11 Weeks

Everyone knows about the zebra, right? The one that she likes to stare at? Well, on Friday we introduced Alex to her bouncy chair, and she seemed to enjoy it. It has a bar with some toys attached to it, but she doesn't seem to like those yet. (I think it was too much new stuff at one time.) Yesterday (Saturday), though, I took off the regular toys and attached her zebra to it, the one she likes to stare at. After she had been looking at the zebra for a few minutes, she started taking her right hand and, still intently focused on looking at the zebra, kept making swipes at it with her hand. IT WAS SO AMAZING! She did it again and again and kept hitting it! I was so proud and it was so cool to watch this small part of her development.

Alex continues to do well. It's 5:00 am here, but I am happy and content and awake because (drum roll, please...) Alex went six hours between feedings last night! This is great. She continues to go longer between feedings, which is wonderful but also takes some getting used to, and I'm hoping that pretty soon I'm consistently only getting up once during the night, and then hopefully she'll begin sleeping through the night most of the time. Her acid reflux seems to be doing much better due to the Zantac that she's on, and we try to hold her upright for at least fifteen minutes after feedings. (All of this is normal and Zantac is one of the most commonly prescribed drugs for babies with acid reflux.)

She also continues to focus more and more on objects and spends longer amounts of time entertaining herself. And she totally loves attention! Almost without fail, if we're out and there are other people around, she is very chill and enjoys being passed around from person to person and is rarely fussy during those times. She's also beginning to enjoy her baths more and more I think. Yesterday she didn't cry at all when I put her in and only cried when I took her out.

Alex continues to grow and we had to cycle out some of her clothes (I'm going to miss her little days of the week onesies that dad gave her) and got some new ones put in to the rotation. It's really crazy to look back at pictures from the beginning, especially of her in her pajamas, and realize how much she's grown. Her feet actually reach her pj feet now! Her eyes continue to be dark gray, although we're wondering if they are starting to get a little lighter. People always comment on her eyes and how big and intense they are. I also get more and more people commenting on how expressive she is. She tends to furrow her brow a bit and lift her eyebrows, making her look very inquisitive and attentive. She's probably just passing gas, though... :) And she has kept her hair and there seems to be only the slightest bit of thinning where her head rests against her bed. It's starting to grow more on her head where she didn't have it before, and it's getting pretty long as well. In the sunlight, her hair looks almost copper-colored. I keep wondering if her hair is going to have more red tints to it than expected. Maybe she'll look like nanny!

And Alex is now cooler than any other person I know; she has two passports! We picked up her US passport a while ago, and she got her Nicaraguan passport on Thursday. I wish I were cool enough to have dual citizenship!

10 Weeks

This is when my child starts to get truly interesting. This has been the week for visual focus and concentration. She is currently really good at looking at a foil ball that I dangle back and forth, she will follow herself in a mirror, she has become interested in the car seat mobile that her great-grandparents got her, and she will look at the small stuffed animals that dangle above her bed. She especially likes the zebra, I think because it is black and white and has stripes, two things that are especially interesting to infants this age. It's been amazing to watch her make these steps when days before she wasn't doing these things.

She also did something else pretty amazing on Saturday morning. She let me sleep until I wanted to get up, which was a little after 7:00. It was really nice :) She still has a few times when she cluster feeds, but she's usually eating about every 3 hours, and starting to go a little bit longer sometimes, especially after her last feeding at night.

We still just keep thinking about how big she is. At her last appointment, she was a little over 21 inches, which means that she has grown almost 3 inches since she's been born. Her little legs are so chubby, as are her arms and hands and cheeks.

She's smiling so much more and many times will respond to you when you smile at her, and we can go back and forth taking turns smiling. She is also staying up more (she's still great at telling the difference between day and night), but a lot of times I think she has a hard time knowing what to do with herself when she's awake. She can kind of entertain herself for about 10 minutes, maybe 15, but then a lot of times she gets fussy and cries because she doesn't know what to do with herself. When she's totally inconsolable, many times there is only one thing that will fix the problem - Daddy Time. Without fail, Jason can take her in his arms a certain way and sing a little song that he made up, and she will be totally enthralled. (We have video copies for you that you'll be able to see.) It's pretty impressive, and I can't duplicate it. It can get a little tiresome for Jason, though, because it's pretty high-energy and hard to keep up for any long period of time. We're getting much more familiar with her cries, though, and can usually tell when she's simply fussy and can let her cry without feeling as though there's something we could actually do for her. (Just because we let her cry doesn't mean were bad parents, though - PLEASE don't think that... lol.)

She can't wait to meet all of you!

Two Months

Alex turned two months old yesterday and is doing great. she had her check-up yesterday and currently weighs in at nine pounds, four ounces! This is great because she gained over two pounds this past month, which is a little more than normal. She needs to do this because she needs to play catch up some. She is still on her medicine for another month at least, which we expected, and she's also on Zantac to help some with spit up that's kind of creamy and not just milk. (Acid reflux.) We have also come to the conclusion that we think she's lactose intolerant, something very common in babies, so I am on a total diet lacking in cheese (NO PIZZA), milk (NO PUDDING), and ice cream (NO ICE CREAM). How sad is that? We have a formula that she shouldn't be allergic to now. This will be great if for some reason I'm gone and she really needs to eat, which has happened occasionally.

She also has something called an umbilical hernia, which sounds scary but isn't. Her little belly button sticks out like you wouldn't believe. It's a little weird but not something to worry about. 75% of the cases correct themselves by the time the child is two years old, so we really hope that we're in that 75%. (There is a possibility of corrective surgery, but it's not something to worry about at all, so don't concern yourselves...)

