The end of the freak show

For so long, I honestly wondered if we should join the circus. There was not a time that we left the house that people did not comment on how little our baby Charlotte was. People would ooh and ahh over her and say things like "that is the tiniest baby I have ever seen!!" All of a sudden, no one is a stranger anymore and everyone wants to know the background story behind our little freakshow baby. People still ask how old she is when we go out, but I think it has more to do with the fact that she is finally looking like a newborn baby rather than a preemie. She weighed 7lbs and 2oz at our last weigh in last friday. She truly gets cuter every day. We can't get over how much we love her. I do think I need to get a onsie made though that has her info on it so I don't have to get into it every time. Just something that says, "I am older than I look. I am 3 months old but was born 12 weeks early at 2lbs, 8 oz. I now weigh over 7lbs and am doing well. Thanks for asking!" It might save me a lot of time next time I run to starbucks :)

It is kinda crazy to think that we are slowly losing the remnants of preemie life. She is even beginning to breastfeed more frequently and needing the bottle less and less ( although we have finally put a dent in the hundreds of oz of breastmilk we have in the freezer! I might actually have some room for some frozen veggies again soon!!) Most of her preemie clothes are now quite... snug. I guess this is where we move onto newborn life. As crazy as it sounds, it almost makes me a bit sad! Oh well! I am excited to see what this new phase has in store for us. Hello newborn world!!

Catching up to do

There is so much to catch up on... I don't even know where to begin! Charlie is doing well. She is growing quickly. At her last weigh in (last Thursday) she was 6lbs 10oz. She seems to be gaining about an ounce a day so I figure she is over 7lbs by now. My new favorite thing is that she can really hold her head up on her own pretty easily. It is fun to see her looking around and being so aware of things that are going on around her. I can pick her up by grabbing under her arms and lifting and not have to worry about her head bobbing around. In some ways I feel so lucky to have a preemie because she is still so little. I guess one positive thing in all of this is that my baby is a baby for so much longer. The down side of having a preemie is that I really do feel paranoid about everything. I started getting a cold yesterday and now I am worried sick that Charlie is going to get sick and that it is RSV, not just the common cold (of course RSV is the virus that is really bad news for preemies... it causes major respitory issues and can even cause death). Her pediatrician mentioned that there is RSV out there in the community already but I checked a Southern CA blog that gets info from various hospitals in the area and they have yet to have any reported cases, which makes me feel better. For some reason they don't start giving the RSV prevention shot until the first week of November (which makes no sense seeing as how the season usually starts in October). In any event, she seems to be okay as of right now. I am wearing a mask around the house (luckily my packrat of a husband kept the mask that he wore during my c-section) and washing my hands after every time I sneeze or blow my nose (which is rather frequent at this point!!) So, we just keep praying that Charlotte has some how eluded this sickness. Even if it is NOT RSV I would hate to see her sick with this. It is truly no fun at all!

One thing is for sure, our little peanut is so cute and getting cuter every day! Here are some new(er) pictures of our sweet 3 month old (can you even believe that she will be three months tomorrow?!?! She is so precious!!!

I found a few pics from back in the NICU that I wanted to post here...

Here is the three of us on game day. Check out Charlie's booties :)




These are pictures that we took the day we left the hospital... One of the nurses was hilarious and wanted to put Charlotte in all these crazy places. I will have to find those pictures on Will's computer. For now, these are a few we took that day.

Charlie in daddy's ball cap (just to give you some perspective on how little 4lbs is)

Here we are with her nurse Amanda (who we still keep in contact with and has become a good friend to us) and Charlie with Dr. Kukraja (one of our favorite and most encouraging doctors!)


Here are a couple pictures from the night we got home (we stopped at Marsha and Wyman's on the way so that we could feed her, so we didn't get home until late)


And here are just a few random cute ones from around the time we got home from the hospital...





That is all for now... I promise to update more soon and get some pictures of our showers up here as well as pictures from just before she was born when we were in Hawaii :)

D-Day

So, here we are... the beginning of October. It is crazy to think that just 6 months ago, this was the week that we were so anticipating. It is strange to think now that October 4th will always just be "another day" for us from here on out! The nice thing is that Charlotte is officially a newborn now, at least when it comes to her corrected age. Now we can actually expect her to do all the things that a newborn does. It is just so crazy to think that, in a perfect world we would just NOW be finding out if Pip was a Charlotte or a Liam. To think that we have known this sweet girl and really gotten to know here for 12 weeks already is just so hard to fathom! It is also hard to quantify how truly in love with her I am. Just thinking about her and the way she looks at me or the cooing she makes as she eats or the way she and Will look in the morning as they face each other and make googly eyes at one another, or her little smirk,,, it all just makes me melt. I feel so lucky to be her mom!

For a quick update, Charlie is now just over 6 pounds and doing very well! Will and I absolutely love having her home. It feels so natural to be a family. People ask me what it was like bringing her home (at a hefty 4 pounds!) and if we had those usual parental anxieties. Of course there was some trepidation but I think having the NICU buffer makes our experience much different than the average. There were so many pros and cons from this whole experience. It is hard to believe now that I can feel as though there were actually POSTITVE aspects to this whole ordeal but I have to admit they are there. First of all, I was able to fully recover from my c-section and prepare for her arrival. Additionally, it is nice that she is pretty well scheduled (she eats just about every 3 hours!) as well as the fact that she takes a bottle. That makes it easy for dad (or the grandmas when they were here!) to take a shift in the night and allow me to get some extra rest. That freezer full of breastmilk is nice to have on hand too (we haven't even made a dent in that yet!) Plus, we have really been able to see our community (our friends and family... even our new neighbors!) rally around us in this time. We feel so blessed. By the end of her 7 week stay at CHOC, we aleady knew so much about our little girl, her eating habits, her personality and we had a strong sense that the best place for her was at home and that Will and I could be as attentive to her needs (if not more so!) than the staff at CHOC. In the end, we were certainly more excited than nervous to bring her home!
We feel so blessed to be so supported. Our church family has been so amazing throughout all of this as has our actual family. Lisa loves spending time with her niece and both grandmas were able to come and spend a week or so with us the week before and after our latest shower (which I will post about soon! It was wonderful!) Having them here was so great! I also feel that we have an amazing new support system since we made friends with her awesome primary nurses (Amanda and Kelly) and now get to go to lactation clinic once a week to get weighed in and have some support in the breastfeeding department (which, again, could be a whole nother blog post). In any event, we continue to be reminded of how blessed we are and how grateful we are for the health of our sweet Charlotte.
I know I have a LOT to catch up on since my last post... I promise to do a better job (and post a lot more pictures) very soon!
Thanks to all of you for being such a blessing to us! We are incredibly grateful for each of you!