Our very first night at home after the hospital was very different than the night in the hospital. It did not take us long to learn that Addison isn’t the biggest fan of being swaddled or her bassinet, and if you want her to sleep then she needs to be very well fed. Addison sleeps a fair amount between her feedings during the day, but from 9 PM to 2 AM she feeds voraciously. Amanda wasn’t quite ready to support her eating habits until day 6, which led to some long cranky nights and almost a pound of weight loss in the first week. We finally started supplementing with Earths Best formula after feedings using Comotomo bottles. We’re very excited to say that, at two weeks old, Addison is back at her birth weight and growing. She remains fussy at night and mostly a pleasure during the day. We are planning to wait at least 3 weeks before introducing her to a pacifier, I’m hopeful that will allow her to settle down easier at night and remain calm in her bassinet more often.
Addison enjoys a good bounce. Amanda and I have been bouncing her around the kitchen with Alexa providing accompaniments of Good Vibrations, by the Beach Boys, Bouncing Around the Room by Phish, and Here Comes the Sun, by the Beatles.
Addison does not like riding in her car seat, and later today we are taking our first trip to Columbia, so that’s exciting for all of us.
I became convinced the only way to get this little one to sleep was to keep her snug in my arms. I spent a few nights in the recliner and/or rocking chair trying to let Amanda get a little sleep.
Eventually we learned that if we loaded her up with enough milk and formula at night we’d be able to get her to sleep, sometimes even in her bassinet for an hour at a time.
Despite her limited sleep and weight loss, Addison appeared strong from the start. Day 3 tummy-time showed us Addison don’t mess around.
We were very blessed to have Amanda’s mother available to help during the day quite a bit in the first two weeks. Made it much easier for me to get back to work.
And we’ve also been spoiled by Amanda’s friend Megan, who not only made us a gigantic pot of chicken soup, but also has been doing some photo shoots for us. We’ll have a full post of her work at a future date, but here are some preview’s of her test shoot just for fun.
Megan’s fiance showed us this hold, often used by pediatricians to calm babies down. It did the trick and gave us this awesome picture.
And here is one of Megan’s fiance holding Addison. This is the last photo from that test shoot, we’ll have a full post of photos just from the follow up sessions on the blog shortly.
Addison struggled with some baby acne from day 7 to about day 11, it had cleared up a good amount and was on the way out when we took this picture.
Love of my life no. 1 and love of my life no. 2.
Addison and Mommy picked out a nice outfit for cousin Avery’s luau themed 4th birthday party.
Thus far Addison prefers zip up sleeping sacks with free arms and lots of leg movement to swaddles. This is entirely consistent with her time in utero, where Amanda was constantly worried that Addison was going to break one of her ribs with her kicking.
We get quite a few smiles out of our little love. They may just be gas, but we enjoy them anyway.
I love getting notifications at work that Amanda has taken new pictures and uploaded them to our Google Photos album. This set in particular was a pleasant surprise from one of my first full days back at the office.
This one deserves a caption contest.
We could just watch her yawn all day.