Emma definitely holds the bragging rights that her first 2 weeks of life were more exciting than most!
At her first pediatrician appointment (at 10 days of age), she weighed 9 pounds, 7.5 ounces so was basically back to birth weight. Her weight has been all over the place with all the IV fluids and poor feeding when she was at her sickest but overall she's doing well.
She has a very strong neck and more or less holds it up on her own already. Often I will try to lay her on my chest and she'll pull her head up and crank it to the side, causing her to roll off my chest and flip to her back in the crook of my arm. I really think she does it on purpose because when I return her to my chest, she immediately pulls off again.
Sleep has been quite wild. I am already noticing some pattern now that we seemed to have conquered her day and night confusion. Emma is pretty hard to get down for the night as she wakes up the instant you set her in her bed. Her most awake hours seem to be between 9 and midnight so we sort of have to take turns hanging out with her until she finally falls asleep. Thankfully Graham is a night owl so I've handed her off to him on a couple of occasions and leave them to snuggle and watch movies while I hit the sack. Once she finally goes to sleep, I usually get a 3-4 hour stretch right off the bat. I feed her on both sides and lay her back down and usually she falls asleep but it's like she goes into light sleep mode. She starts getting really loud and grunty and I have a hard time sleeping through it. She usually wants to eat again in 2 hours but only on one side. I'll lay her back down afterward and she'll sleep for a half hour or hour and then want to eat on the other side. We seem to do 1/2 feedings every half hour to hour for the rest of the night which definitely isn't my favorite. We're working on it!
Emma really likes being on her tummy. There have been times where we lay her down for tummy time and she instantly goes to sleep. I really do think if we laid her on her tummy she'd sleep better and deeper but that's a no-go with SIDS risk so we are just going to grin and bare it until it can't be prevented whe she is able to toll to her tummy on her own.
I have opted to swaddle Emma with her arms out from the get go. At the hospital, she was sleeping with her arms up over her head so I didn't want to take them away from her. Now she lays with them by her sides and doesn't seem to need them wrapped so I figure it'll make the swaddle easier to break later on!
We ended up letting Emma have the binky when we were readmitted to the hospital. She sometimes takes it when she is really worked up or hungry but isn't very good at keeping it in her mouth just yet. It basically covers half her face so is quite the crack up visually at this point.
At our pediatrician appointment, our doctor reminded us that evening fussiness should be right around the corner. It's like she jinxed us because that night it started. It's nothing bad or major but Emma does not want to be put down at night and would prefer to eat constantly. I think I've been feeding her more or less every hour for 3 or 4 hours in a row and she acts starving every time. One of the feeds the other night was a 4 oz bottle so volume certainly isn't the problem! I tried putting her in the Moby wrap while going about Isla's bedtime routine to make sure I could do it on my own once Graham goes back to work. It seemed to make her happy so hopefully it'll be manageable.
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