It's been a bit of an up and down week for our little Harry-with-a-skirt (this is what Lee's father called her when he found her nickname is Harry. He's an old Greek guy and probably finds a lot of things we do pretty funny).
On Tuesday she went to the local health clinic to have her 8wk immunisations. It's a free service so there was a group of people waiting when I got there. We'd walked around from home so she was in the pram rather than the more compact car capsule that she is usually travels in.
We are now all on the same Medicare card (ooh, scary 'family-type' stuff) so I updated her details and took my little plastic number 6 and waited to be called in. All different ages are catered for on these immunisation days, so there was every age from Harriet to 4yr olds. The other babies that were there were having their next lot of shots, so they were about 4wks older than Harriet. They still looked about the same size as Harriet - I realised just how big she really is for her age! I weighed her while we were waiting and she was 6kgs. She's still lean but pretty long.
Anyway, we go in and she has to have a few drops of an oral vaccine which obviously tasted evil according to the look on her face. Then she had to have an injection in both legs and another one in her arm! :o( Poor little baby. She only grizzled when she was in there and was relatively calm on the way home, but when she was almost halfway back to the house any hope of us going for a long walk that morning were thwarted. She started to scream! I raced back home and tried to calm her down but she was absolutely inconsolable. She screamed until she was red in the face and couldn't catch her breath for the following 8hrs. Jimbo came home early and helped me de-stress, it was pretty horrible to have to go through. We gave her some Children's Panadol at 6pm and that finally quelled the hysteria. She made the funniest face when we dropped the solution into her mouth - apart from the vaccine it was the first thing she'd ever tasted apart from my breastmilk.
The photos here are from her finally crashed out from exhaustion at about 8pm on the lounge. Jimbo and I soon followed.
The next day her godfather, Jim, arrived from Sydney and she proceeded to greet him by sleeping through the entire day. She was obviously totally tuckered out from her immunisation experience and its aftermath. However the following day she had another day of crying and stress - this one appeared to resolve after we gave her some Infants' Friend (a solution that helps them pass wind; basically some fart juice in a bottle). By Friday she was beginning to return to her normal cheery chubby-cheeked self and Jim got to almost see what she is normally like. Unfortunately Jim had to return to Sydney on the Saturday morning, so he didn't get to see Harriet return to full monkey-like cheekiness.
The hospital where I had Harriet runs a whole swathe of postnatal classes. I enrolled in the postnatal Pilates course (a friend of mine, Emma from vet, had done it and I remember her telling me it was great) where you can take your babies along and they stay in the room with you. There are babysitters who walk around and pick up any yelling babies but if it's really bad you can always take them away yourself and settle them. Harriet was a total trooper. She arrived in her capsule and stayed in it for the first half of the class completely asleep. Then, when she woke, she had a little grizzle and I gave her a feed while I sat on my mat. Then I laid out her blanket (it's the one from her great-Grandma) and she laid next to me for the rest of the class just watching me do the exercises. It was *very* cute! You can see her here in position, looking up at one of the girls who was babysitting (just out of shot).
I guess we are *really* lucky in that Harriet, throughout all of these upset days, has still maintained her constant night routine of going to sleep at about 9.30, feeding twice during the night and waking up around 6.30am. What a chickybabe she is! Check it out, we got a cool one.
In other news, she has also started to make actual sounds rather than just crying/screaming/grunting/snorting/farting. The other night she made a sound that was just like 'Mama'. Of course she wasn't saying mama, but the sound she made was just like it. Jimbo and I looked at each other, startled, when she 'said' it. What a prodigy! Also known as 'What self-deluded parents to think she conscioulsy made the noise'. But we're going with the first one of course. Harriet also has started waking up and not putting those crankypants on straightaway. Sometimes she can wake up and just sit there for about half an hour before she'll make noise for our attention (usually mine, for food). And she is going for much longer periods at her play time and being alot more interactive. We're getting major smiles, grins and gurgles of happiness in the morning, afternoon and evening now.
In this morning's news, I was lying there awake listening to her grunt through a major poo. It wasn't coming so I thought I'd better get her for a feed since she seems to pass those explosive poos easier if she's feeding (what a charming experience motherhood is). I picked her up, put her on the boob and what did she do? Turned her head up to me and gave the biggest, cheekiest grin! She didn't want to feed at all, she just wanted to play! So I got to spend an absolutely adorable 40 mins playing with her, all smiles and chuckles and being so cute.
I may not have mentioned, however, that this happened at 5am. But sometimes you've gotta grab those moments no matter what time of day they come. I'm sure I'll remember those 40mins a lot longer than I would have remembered the sleep I missed out on.
No comments:
Post a Comment