3 Weeks On: Naomi

3 weeks on, how are we doing?

Naomi

Little Naomi has continued being a dream baby. She is still sleeping a lot, though she has gotten more wakeful as the days go by. By that I mean she now sleeps about 18 hours a day, rather than more than 20 hours a day in the initial days. Even after coming round practically everyday, her grandparents have barely seen her awake. In this respect, she definitely appears to take after her father!

Of course, occasionally she chooses to take those awake hours are the wrong time of the day. It hasn’t happened too often fortunately. Not yet at least. It’s not like we have not tried to keep her wake in the day time. However, not having had any experience waking a sleeping baby — why would you want to wake them when you spend all your time trying to get them to sleep?? — we’ve found it surprisingly difficult.

In the initial weeks, I had to wake her up for her feeds. I was quite anxious about this because she could regularly go 4-5 hours sleeping and not needing a feed. I found however that with this girl, if she doesn’t want to wake up and/or feed, you can’t make her. This was vastly different from my experience with Noey who was not only regularly hungry, but who (in the first 3 months) never refused the boob when it was offered.

However, since our first couple of visits to the Paed for routine check-ups revealed that she’s growing well, I’ve lightened up somewhat. That plus the fact that I haven’t had any issues with milk supply. Quite the opposite really. More of that in a separate post.

We visited our Paed twice, once when Naomi was 7 days old and again when she was 10 days old to check her jaundice level. Poor baby got pricked twice, but the good news was that the level was not high enough to require photo therapy. Naomi also weighed in at 3.285kg at one week, exceeding her birth weight, and 3.580kg at 10 days. Muumy the milk cow was extremely pleased.

I wish I could weigh her regularly to find out how she’s growing, but I guess I’ll make do with the fact that she looks like she’s visibly putting on weight.

3 weeks on, we’re still getting to know our little girl. Aside from the fact that she loves her sleep, we’ve learnt that she grunts a lot, she seems rather gassy and poops most LOUDLY. How unladylike! She is ok with a dirty diaper, but she would not stand for a full, soiled one and is much happier when cleaned and changed. She is happy to be carried in a cradle hold, sit in a rocker, a stroller and in a sling, which I am very thankful for. She also loves her baths. I can forsee many happy hours soaking together in future.

Let’s see what the next 3 weeks bring!