What a fun weekend!  Dave's sister and kids came to visit from Boise and we went whale watching!  Crazy how a day long event can take so much preparation when you have a 2 month old.  I can't control when Gretty is going to be tired or hungry, but I do the best I can to work backwards from the event to be able to plan and figure out about when I should feed her the night before so everything lines up with when we need to leave.  Everything worked out perfect, I woke up at 5am to get ready and then she woke up on her own around 5:45 to eat.  I fed her and Dave helped me get her ready then we were off to Anacortes by 6:45am to our Island Adventure tour.  I must say she loves all things water; she practically slept the entire time on the boat - it was 100% conducive to her perfect sleep environment:  loud, lots of motion, and tightly secured to her momma's chest.

We were on the boat for a little over 5 hours and were able to see 2 groups of orcas (T37 and T34 - not sure why they are called that...)!  Crazy to think I have lived in Washington by the Puget Sound my entire life and yesterday was the first time I had ever seen a whale (besides at SeaWorld which is forever ruined because of Blackfish).

Here are some of my favorite pictures to recap our excursion.

Papa Al soaking up the (lack of) sun.

Colli and Grammy Pammy.

Our nephew, Cash, who shortly passed out on this bench after this photo was taken.

No trip up north is complete without stopping at Snow Goose Produce for ice cream.  See our niece Collins enjoying her bubble gum icecream.  #toocuteforwords

Weight:  Because of her slow weight gain, we have been going in frequently to get her weighed.  A week ago, she weighed 9 pounds 7 ounces so I'm guessing she is getting close to 10 pounds. 

Height:  We will find out next week at her wellchild checkup...I'm guessing 24 inches.  She is super long!

Clothing Size:  So sad that her newborn clothes are so tight that I can't even fit some over her head.  With the exception of some of her newborn clothes, she is now in 0-3 month clothes.  Size 1 diapers.

Eating:  Getting better everyday.  We are only giving her one 2 ounce bottle of breast milk before bed and she is gaining almost an ounce a day.

Sleeping:  She is technically sleeping through the night because she will give us one 5-7 hour stretch every night.  We are not sleeping through the night though because she will wake up between 3 and 4 to eat.  Luckily she falls right back asleep for another 2-3 or so hours after I feed her.


Health:  Super healthy and strong!

Speech:  Just some cooing and gurgling noises.  I have started having conversations with her (although they are very one sided) but she is getting the hang of listening and then responding with noises.

Nicknames: The Beast, Gretty, Greta, Greta Lou, Baby G, Babe

Personality:  We have one sassy girl on our hands.  I mentioned in my post last week how she looooves smiling.  Well she has perfect timing with her smiles.  She poops on her dad while he is changing her at least once a week and after she does it she starts to smile.  Sometimes when I tease her dad too she will smile (probably because she sees me smile and laugh, but I like to think she can understand me.)


Baby Gear Love:  We have been putting our Baby Jogger City Mini Stroller to good use.  She loves to go on walks!

Milestones:  Smiles all day long!  She is one happy baby.  It is like night and day from her first month.

Loves:  Car rides, going on walks, bath time (we always sing songs to her during bath time), being outside, her play gym - especially this star that lights up, grocery shopping with mom, the vacuum cleaner, being worn in the Baby K'tan.







Dislikes:  When mom and dad skip her bath and air blown in her face.

Signature Move:  Sneezing in twos, pooping on her dad while he is changing her, reaching for the sky with her legs criss-crossed apple sauce when we pick her up and she is stretching (soooo cute).



Mom's Proudest Moment:  2 months of breastfeeding and not having to supplement with formula.  Sometimes it get monotonous, but I love the bonding time.



Dad's Proudest Moment:  Whenever she smiles, even if he just got pooped on.



Things I Don't Want To Forget:  
The Vacuum
Gretchen loooves the vacuum and we cave in by turning it on for her at night to help her fall asleep.  She's so spoiled :)  What can I say, the woman looooves noise!  Serious...no other white noise machine will cut it to get her to sleep, it has to be loud, and it has to be the vacuum for some reason (I blame Dave if she goes deaf because he puts it so close to her head.).  For some of her naps and always at night we will take the vacuum cleaner and turn it on.  Sometimes she will fall asleep immediately and sometimes it takes a few minutes.  We have learned that in order to keep her asleep we need to leave it on for 10 minutes or so and then phase it out replacing it with some other kind of white noise. I am not going to name names, but one time someone fell asleep with the vacuum cleaner on and it was on for 3 hours straight before he woke up to turn it off.  The other person was mad.

Usually this is how our nights look:
1. Give Gretchen a bath.  Leave her in there for as long as we can stand because if she had it her way she would lay in the bath all day long.
2.  Take her out of the bath (she screams) lotion her body, put on diaper.
3.  Feed her while Dave reads us a story.
4.  Swaddle her, say a prayer, and lay her down.
**All pretty standard up to this point.
5.  Bust out the vacuum which is conveniently in our closet.
6.  Turn vacuum on and watch Gretty's face because relaxed.
7.  Hold binky or our finger in her mouth until she falls asleep (roughly 1-15 minutes).
8.  Hang out on bed with vacuum still on for another 10 minutes trying not to fall asleep.
9.  Turn on white noise.
10.  Slowly walk the vacuum back to our closet and turn off.
11.  If she wakes up, repeat steps 5-10.

