Doctor Says

Today was Kaylani's 6 month checkup. Sure, she's not 6 months yet, but we had it anyways. Overall, the doctor said everything looked good,which is always a good sign. She now weighs 14lbs, which puts her in the 21st percentile. She's 27" tall, which is in the 35th percentile. Her head is 17" round, which is in the 26th percentile. What's all of that mean? It means she's a skinny little tall girl. At least that's what I took out of it.

Her height and weight measurements weren't what we went for (well, not the whole reason). We found a few other important things, like she has no signs of teeth yet and that she's developmentally on track with her rolling, feet grabbing/eating, grabbing in general, "standing", and sitting (as limited as it may be). But the 2 other things that the doctor said were what we really took away from the appointment.

The first was food. Since she's in the 21st percentile in weight, we got the go ahead to move to 3 solid feedings a day (in addition to 5 breastfeedings a day). Up until now, we've been giving her a 1/4 cup of oatmeal at lunch and then 2oz of vegetables at night. Well starting tomorrow, we'll be moving to a little less than a 1/4 cup of oatmeal at lunch, a 1/4 cup of oatmeal and veggies at lunch, and then 5oz of a different/new vegetable for dinner. It's going to be a race now to see if I can lose more weight than Kaylani can gain. It'll be close.

The other thing that the doctor told us was that we had her full permission to begin ferberizing Kaylani when she doesn't sleep. Sounds mean, but what that actually means is that we need to let her cry at night for however long it takes for her to get back to sleeping 10-12 hours straight through. Since she used to be able to do it and just hasn't been doing it lately, it means that she's capable of lasting 10-12 hours without nursing. The hard part will be seeing if we can do it. It's a battle of wills according to our doctor, and I'm not sure our wills are strong enough.

Letting her cry sounds easy enough, but when it's the middle of the night and she's crying, that means one of us has to stay up and make sure that she's actually okay and just crying for the sake of crying. Shutting off the monitor(s) sounds easy enough, but given how tired we are, we may just sleep through any type of cry and miss out on something important or urgent, which is not really an option.

The other otpion is for 1 of us to stay awake with her while she's crying. The problem with that is it means one of us will suffer through the next day. And it's really a coin flip to see if a tired Mommy home with Kaylani is worse than a tired Daddy in the office. Anyways, I guess we'll deal with that starting tomorrow because tonight doesn't count with Kaylani getting 2 shots today (which she did great at and only cried for a minute after the 2nd one). Stay tuned to see how this one turns out.