2-month progress report

Sylvia passed her check-up today with flying colors! They weighed her in at 9 pounds, 13 ounces, and they were very happy with her weight gain. They also said that her eating & sleeping habits sound good, and the doctor was impressed with how alert and chatty and strong she was.

The doctor noticed that Sylvia has an hemangioma on the back of her shoulder. It's a cluster of raised red spots, which we had noticed a while ago and been keeping an eye on. Apparently it will likely get bigger and then disappear. Right now it looks like this:

She also got her 2-month vaccinations today. She was calm after I lay her down and held her hands and told her everything was okay, and then the shot went into the first thigh, and her face turned red and her expression clearly indicated intense feelings of misery and betrayal. And then there was the second thigh! Her eyes watered, and she has never looked so sad. It was terrible! She calmed down pretty quickly, but I remain traumatized, and she's continued to act like she's in a bit of discomfort. Here she is with her sad little bandaids:

Will try to follow up soon with more pictures!

Sylvia is 2 months old!!

Sylvia Rose is 2 months old today, and still perfect!

She's been giving us full-fledged smiles for the past couple weeks, which is absolutely wonderful. She's awake more than ever before these days, and seems to really enjoy looking around at the world and at people fussing about how cute she is. She definitely has good days and bad days, but she seems to spend less of her time screaming. When she does get upset, it's usually not to difficult to calm her down. She's been sleeping 4-6 hours straight in the evening. The only trouble is that this usually starts a few hours before we're ready to go to bed, but it often gives us a chance to get some chores done without interruptions and get a few hours of sleep before she wakes us up needing to be fed.

Today, we estimated that she weighs 9 pounds, 12 ounces and is 22.5 inches long.

Tomorrow morning we go in for her 2-month checkup and her vaccines, so I'll at least post a quick official progress report, and if I have some time I'll also post more recent pictures, including one of her first trip to the beach!

Time goes by...

Max & I have been married for 3 years! We've had a pretty low-key anniversary. We took the baby to her first movie and got ourselves some Thrifty's ice cream and otherwise just hung out at home and enjoyed each other's company. Yesterday, though, we continued our tradition of going to Buca di Beppo the night BEFORE our anniversary.

This tradition started because Max spent our first anniversary flying to Mexico so we decided to celebrate the night before by driving to one of our favorite restaurants. We realized that we also had dinner at a Buca di Beppo at our rehearsal dinner one year previous, and a tradition was born!

But enough about us, right?

Sylvia is now 7 weeks (and 2 days) old! On Monday we estimated her weight to be 9 pounds, 7 ounces (after adjusting for the blanket & diaper).

And several days earlier we used Sylvia's great-grandmother Sylvia's measuring tape and estimated her length to be 22 inches (a full 3 inches longer than at birth).

And if our crude measuring techniques are not sufficient to convince you that she is growing, I can attest to the fact that certain outfits that used to be fairly roomy are now too snug and are ready to be boxed away. She feels and seems like a bigger and older baby.

She still rolls over whenever we try to put her on her tummy, but she occasionally stays on her tummy for a while and does some impressive commando crawling first. She's also been smiling a lot more for at least a week or so, which is pretty much the best thing ever!

There seemed to be a bit of a trend where she was spending more and more time being fussy, so we started more seriously putting the "5 S's" from The Happiest Baby on the Block into effect. When she starts getting worked up for no apparent reason, she gets wrapped up (swaddling) and gets her pacifier (sucking), and if that's not enough than we bring out the noise-making Sleep Sheep (sshh'ing) and bounce (or swing) while holding her on her side (stomach or side), and it works great!

So, things are going really well! I do miss sleeping for more than 2-4 hours at a time. A lot. But we're all doing well! I'll post again in about a week and a half when we have our next pediatrician's appointment (if not before).

Here are a few more pictures to tide you over!

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: