Our first weekend with Hannah

Well, I think I owe you all a big huge update. Sorry I didn't get on here over the weekend. It's been a busy couple of days.

We've had Hannah home for three full days now and things are going well. The boys have taken right to her and just love her to pieces. I was concerned that Micah wasn't going to like her too much when he saw how much she got held by mama. He's previously gotten jealous when I've held other babies for longer than a few minutes. But he hasn't acted jealous at all. All three of them are smitten. They all get concerned when she cries and try to give her a pacifier or tell her not to cry because they are there or mama is coming. It's so sweet! Micah loves to look at her and make sure her hat is still on. He lets me know where she is when she cries by saying, "Uh oh. Baby. Right der!" They just love her so much already and it's really heartwarming to see.

She's an easy baby for the most part. She pretty much sleeps all day, which I'm told is typical for a preemie. They believe she was a little over 4 weeks early. She has some suck issues and I'm told the nurses in the hospital were working with her on that. You can hear a clicking sound the whole time she's drinking, which I had been told in my breastfeeding days means that the baby isn't properly latched on. I guess the same holds true for a bottle and she's not sucking it the right way. It could be the positioning of her tongue. The biggest thing with her right now is that she is not so concerned about eating. You have to really make sure she's awake to get her to eat, and even then you can't always get her to drink much. She's so tiny that she really needs to have all her feedings. We have to set an alarm during the night to make sure that she is eating, because she doesn't just wake up and cry to eat every few hours like you would expect. It's work just to get two ounces in her. She has been really gassy since we brought her home. The foster mom didn't mention anything about it, but I hear her little belly gurgling all the time. She seems to be most affected at night, but I'm not sure why. She wants to sleep; you can tell she's trying to. But you can hear her belly going and then she'll cry and she'll pass gas. This happens quite often at night, so even though she's not really awake, we're not sleeping well because she is uncomfortable. Having dealt with three kids who are lactose intolerant, and being lactose intolerant myself, I am wondering if that might be her problem as well. Tonight I got some lactose free formula and have given that to her for her 7 and 10pm feedings. I'm about to wake her and give her another one and we'll see how the rest of the night goes. I hope fixing the problem is as simple as that. If this doesn't work, I will probably try soy formula next and see if maybe the problem is just dairy period. I added Hannah to our insurance this morning and she will be going to see our pediatrician on Wednesday morning, so I'll definitely be talking to her about this.

Now that her cord has fallen off, she had her first real bath today. You should see her hair now. It got all curly after getting cleaned and now she's got hair like Nathanael. I pointed that out to him and I think he liked that, because I later heard him telling Luke that baby Hannah had curly hair just like him.

Thanks to several people who have either bought some clothing for her, given us some hand me downs, or told me they are going to be sending us some clothes, we are all set for smaller clothes now. Hannah was smaller than I had anticipated our baby being, so we needed a whole new wardrobe in preemie and newborns sizes. She's wearing the preemie stuff now, and some of it fits and some is still too big. I have no clue, but I guess she'll be in the newborn stuff in a few weeks. Who knows when we'll finally move into the 0-3 month size clothes. If anyone wants to get us anything, preemie sized diapers would be appreciated (but we don't need too many packs of those as I'm not sure how long she'll be in them) as well as Dr. Brown's bottles. Dr. Brown's makes a preemie size nipple that Babies R Us sells. It was the only place I could find one that small. The regular nipple for infants flows too fast and is too large for her.

Ok, this is getting really long. More tomorrow with some new pics!