So I haven't updated the blog in forever. Can you tell I have an infant? :) Hannah is two months old today, so I figured it was time for an update!
Two months have passed and Hannah is getting big! Well, not really. She’s still such a little peanut, but she’s starting to act more like a baby and less like an infant. She just had her two month check up this morning and she now weighs 8 lbs 10 oz and is 20.5 inches long. It’s funny to me, because she is two months old now and that is Nathanael’s weight and length at birth! She is still wearing newborn sized clothing, but she is getting bigger because those used to be too big on her. The 0-3 month clothing is way too big and it will still be awhile before she can fit into that size. Last week, she moved from newborn sized diapers to size 1.
She is doing very well physically, although she is still struggling with reflux. The zantac medicine she was on seemed to be helping her at first, but then it stopped being effective. So she is now on a medicine called prevacid. Now that that has had time to really get into her system, it seems to be helping her more than the previous medicine. She still has episodes where you can tell the reflux is really bothering her and it upsets her, but hopefully she will outgrow that. Now that her reflux is under control, she has fewer episodes of the congestion she previously struggled with. Hannah is doing really well on the schedule I put her on. She no longer has her days and nights mixed up and now has a predictable routine. She is only waking once at night to eat around 4 or 5 and usually goes right back to sleep until about 8. Hannah takes 4 ounce feedings most of the time. She is getting really good with her head. She holds it up very well and looks all around now. She knows our voices and recognizes our faces. She watches us whenever we are near and knows when we have left the room and cries. She stops crying immediately as soon as someone picks her up. She definitely likes to be snuggled. She loves being in the baby sling I made for her and is as happy as can be whenever I put her in there. She is smiling much more often now and is starting to make noises when you talk to her. We have a baby activity mat and she now enjoys laying there and staring at the toys that hang down. She isn’t able to swing at them yet, but she does sometimes hit them accidentally and somehow she got the little hanging frog toy into her mouth the other day and was sucking the heck out of his legs. It was pretty cute.
The boys are still madly in love and they still enjoy helping to take care of her. Nathanael enjoys giving Hannah a bottle. Luke likes to do it sometimes, but he doesn’t usually make it through the whole feeding before I have to take over. Micah is the binky police. When her pacifier falls out and she starts crying, he still comes running and says, “Uh oh. Where binky go?” We have to watch out with him, because he seems to think she needs to always have it and he sometimes tries to shove it in her mouth when she is asleep. They like to help burp her and still take pride in introducing her to friends who haven’t seen her yet. Luke wanted to lay her on his blanket the other day and surround her with his favorite stuffed animals so she could have a nap. He is very attached to his stuffed animals and blanket, so this was a big deal for him. He gave me a heart attack the other day by calling out, “Mama, I am holding Hannah, but I’m not going to drop her.” I ran in there to find that he had picked her up because he wanted to hold her. We now have a don’t pick Hannah up without mama’s permission rule. Apparently, he wanted to walk with her around the house and give her a tour but he was not holding her properly. She was fine, but she did look like, “What in the world is going on here?” He also wanted to put her in the trampoline so she could play. He just doesn’t understand that she can’t enjoy everything he enjoys right now. The boys can’t wait until she is bigger because they want to play Barbies with her. I told them that Barbies are for girls (they wanted me to buy them some) so they decided they will play with hers, once she has some. They have no idea that by the time she is old enough for Barbies, they will want nothing to do with them! They are loving all the girlie colored items in the house and have decided that pink and purple are their new favorite colors. It cracks me up. Luke and Nathanael even picked pink and purple Easter baskets for the egg hunts we were going to.
I was reminded on Easter morning, as I held Hannah in my arms, of how symbolic adoption is of our relationship with Christ. The Bible says that we are sinners and that because of that sin, we are separated from God. Someone had to pay the price for our sins, so that we could be reunited with God. So God sent His son Jesus to earth as a child to be raised by another. He would grow up and then take our sins upon himself and pay that price by dying, so that we could be reunited with God. Adoption is a lot like that. On one hand you have a Father, who gives up his Son, even though he knows it will be painful, because He knows it is what is best. That makes me think of the sacrifice that our birthmother made and how God was kind of like a birth parent in that situation. Then on the other hand, you have Jesus who did whatever he needed to do so that God’s children could be reunited with Him. That makes me think of us and all the things we had to go through and the cost we had to pay to be approved to bring Hannah into our home. It just made me think of Easter in a different way this year, and how God must see adoption in a special way to put so much symbolism into it. He must really understand all the emotions involved with adoption because he’s been on both sides of it, in a way. I just thought it was interesting.
I will post some new pictures in a bit.
