Wonderful day

Today has been a fabulous day! I'm sitting in a rocking chair with Natasha asleep in my arms and that's pretty much the entire plan for the day.
<-- This is actually my eyes looking much better.. our labor and delivery class wasn't for a few more weeks, so let's just say I didn't have the finer points of pushing perfected yet..

She weighs 4lb 11oz, though some of that may be due to the doctor prescribing a supplement to be mixed in her milk to give it some extra calories. I have mixed feelings about this, but it is common and seems to be helping. She's also been getting an iron supplement and multivitamins through her feeding tube.

We nursed a little bit, and those Neumansky good eatin' genes have not skipped a generation. She sucked like a pro, then passed out asleep. I don't know how much milk she got, but she definitely got some - I could see it in her mouth and she even drooled a little bit onto her chin.

And then I just held her for a couple hours. Joann and Lesli came to see her and she opened her eyes to say hi.

And then it seemed like a good time to put a shirt back on her. We played a little game where as soon as I got one arm on and moved on to the next one, she'd have wrangled her way out. And then, moments after this picture was taken, she spit up on the shirt. I've decided it must just be this shirt.. She's been wearing a plain white oversized shirt for days, and hasn't spit up on that at all. This shirt, 10 minutes tops.

When Dan got there we tried another feeding session, but this time the nurse weighed Natasha before we started. Then Natasha pretended mommy had made up the whole story about her eating earlier and pretty much just sat there looking around. But then she remembered what she was doing and ate for a good while. She snacked a bit then dozed off for a bit until she finally had enough. When the nurse weighed her she wieghed 4 grams more :)

And then it was daddy's turn to hold her, and she was content in his arms for hours.

This skin-against-skin time is called kangaroo care and it's very good for babies (and very good for mommies and daddies too..). In Bogota in the 80s there were more preemies than incubators and the mortality rate was 70%. Parents were taught to hold their babies, naked except for a diaper, against their chest 24 hours a day. Turns out, these babies fared much better than those who didn't receive this sort of care and the practice as been more widely studied and adopted since then.
This doesn't surprise me at all.. in the hospital during the long night after my water broke my blood pressure was through the roof until Dan climbed into the bed next to me for awhile. The nurse was shocked how quickly my blood pressure returned to normal, but it's exactly the same idea as the kangaroo care they encourage one floor up.

All in all, it was a great day. Tomorrow we might need to get a little bit more of a schedule down though.. I sat holding Natasha for hours and hours, but didn't quite manage to eat or pump or anything. Then Dan came and did the same thing. By the time we left tonight we were ravenous and exhausted. But now I know her rhythm a bit better, so can try to grab food while she sleeps and hold her while she's awake.
Off to pump and sleep now, more good stuff tomorrow!