Tuesday 3 April 2012

3 Week Report

Today marks 3 weeks since Danny's arrival. Olga and I feel like it's been about one week, time has flown really quickly.
As soon as I posted my last entry I remembered loads of things I should have included... and listed them in Evernote on my phone. I mention this because that's how I was able to keep a pretty accurate record of what happened on 13th March, because I jotted things down in Evernote as they happened. I normally use it for creating shopping lists as I'm wandering about the house, but it was very useful on that day, and for listing things I should blog about.
We took him to be registered on the Friday after he was born, but not before I'd registered him for his hotmail.com email address - it might be a year or two before he can use it, but danil_armstrong@hotmail.com is his, so he can keep in touch with Lara (lara_armstrong@hotmail.com).  We submitted his passport application on Thursday 29th March, with this photo:

 



It's not fair that his passport photo will be better than mine, is it?

Something I should have blogged about but shamefully forgot was how I couldn't help feeling guilty after Danny came along all healthy and well, at the same time as those poor parents in Belgium were grieving for their children, killed in that coach crash in Switzerland. And on the Saturday evening I was listening to the radio, to the Bolton v Tottenham FA Cup match when Fabrice Muamba collapsed. That seems to have turned out well for Fabrice, and is testament to the "never give up" attitude of the medical staff involved. Those two events put our little bit of good news into sharp focus that week.

At home, it hasn't all been about Danny of course. Poor Lara has been suffering with a cough for a month or more now, though its severity fluctuates. 3 weeks after first reporting it to the GP (she'd already had it for 2 weeks then), I took her back to him and he prescribed antibiotics. We're 2 weeks on from that now, and she still has coughing fits in the night that nearly make her sick, but they're not every night, and during the day she's mostly OK, although we did keep her at home yesterday after a particularly bad night. So, it seems we'll just have to tough it out, Lara just accepts it as normal now, which is brave of her but perhaps not necessarily the right thing for us all to do.
Jackson made sure we didn't forget about him - one night last week I let him out into the back garden for his usual post-dinner comfort break, and after 15 minutes he'd still not popped back in through the cat-flap like he normally would. I went out and called for him, and got no response at all, which is most unlike him. I went up our back garden and he wasn't there, but I found a gap in my "dog-proof" fence that he must have worked on over a period of time, like Charles Bronson in The Great Escape. He wasn't in the neighbours gardens either, so I had set off up our street, trying to call him in a way that he could hear but without the neighbours having a giggle at me looking for my escaped dog. I'd gone about 200 metres and heard a familiar jingle of dog-tag-on-collar, and sure enough, there he was, trotting about on the pavement on the other side of the road, calm as you like. He did seem happy to see me, and came bounding over. It would have been annoying if he'd beenn run over just as he ran across the road! Anyway, I repaired the fence the next day, and he's been captive ever since.

Anyway, back to Danny.  I'll try to be brief; Danny's day revolves - as expected - between feeding, pooping, sleeping and then waking briefly for a look around. Those periods when he's awake have been getting steadily longer, and he has found his voice now, and let's us know in no uncertain terms when he needs a trip to Cafe Mama.





Health & Feeding
He is feeding on demand at the moment, we're not bothered about routines yet. The Feed Baby Pro app is proving very useful in keeping track of his feeds, not just how long since the last one, and how long that was for, but of course we can track how long each day he spends feeding. On this last Saturday just gone, when we had a fairly quiet day, he fed for 5 and a half hours during the day. He seems to last between 2 and 3 hours without a feed during the day, and at night can go as long as 3 and a half hours between feeds. If we're (OK, Olga!) lucky with timings, this means Olga is only waking to feed and change him once between Midnight and 6am, though this is not the rule, there have been many nights when the poor girl is up at 2am and 4am too!
What she's serving is clearly good stuff though! These are his weight measurements so far:

Birth: 3.44 kg
5 days: 3.22 kg (weight loss was expected and is normal)
10 days: 3.62 kg (back up again, and beyond his birth weight)
20 days: 4.14kg (half a kilo on in 10 days!)

The only thing we need to keep an eye on is his jaundice. He was jaundiced at birth, and that was fine, Lara had been too, and we just expected it to sort itself out in a couple of weeks, and the good weather we'd had recently meant he'd been getting a lot of exposure to sunlight. However, the health visitor came yesterday, and thought that perhaps as he was still jaundiced after 3 weeks, we ought to get him checked, so he went to Wycombe hospital today for blood and urine tests. The blood tests have come back normal, which is good, so for now we'll just keep giving him as much sunshine as possible, and see what happens.

Grandma Visits..On the weekend of 24th/25th, my mum came down to visit, and we had a lovely time. She was fully loaded with presents for both grandchildren, and the weather meant we could go for a lovely walk down by the Thames in Marlow on the Sunday.



Things are moving along nicely with our holiday plans for the summer. Mum's flight down to Gatwick from Manchester is booked, and we've booked a hotel near the airport for the night before the flight to Majorca. Exciting times ahead!!