Juliet at one month (a stream of consciousness)

All goes well in the House of Yardley.  Juliet has settled in nicely.

She has finally regained her (somewhat enormous) birth weight, stacking on 300g over the past week, so the marathon effort of Motillium, expressing and formula top-ups have paid off.  I am left with about 3 spare minutes a day by the time I have done all of that (minutes which I try to spend with Alice - see below) but at least she's filling out again.  The local Early Childhood Clinic have been so kind and helpful but I'll look forward to not having to report there every week, which will hopefully happen if the weight gain is sustained.  Happily she was a good size to start with (although I might not have used the word "good" if you'd spoken to me at 11.41pm on 10/10/10) so there have never been any serious concerns.  She's the full length of 0-3 month clothes now and her head has been growing every week, so she's progressing nicely.

Juliet has been feeding every 3 hours since we brought her home.  Sometimes I have to wake her to reinforce this, but she's pretty regular.  So we start at the time honoured 7am and progress from there.  She has one long stretch from her 10pm feed until about 4am, which is brilliant, but she absolutely will not settle after that.  So Stu has been getting up with her from 5am and they watch football together.  This would be a delightful arrangement for all concerned if Alice weren't waking at least twice before the 4am feed.  Shouts of "Daddy, Daddy, I've lost my pillow" or "Mummy, Mummy, I've lost my cover" or "I've lost me" echo down the hallway and so we're all pretty tired.  I should mention that she usually has not lost her cover, her pillow or herself, but she yells so loudly that we have to go to her. 

Which brings me to Alice by day...I'd like her to look back on this blog one day, so a polite description would be to say that she's going through an adjustment period.  Another way would be to say that she resembles the Little Girl with the Curl, right in the middle of her forehead.  Obviously homelife has changed beyond recognition for Alice so I'm trying to be as patient as possible on very broken sleep.

This too shall pass.