We Survived the First Night! :)

Hi all! Anna is now safe and sound at home, and all three of us seem to manage life together smoothly. A little too smoothly if you ask me :) maybe it's just the calm before the storm who knows. But at this point Anna seems to be a content little monkey, nothing really bothers her and if she does cry, it's only for a short few moments and then it's done.

The animals are taking nicely to her as well. They were a little curious the first day she was here because she's their size but not quite one of them and she is too little to be "human" in their eyes so they were certainly a bit thrown off. All of her funky pushing and grunting noises also throw them off but I think they are over it for the most part. The dog seems protective of her which is cute. We have to watch all of them very carefully since this is their first time being exposed 24/7 to a baby (or a child of any age for that matter).

It was a bit of a rough go at feeding once she first came home, she didn't like her new powder formula (as opposed to having it all premixed) but now she seems a bit more used to it. She is still not eating as much as she was at the hospital; 80-100mls per feed. At home it's more like 30-60mls per feed but it's also a bit more often. Her grandpa rented her a hospital grade scale so we are able to keep track of her weight which is important when she is this little. Any major weight loss and she would have to go back to the hospital since she was so tiny to begin with at discharge. According to our scale, she was 4lbs 7oz on Saturday evening (she lost some weight the evening before discharge as well) and this morning she is 5lbs on the dot. So she gained around 88 grams which is great!!

We are also working hard to try and shape her head back to a normal shape. As you can see in the picture, she has some supervised "head shaping" time each day, along with some supervised tummy time to relieve the pressure on the sides of her head. She was still classified as having plagiocephaly (flattening of the side of the skull) at discharge so we want to keep on top of that so she doesn't have any long term effects. It's tough because we are trying to undo 9 weeks of flattening.

Anyway, we have quite a few appointments for her in the upcoming weeks, which seem to be exponentially increasing. But better to have many appointments so we can ask all the necessary questions. Things are a bit different when raising a baby that shouldn't even be born yet.

Anyways we are coping wonderfully and we're just so happy to finally have her home!

Here she is having her first bath at home, she didn't quite like it but didn't make too much of a fuss:



Marta & Arthur