6 Months Old!

Hi everyone,

Willow is 6 months old today! All day at work I was thinking about it: "6 months ago right now she was being resuscitated...6 months ago right now I was waking up in the ICU...6 months ago right now Josh saw her for the first time..." Crazy. Anyway, things are much better now. Willow actually had a doctor's appointment today, and she's up to 10 pounds, 9.5 ounces. 3.5 ounces more than last week. She's 22 inches long. Her blood pressure was even lower today than last time: 82 over something. (They don't worry about the bottom number with babies). Her doctor today basically said she's not worried about Willow at all, and we can chill out a bit. So we'll experiment a little with feeding her on a less-strict schedule and see how that goes - scary, but exciting! We also decided to stop the straight Neosure feeds. I'll keep fortifying the breastmilk with it for a little while longer though. It'll be nice not to have to be like, "is this a Neosure feed or a breastmilk feed?" They'll all be the same! This makes me very happy. The less formula and the more breastmilk, the better, as far as I'm concerned! Our doctor said it must be the breastmilk that's helped her do so well developmentally. I have, however, just in the past week or so, pretty much thrown in the towel on the breastfeeding. After about 9 weeks of trying at least once a day, I realized it's just not going to happen for Willow. I'm sad about it...but not that sad. It least I tried, and it's not like she won't still be getting breastmilk for a long, long time. Not breastfeeding is just one more thing I've had to adjust my expectations on as far as my preconceived notions of how childbirth and having a baby would be. I'm used to it!

On Sunday, after that last blog post, we did get to the beach.



It was sort of cloudy, but hot. Then it started raining. But we were so excited just to get out for a while. Willow dipped her feet in the Lake for the first time! We caught it on video:


Then, we took a little Keweenaw tour, went to Mohawk and got ice cream, then went to the Ramada in Hancock and had dinner on the patio! It had stopped sprinkling by then. We were high on the freedom of being out of the house!

Willow loves to talk and does it all the time now.



Tomorrow's our 4th wedding anniversary. We might leave Willow with Grandma and Grandpa and go out to dinner. We'll see...