Happy 2-months baby Maia!!
I’m so enjoying this phase! Not only is she the cutest chubby little baby, she’s also interacting with us much more – we love her smiles! ❤️ Of course newborns are simply magical tiny creatures but when Maia was very young she felt almost scary fragile and we were simply overwhelmed with everything new. It’s much easier to enjoy life with our baby now. 😊
Maia has been waking up a bit less frequently at night and I’m more confident as her mum now, and as such I’ve had so much more energy to do things and go to places with her. For example we’ve been to mum & baby cinema, mum & baby fitness class, lunches and coffees with mum friends as well as wedding dress shopping! Of course I sometimes end up breastfeeding at awkward places, or she’s had a meltdown on a train/bus, or we’ve had a nappy accident on the go, but I haven’t let those incidents stress me out (much) or put me off leaving the house.
Maia had her 8-week GP check-up on Tuesday and she got praise for being a lovely little girl. She continues to grow perfectly on her 9th centile graph and weighs now 4.28kg and is about 52cm of length – that’s 1.7kg and 5cm more than at birth! I was so proud of her and happy I have been able to reach this result with exclusive breastfeeding. Well, she’s still not taking the bottle so the exclusivity hasn’t been entirely my choice haha!
The GP examination was very thorough – she looked at Maia’s eyes, mouth, spine, felt her organs through her tummy and so on. I had been worried about a red mark on her arm but turned out it was from the TB vaccination she got after birth at the hospital and so is perfectly normal. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, possibly because I myself didn’t get it as a child.
Another thing I had worried about was her poo. In case you haven’t had a baby yet, it’s hilarious how much you end up analysing their poo!! It’s a pretty good indicator of her health and how she’s feeding etc so it does make sense to pay attention to it. But what does it mean when the normal “mustard poo” suddenly becomes “pesto poo”? No joke, it was a shock to open the nappy with the monstrous bright green load (ewww…). It happened on Monday for the first time and we had a few green nappies and then it changed back to normal. I asked about it from the GP as Google had inconsistent diagnoses (the GP did say she’d wish people would stop Googling but I doubt that’ll ever happen). She said not to worry, babies can sometimes have an upset tummy and if there are no other symptoms it’s fine. Maia has been completely normal, so I try not to worry. She did actually have a green poo during our doctor visit so I showed it to the health visitor. Poor lady, I even asked her to smell it because I thought there’s no way it could be normal (pretty vile). She reassured me it happens and is normal.
What I had been most anxious about however was still yet to come – the 8-week immunisations. I’d heard how heartbreaking it is to have your baby experience the painful shots for the first time and how often they get poorly afterwards. Not something to look forward to.
Maia got four different vaccinations (against various illnesses), three as shots and one orally. It was pretty horrible to hold the poor girl through it but she was brave. She did let out a heartbreaking cry of pain which no mum could listen to unaffected. I cuddled and fed her after the experience to calm her down, poor baby…
I was advised to give her three doses of Calpol, one as soon as we got home and then every 4 hours, to avoid or deal with temperature which many babies get after the shots. I had Calpol at home and having both fed her initially with a syringe and giving her Infacol daily with a syringe I thought I had the technique down. I was wrong. She clearly hated that stuff and I couldn’t get any down. Luckily she didn’t come down with fever despite my failed attempts to give her the medicine. I think the side effects of the immunisations were rather emotional than physical in her case. She was clearly not herself and was crying a lot and not the kind of “I’m bored, entertain me”-cry but a really miserable cry. We cuddled and rocked her for hours. By midnight she finally settled into her Moses basket and slept for over five hours straight which is completely unheard of for her!
The next day she was back to her normal happy self! We are not looking forward to the next set of vaccinations at 16-weeks but at least I’ll know it’ll most likely be a short-lived discomfort.
Today we are off to wedding dress shopping again. Hopefully I’ll find the one soon!
xoxoxo,
Sini