Weigh-ins

I’m reminded of the weigh-ins from my wrestling days as we take Kaiya to the doctor on Sunday morning, only the point here is to gain weight, not lose it. Thankfully, the eating genes are kicking in and Kaiya managed to gain 7oz. since her last weigh in. She’s up to 5lbs. 9oz. She continues to eat more and more as the days go by.

The bad news is, her latest Billy Rubin test still had her climbing slightly, from 15.6, to 17. While the climb has slowed, the doc still wants to watch her closely. She’s fairly certain that the weight gain and eating habits we’re telling her about will result shortly in a drastic reduction. We’ve also had her in a sunny room fairly naked the last few days to help break down the Billy. We’re meeting with her again on Thursday for another check and probably another lab test to confirm her theory.

In other news, we’re about to give up the ghost that is breastfeeding. In trying to transition Kaiya off of the fake nipple and feeding tube we’ve been using, she’s been incredibly frustrated and it was drastically reducing her food intake. We’ll still be giving her breast milk, but it’s going to come from a bottle.

As it was, both of us had to be up every two hours to feed her with the supplemental tube. It was a two person job with one person to hold the baby and another to operate the syringes. As you can imagine, it’s draining and having to do this and knowing that Sharon will be returning to work in 6-8 weeks or so, and therefore not being able to continue breastfeeding beyond that in addition to the aforementioned difficulty in getting her to adjust to Sharon’s natural flow, it only makes sense for us to switch to bottles.

In this way, only one of us needs to feed her every two hours as long as we have bottles ready (which we will make sure we do).

As a little sub-plot to our whole Kaiya experience, I should mention how our dog Zazu is adjusting to her new sister. Let me first say that for those who don’t know, Zazu was our baby before Kaiya. Obviously, there is some risk of jealousy and certainly there are changes in Zazu’s role in the house. Fortunately, Zazu seems to be adjusting very nicely. Before we brought Kaiya home, I took some of her clothing from the hospital home for Zazu to sniff and get acquainted with. When we actually did bring the baby home, I went in first, leaving Kaiya and Sharon outside, to greet Zazu and calm her slightly. Then Sharon and I switched, so she could greet Zazu. Finally, we brought in Kaiya in her baby carrier. At first Zazu didn’t notice her, thinking that the baby carrier was just a shopping bag or something. But then we told her to come over and see what was in the “bag” and she was instantly curious. We think she then identified the smells she was allowed earlier with the first sniffs of the baby we allowed.

Since that time, she barks at us when Kaiya cries, trying to defend her new sibling. She knows she’s not allowed to touch or lick Kaiya, but tries to stay close to her and sniffs her whenever we allow her to. All in all, Zazu has been very good about the whole thing and has even taken to waking up with us every two hours to take care of Kaiya’s feeding.

Ah, and I almost forgot. Our daughter is extraordinarily talented already. As my wife unceremoniously learned this morning, Kaiya can projectile-shit up to sixfeet. Being set on the changing table for just a few moments sans diaper resulted in a shit spray that grazed Sharon’s and splattered the carpet. The sheer ferocity of the blast and range of the spray was incredible given her small sub-6 pound frame. I’ll spare you all the pictures of that experience, but I’ll tell you that the cleanup wasn’t fun.