozing away, making the funniest little noises and faces. She does spend more and more time looking around and charming her parents with her beautiful eyes, but it's still a pretty small portion of the day.

Speaking of eyes, the medical people referred to them as "that baby blue-gray" right after she was born. I think right now they're kind of olive, but it'll be at least a few months before we know how they will settle.

And now it's getting to be time to feed the little one, so I leave you with this picture of Sylvia and I working on this post:

10 Days Old

Sylvia is 10 days old today!

She was born 10 days ago, and we've been home from the hospital for more than a week. Despite the difficulty that the hospital staff had in getting her to cry 10 days ago, I can verify that she definitely does know how, but we're all doing really well. On and off throughout the day, I've been thinking of writing some little things about her first 10 days, but there was laundry and dishes and a baby to feed and comfort, and now it's bedtime! So all I can do is leave you with these pictures that have been taken since last time...

We have a check-up with the pediatrician tomorrow, so I'll give an update on her stats if nothing else...

Sylvia Rose: Unofficial announcement & progress report

I guess it was predictable that I would have failed to blog sooner or even email out pictures. It seemed like word & photos were making it around, though, so I figured it was probably OK, and I figure people will forgive me (which I appreciate)...

But onto the important stuff!!

Sylvia Rose was born at 10:06PM on July 27, 2009.

She didn't cry at all when she was first born, so the hospital people kept her on a heating table while they poked at her. She still wouldn't cry, but she was looking around and moving and making faces and otherwise doing so well that they gave up and let us hold her for a while before they took her away to the nursery for the full set of tests and treatments and things.

They weighed and measured her in the nursery, and she was 19 inches, 7 pounds 3 ounces, and totally perfect. She was checked out by a doctor from her pediatrician's office when she was about 12 hours old, and he said that she was "officially perfect". So there you have it: One out of one doctors agree, Sylvia Rose is officially perfect!


She only went down to about 6 pounds, 15 ounces while we were at the hospital. While we were there, many of the hospital staff commented on how good she was. She didn't give the nurses who had to check her out a hard time, and she was generally very sweet and calm.

We spent 2 nights at the hospital and came home on Wednesday. At the hospital, we weren't allowed to dress her in anything other than the hospital clothes, so we were super excited to get to dress her in her going-home outfit. We weren't sure whether she would fit in "newborn" clothes or "0-3" clothes, so we brought both. We dressed her in a newborn outfit and it was comically over-sized.


She made the transition home like a champ and still has an incredibly sweet disposition. She still doesn't cry very much, which may change when she starts spending more time awake. We made our first migration to her pediatrician's office this morning, and he said she was doing great (which I assume is meant as an additional qualification on top of already being "perfect" and not a down-grade). He says that she is not jaundiced and that we do not have to worry about it anymore because if she has not gotten jaundiced by day 4 then she won't. She also has already started rebounding and gaining weight back from the initial drop, which is ahead of schedule. So, she's doing great! We're tired and still in a certain amount of disbelief -- reality will probably settle in sometime in the next 18 years or so, right? -- but we're also totally delighted!

Here are a ton of pictures:
I think I'll be posting pictures and completely unbiased reports of how adorable and generally awesome she is again soon and often!