I have been a bad blogger

Sorry! So much to catch up on.

Lily is now smiling all the time. She is such a happy baby. All I have to do is look at her and say "Hey little frog" and she lights up. We also decided we need to start using her name more or she is going to think her name is little frog. She is also "talking" all the time and is so observant. She watches everything. Including the TV. We try to keep it off a lot now, but she just stares at the blank screen :/. She is definitely her father's child.

I am still EPing and she is getting all breast milk except for the one bottle a day of Enfacare the nutritionist at her NICU follow-up wanted her on for the extra calcium. I hate giving it to her and Lily hates eating it and she usually spits most of it up. I plan to talk to her pedi about it at her 4 month appointment next week. Surely there has to be a calcium supplement I can give her instead. The nutritionist was kind of dismissive of my EPing and almost acted like she should be on formula full time. WTF?!? NO! I have worked my ass off the get the great supply I have and I refuse to give up because some nutritionist thinks formula would be better. No its not! Her pedi is ecstatic that I have been able to give her breast milk and I definitely trust him more and her weight gain is amazing. I find myself looking forward to her 4 month appointment so I can discuss this with him.

We are getting plenty of sleep around here! Lily goes to bed when we do at 10:00pm. She sleeps in her Fisher Price Rock n' Play sleeper right now, but I want to transition her to her Arm's Reach Co-Sleeper in its bassinet mode soon. She gets a bottle right before bed and I climb in bed and rock her in her sleeper until one of us falls asleep. She sleeps until 3-4 am and daddy feeds her a bottle while I pump. Daddy then gets read for work while Lily and I go back to sleep. She sleeps until 6-7 am and I feed her again and we then go back to sleep until 9-10am. I love my great sleeper! I so hope this continues.

Lily did great at her NICU follow up appointment. She pulled out her full bag of tricks for the doctor. She smiled at her, cooed at her, held her head up like a champ, did her grasping reflexes like she should, followed her stethoscope with her eyes and turned her head to find me and Josh every time one of us spoke. The doctor said she was a little ahead of her adjusted age milestones and she does not need to see her again until she is 6 months old. She also went from the 10th percentile for weight, length and head circumference for her adjusted age at birth to the 75th percentile for her adjusted age! Hopefully she will get in the charts for her chronological age soon!

Our next goal is to get her to roll over. She likes being on her tummy so she really has no motivation to try, but she has started kicking her legs out when she is on her tummy so I think she will get it soon.

I also have started cloth diapering. Well I only have 3 BumGenius 3.0s right now. I have ordered some Fuzzibuns, some Bumkins AIOs and some prefolds and covers to see what I like. Buying diapers is so addictive! They are just so cute its hard not to buy them all. But I need to test out different ones to see what I like before I go crazy. So far I like the BGs but they are bulky.

So we are doing great! Lily is such a good baby. She only cries when she is hungry or tired and shuts right up if I give her a bottle or put her in her swing to take a nap. I love her so much!

Where did my tiny preemie go?

Lily now weighs 10.5 lbs and is 22 1/4 inches long!! Holy crap! My baby is getting so big!! Some of her 0-3 month onsies are too tight. She is so alert now too. She wants to look at everything. I am having a hard time feeding her since she wants to pay more attention to everything going on around her than to her bottle. I have tried feeding her in a quiet room with no distractions, but she is just as content watching the shadows on the wall as she is watching to dogs or the TV so that doesn't work either. She is still getting 100% pumped breast milk. I have decided to EP from here on out. We have tried and tried to get the nursing thing down, but its just not working. She latches on fine at first but after a few minutes she gets frustrated and starts screaming. Even if er do have a good session where she seems to eat for 20 minutes or more, she starts screaming for a bottle within an hour, so I am guessing she is not sucking efficiently to get enough to eat so then I have to pump and give her a bottle and the whole process takes 2 hours, then its time to start over. So for the sanity of us both I am going to stick with EPing. My first goal was 3 months, which is coming up quickly. My next goal is 6 months. I think I can do it. Its a pain to be strapped to a pump all the time, but since she is gaining weight so well and seems happy it makes it all worth it. Just looking at her little face melts my heart!

Lily's Pad

Since the nursery originally was designed with boy/girl twins in mind it was very gender neutral and I have been itching to girly it up but have not had the heart. I had done a little here and there but not too much. Well yesterday I decided to girly it up a bit. I would love to paint the walls pink, but I paid a lot of money for the tree decal and I love it so I don't want to take it down because its not reusable. So Lily and I went to Target yesterday and got some of the coordinating pieces to the picture and valance I had already bought. Plus we got a cube storage unit and the fabric drawers. We also got some pink sheers to put under the valance and a pink sheet for the crib and a pink changing pad cover. Here are the results:





I still want to get a pink rug and maybe some more wall art. Etsy has some matching accessories, but I have spent too much money already so I need to wait awhile! Also Target supposedly has some wall decals that match this set, but they were sold out at my Target and they were on clearance so I doubt they will get anymore and they are not available online so I may have to take a tour of all the Targets in the area!

Some photos from our photo shoot

J is an aspiring photographer. He mostly photographs cars, so Lily presented quite a challenge. Here are some recent ones we took:

Screamy McScreamerson

Lily has taken to screaming as loud as she possibly can if she goes more than one second past the time she thinks she should be fed. She screams and screams until she can't catch her breath. I have no warning either so I can be prepared. Sometimes she wants to eat after 2 hours and sometimes she will go 3. She really has no hunger cues either except the blood curdling scream. The bottle warmer takes waaaay too long. Someone needs to invent an instant bottle warmer. I would pay good money for that!

No one ever said how hard breast feeding is

especially breast feeding a preemie. I have been pumping since she was born and I have about 1500 ozs in the freezer. Since she got so used to bottles in the hospital I have had problems getting her to latch on and eat an entire feeding at the breast. She has a great latch but shes lazy and gives up before she eats enough. So we try at least once a day on the breast and when she cries an hour later I give her breast milk in a bottle. She is getting better and going longer before she screams for her bottle so I guess we are making progress. Once she can go 2 hours before her bottle I will add in another feeding at the breast since she usually only goes 2 hours between bottles anyway. With her still being so small I have to make sure she is getting enough to eat so I have to continue with bottles instead of forcing her on the breast, but I am hopeful she will get it as she gets bigger and gains more stamina. I am sick of pumping every 3 hours!

Introduction

This is the story of our lives with our little Lily Grace. She was born at 32 weeks 1 day on March 15, 2010 at 11:28 am weighing 4 lbs 6 ozs. Lily was twin A. Her little brother Logan is now an angel in heaven watching over her. He developed Necrotizing Entercolitis (NEC) at 7 days old and passed away. He will always be part of our lives and we will love him forever.

Lily spent 37 days in the NICU. We had a pretty eventful stay. She began life with RDS and was on CPAP for 4 days then stepped down to the nasal cannula for a week. Lily also had a PDA which was successfully closed with 2 rounds of ibuprofen. 2 days before her release we had a NEC scare and were rushed across the street to the children's hospital where the pediatric surgeons were. Luckily it turned out not to be NEC, but a UTI which was treated with antibiotics and 10 days later we were finally home.