Overall, Dr. Mora is pleased with her progress, even though she's still only in the 25th percentile of weight, height, and head size for girls, but that's to be expected.

At home she's doing really well. Jason and I think that we're both finally getting better (we started taking parasite medicine and it seems to be working). Alex has been sleeping for longer periods of time at the beginning of the night, so I am pretty regularly able to have at least three hours of sleep in a row at the beginning. She continues to brin gher hand to her mouth, and she now has a little play area set up near our back door where I do some development exercises with her and just hang out some. She did the GREATEST thing this morning! I attached a foil ball to a ribbon to help encourage her to move her hands up and try to swat at it. It's early for that, but it was an easy thing to make and try out. She did not swat at it. However, she got realy interested in it and she tracked it with her eyes, left to right and up and down, for about 2 or3 minutes, which was amazing! she just kept following it with her eyes. I've seen her do this a little bit but never to that extent. It's pretty cool. I also took out a few spices to have her smell, which was kind of fun, and I lift her up by her hands and her neck is starting to get so strong. She can't hold it up yet, but she's getting there.

Okay, sorry nopics this time. She just woke up and is HUNGRY!

7 Weeks

We have a grubby little girl.

I say this because of her hands. While she fills out her pajamas much better than when she first came home, her hands still tend to curl up inside of her sleeves. When this happens, any fuzzies from the cloth (or any other cloth I'm sure) somehow get stuck in between her chubby fingers, so that when I'm playing with her or holding her, I'm constantly pulling out fuzzies from between her fingers. It's a little strange. She also has a tendency to spit up, as already written about, and sometimes when she does this, her head is at such an angle that it gets into her hair and behind her ears.

When one is considering becoming a parent, I assume that one rarely considers the possibility of cleaning coagulated milk from behind a child's ear. However, this is what parenthood is all about.
Alexis is now seven weeks old and will have another doctor's appointment at the end of next week, so we'll have new measurements for everyone soon. She's doing a better job the past few days about eating on a more regular schedule. I'm trying to be patient, especially at night, and give her some time to pause before continuing to eat, and I think this is helping her to be more full, therefore eating a little less frequently. This also helps in the middle of the night; for the past few nights, when I've put her down after feeding her, I haven't had to get out of bed again. This is a very nice change of events. And she's at the age where she can go a little bit longer between feedings, too. For the most part she's eating about every three hours, and a little bit longer between feedings at night. BUT, in all honesty, she could start eating every hour on the hour again this afternoon. You never know. She's a baby.

She continues to grab hair and shirts, including her own. It's really funny when she's grabbing her own hair with one of her fists. Her favorite new thing is when we've burped her and are putting her down again, she takes the cloth with her and holds onto it tightly, with her grubby little hands, of course! She also goes on "rolling expeditions" in her crib. She's still a little elevated, and she kicks her feet and moves her body around until she can get to the bottom. I'm trying to get this on video because sometimes she does it pretty quickly. When doing this, she looks like she's about to roll over because a lot of time we'll find her part of the way down and totally on her side. I know this is partially due to the inertia of the angle she's at, but it's still pretty amazing.

I think she's also beginning to react to us some. For example, this afternoon she smiled, and I gave her this big, happy encouragement after she did it. And she did it again. And I gave her more big, happy encouragement, and she did it a third time. It was pretty cool.

This past week was a little odd, though. Jason and I were both sick most of the week and went to the doctor on Wednesday and went on medicine, which meant she went on formula for a few days. And of course she was allergic to it. She's back on breast milk now and had no problem with the transition. It's not unusual at all for babies to be allergic to normal breast milk, so she might just need a soy-based formula. We'll talk to her pediatrician about it at the next appointment. It was a long few days because whenever she ate, I had to pump, and we had to go through the process of sterilizing everything, and we were trying to get over being sick (which we're both totally better now - stomach stuff), so it was nice to be better this weekend. The big thing is that she went back to breast milk without problem after a few days of being only on a bottle. I'm hoping that this is a good sign of her flexibility and adaptability, because she's going to need that in large doses come December.

And the cutest thing of all is how GOOD she's becoming at bringing at bringing her fingers to her mouth. This is great for a number of reasons. It (hopefully) means that she's truly beginning to recognize that her hands belong to her. It also means that she's trying to stick her fingers in her mouth more often and suck on them. This had happened almost accidentally a few times before, but it's been pretty consistent this week. We got a great picture of her sucking her thumb! If she learns to suck her thumb (or her knuckle, like I did), it means that when she's upset and wants to suck on something, she can get her fingers to her mouth, even if she can't pick up her pacifier. We'll give her a pacifier during the day when we're up and around to put it back in her mouth, but at night I don't want to deal with getting up if she's upset because it fell out of her mouth. So hopefully she'll continue to get better with her hands. Plus, it's just cute when she does it.

She has a number of friends. The pink, fluffy thing is Boggy, a gift from a friend's parents. (There were various opinions about whether it looks like a dog or a bear, hence the name.) And Clarence, her elephant, is her "oldest and dearest friend." (That was for you, Edgertons...) In the pictures you can actually see some of her scars as well, the top on being where the triple line went in, and the bottom line near her navel where her incision was made. (You can't see where her stitches on her bottom neck were, which will be her other scar. ) They all still look really great and I hope that they never cause her to be self-conscious and that, instead, it will be a great opportunity to talk about God's hand on her life from the very beginning.