We were debating on whether or not to celebrate your One Month Birthday with the family. Part of that was just that you had been spitting up, not sleeping well, and overall, we were just super stressed about your well-being. However, in the end, we decided to have your One Month Birthday celebration. It's a very traditional Chinese/Vietnamese celebration for babies and while I don't know any of the specifics, it is a big celebration where you get lots of gifts. You've been very blessed so far because so many friends and family have given you so much. Lucky money and clothes are most popular. For your celebration, we got you a strawberry cake from Layer Cake [one of our favorites!] and Chinese food from Capital Seafood. We were a little worried because we weren't sure how the day would go with how you hadn't been sleeping. I know I was a little anxious and stressed. Irvine Grandma helped me to pick up all the food and by the time everyone came and we started to eat, you were eating yourself. Everyone had a great time and we were all able to enjoy you. Even though the One Month celebration didn't actually land on your 1 month birthday, it was important that we celebrated you.
After your celebration on Saturday, we decided we really needed to take you in to see the doctor. Your spit up wasn't getting better and one of the things that doctor said it might be was "pyloric stenosis", which is a thickening of a muscle that wouldn't allow the milk to get to your stomach/intestines, causing spit up/vomiting. We went on a Monday and the doctor who saw you also didn't think it was pyloric stenosis. She thought it might be because we were trying to give you the bottle, and how you were just swallowing a lot of air. We had some time to kill before the ultrasound, so we went to the mall to have some breakfast. The ultrasound was done at Irvine Hoag and during the procedure, they needed you to eat. Which meant....taking the bottle. Well, you didn't like it and you were crying quite a bit. And we had to bring you hungry as well, so you were really starving. By the time the nurse told mommy to feed you, you had swallowed so much air that you also vomited in the lab. Yikes! We went home after they felt they got enough pictures and waited for the doctor to call. Good news! You don't have pyloric stenosis, which would have bee the worse case scenario. So, we thought we would just let off on the bottle and see how the rest of the week went. Sure enough, after we stop introducing the bottle to you, your spit up went down to almost nothing. So, lesson learned. We cannot force you to take the bottle. But, that doesn't mean we have given up on trying to give it to you.
The rest of the week was us trying to figure out how to get you more sleep. We bought a swing from Babies R Us and thankfully, you've taken to it and have been able to sleep in it. We didn't want to use it to put you to sleep, but we haven't had much choice this week. You needed to sleep, and truthfully, so did we. And we needed a way to not stress about putting you to sleep. We are still trying to find your internal rhythm of when you need to go down for a nap. It won't be until week 8 that I think mommy figured it out.
There were a couple of "firsts" this week. We had bought this rocker sleeper that you don't mind lying in, but you were never able to sleep in. Well, you finally did sleep in it, although you had to be already asleep. Nonetheless, we find these little steps towards sleeping as a positive.
There was this one night I was so wanting you to go to sleep that I put you back in the car seat and walked around the house until you got drowsy. That took about 20 minutes! And with the weight of you and the car seat, I was feeling tired! But you did fall asleep, even though it was only for 20 minutes!
This week ended with mommy and daddy pretty stressed about getting you sleep. So...we finally started to use the swing more during the day to put you down. Sometimes you would fight it and it would take 15-20 minutes before you finally fell asleep. We didn't feel good about using the swing to put you down, but at some point, it was getting tough. I called it the "vicious cycle". You would first get fed, then we would burp you. After that and some downtime, we would soothe you to sleep. At night, this took so long that it would be time for your next feeding and we would have to do it all over again. The swing would put you asleep in half the time, sometimes even shorter than what we could do. Sorry Emily, we never wanted to put you to sleep with the swing, but you needed the sleep!
Mommy and daddy had many talks about not being so stressed with you, but it's hard. If it's not one thing, it's another. For a while, it was not gaining weight. Then it's the lack of sleep. Sometimes, it's too much feeding. Then you're sleeping too much. This parenthood thing is tough! But we're doing the best we can, because we love you so much!
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