Day 15 @ Home

It's hard to believe Alice has now officially been at home for two weeks. Where has the time gone. It's been hard to find time to update the blog we've been so busy. But it's so nice to have her home and not be commuting to any hospital on a daily basis. The stress in our house has been lifted - I don't even think we realized there was any until it's now gone.

Max is doing really well as a big brother as well. He shares his room with Alice and is quite happy to do so. We got him a new bed for Christmas (one from Ikea that's 4 feet off the ground) so he has his fort underneath it. His own play space. When I'm in the room during the night to feed or change Alice, he doesn't hear us (or if he does, Max doesn't say anything).

It's just such a relief to get into a normal routine with Max and Alice tagging along. Max has preschool 3 mornings a week, full daycare on Tues/Thurs and swimming on Wednesday afternoons. So a busy little boy he is. He's loving preschool! Alice comes along wherever we go. It's quite different a second child than a first. With the first I remember napping a lot more and not being quite so active. Now with the second, there's definately less sleep and the second tags along to all the older child activities.

First bath at home.

Alice is doing really well. The first few days there was some extra mouthfuls of milk during the feeds and she needed help to breathe again, but now she's doing it all on her own. No non-breathing incidents for quite a while now. We've stopped topping up the feeds on the bottle so she is 100% on the breast for her meals. Alice is feeding every 3 to 4 hours during the day and night time feeds tend to vary - sometimes 3 hours, 4 hours and we had some nights with a 6 hour space. She now weighs 8lbs 2ozs. So she has gained over a pound in two weeks (you can see the double chin in the pictures below).

We had a visit with the paediatrician earlier this week and Alice is doing well. If you chart her head circumfrance, her weight and her length on a chart and compare it to if she was born on Monday (week 41) then she is bang on to where she should be had she stayed inside me for the whole time. Not sure when she'll "catch up" - anywhere from 1 to 2 years is what we've heard.

We were also at Children's Hospital yesterday for her second RSV shot. She will get two more (one end of February and one end of March) as the RSV season is November to March. The little vile of medicine for the RSV (for a 6 kilo child) costs $1,500. WOW! But if the medicine can prevent the kids from getting RSV it's cheaper than having them in the hospital.