Claire straight chillin right from the womb. "The outside world is a breeze."
Showing the cats who's boss - marking her territory with her gang signs.
Sun bathing to try and get rid of the jaundice.
Lit her up like a lightning bug for her jaundice.
The apple shows how tiny she really is. Don't let her size fool you....she's tough!
Claire using my pinky finger as a pullup bar. Knocked out 3 sets of 20 like it was her job.
Claire's got a good support crew from day one. Thanks everyone!!
She's got some chubby cheeks along with long fingers and toes.
BY THE NUMBERS:
| Day |
Intake |
Feeds |
Weight |
| Mon |
7 ml |
1 |
5-4 |
| Tue |
116 ml |
10 |
- |
| Wed |
178 ml |
9 |
- |
| Thu |
166 ml |
8 |
- |
| Fri |
180 ml |
7 |
- |
| Sat |
241 ml |
9 |
- |
| Sun |
238 ml |
8 |
4-14 1/2 |
RECAP:
Claire came 5 weeks early and with that comes a couple of potential issues: jaundice & body temp regulation. Jaundice occurs because her liver didn't quite get fully developed and the body temperature regulation issues occur because she didn't grow the body fat necessary to insulate heat. That's my understanding of it anyway. During this first week Claire was very sleepy. She was so tired all week which is normal. I don't think that we saw her eyes until late in the week. She would basically just eat, sleep, and soil her shorts. Because she was early we needed to wake her up to eat every 2-3 hours. So the routine went like this: Wake, Eat, Diaper Change, Sleep. Her only activity time was during her feeding and while we were changing her diaper. Speaking of diapers.....during the first week her poop was black and tar like. I got plenty of practice changing black loaded diapers.
We spent Monday through Thursday in the hospital at CMC University and were able to take her home Thursday afternoon. On Friday we went to the doctor and Claire had a low temp of 93-94 degrees. Our doctor didn't feel comfortable with that (and neither did we) because of the chance that she could have an infection so we took her to the ER at around 6:30pm on Friday evening. In the ER they poked and prodded taking blood, urine, and they did two lumbar punctures. This was very scary for her new parents and was quite stressful throughout the night. We spent the rest of the weekend at Levine's Children's Hospital where they took good care of her and we were able to take her home on Monday after all of her blood work came back negative for infection. They deduced that she was just having a hard time keeping her body temperature stabalized.
Claire is as sweet as can be. She's got a very mild temperment. I find everything about her to be so cute. It's even cute when she cries. She starts off with a little wimper that turns into a sheep type "baaaa" and then a full cry. Once she gets what she needs she goes right back to sleeping. I have a feeling it's not going to be this easy in the coming weeks but we'll take it for now.
As new parents, Jen and I think we are doing a good job of taking this all in stride. We've got the routine down: Eat, Diaper, Sleep. By the tail end of the week she was on a 2.5-3 hr cycle with her feed & diaper time being a total of about 45 minutes and her sleep time being around 2 hours. During the first few days I became the master of the swaddle along with top feeder and diaper changer........but who's keeping track. I've still got a lot of catching up to do since Jen carried her around for 9 months and then pushed her out!! We are both really enjoying the process of parenthood and look forward to what's soon to come.