Notice the vacuum next to her...

Smiles
Around the time she turned 6 weeks, I saw her first smile that I knew was not because of gas!  I knew she was smiling at me and every time she does my heart melts and my day is made - even if she cried for hours the night before.

Hair Loss
We got Gretchen's tongue tie clipped this month and that was when I first started to notice she was losing her hair.  Over the next few weeks she lost most of her hair on top and was sporting the horse shoe look (kind of like her daddy).  It is slowly starting to grow back now though and it is quite stubbly but still soft.

Some of My Favorite Pics

Milk Coma,

She doesn't like being momma's purse.

Anyways, since my little blogging hiatus - which I attribute to endless pumping sessions (you can read my breastfeeding story here) - there have been many new things going on in the Pehrson household. Let me update you...

Daily Smiles From The Beast
I cannot get enough of little Greta's smiles!  She is most smiley in the mornings (particularly right when we put her down for a nap.)  It is also apparent that she now knows who her mommy and daddy are.  Sometimes Dave will take her while I do something else and when I come back and start talking to her she will look at me and give me the biggest smiles.

Wow it has been quite some time since I have blogged!  By the end of this post you should be able to guess why I haven't had much time on my hands lately.

I would say one of my biggest accomplishments of motherhood so far is breastfeeding.  So far, Gretchen has exclusively been fed from my breast milk, and for us, that is a HUGE accomplishment.  Throughout the past 8 weeks I have faced many obstacles where many people would have given up.  We have been to the Lactation Consultant at least once a week since she has been born.  Here is our story...

At Gretchen's 1 week appointment she had lost weight.  She was 7 pounds 5 ounces when we left the hospital (which is normal for babies to lose weight) and was gaining weight fine at our 4 day check up.  A week later though, she was back to 7 pounds 5 ounces.  Our doctor told us to go to lactation ASAP!  We made an appointment and where able to get in that day.  At lactation, they weigh the baby, you feed the baby, and then they weigh the baby again.  Through some kind of mathematical equations and a very sensitive scale, they are able to figure out how much your baby got in volume based on how much weight they gained during the feeding.  Gretchen wasn't getting enough so they told us we would have to supplement half an ounce of breast milk or formula after each feeding.  They also told me that in order to keep my supply I had to pump after every feeding (that's right...8-12 times a day of sticking my boobs in a vacuum...fuuuuun...).  I was able to pump all of her supplements and each day of pumping I would get more and more milk.  I wanted to give her everything I was pumping so sometimes we put an ounce in her bottle, but I still managed to build up a pretty hefty freezer stash.

The next week we went back to lactation. She had gained over an ounce a day!  They say that babies are supposed to be gaining 2/3 - 1 ounce every day so we were back on track!  Yay.  We saw a different woman this time and I really liked her!  I told her that I had been able to pump all of Gretchen's supplements and then some so we made our goal this time to exclusively breast feed and not use the nipple shield (it hurt too bad without it).  She assisted us with getting a good latch, but it still hurt me a little - she said this was normal.

A few days later we went back to make sure everything was going alright.  Gretchen was still gaining weight (not as much as before since we weren't giving her extra in a bottle) but my nipples were shot.  I'm not talking just a little bit of soreness...I'm talking the kind of pain where I would go to bed and have nightmares about sticking my nipples into a moving fan that had knife blades - no joke!  They were so bad that I stopped nursing Gretchen the day before our appointment and was exclusively pumping.  The LC assessed my breast and told me - to no surprise - that my nipples were cracked, bruised, and one even had a scab from bleeding.  I mustered the strength to latch Gretchen so she could see what was going on and she said everything looked perfect.  This is when she assessed Gretchen's suck.  It was very disorganized.  "You got a chomper," she told us.  "She has a clenched jaw which could be caused by trauma during birth."  Because of this she bites a lot and cannot figure out a good suck rhythm.  This explained the gum line bruise that I had under my nipple.  Gretchen is also tongue tied so this could be affecting it as well.  By the end of the appointment, we went back to the nipple shield - a smaller one though that fit better because it protected me from Iron Jaws - no joke, my baby could probably eat a flank steak with her gums.  The LC told us to stop using pacifiers because the rubber nipple encourages the chomping.

Our next appointment was to get her tongue clipped; hoping that breaking her tongue tie would help her.  Her tongue tie wasn't bad, but they said it might help.  This was a sad day...they gave Gretty some concentrated sugar drops, swaddled her super tight with two blankets, one nurse held her head, and the other clipped her tongue.  She immediately came to me after to nurse because it calms them down and the  antibodies in the breast milk helps heal the wound.  She bled a little bit which was awful because I was trying to latch her while she was screaming and bleeding.  I couldn't do it so I looked away and had the two nurses latch her for me.  Once she was on and calming down I noticed she was losing hair.  I swear it was from the stress, but now I think it was just a coincidence because she has lost most of her hair on top and is sporting the horseshoe right now.

Anyway, I continued to nurse her with the shield until she figured things out. We had to do "Suck Training" with her for 2 weeks where we did different tongue exercises and different exercises with the pacifier (even though the previous LC we saw told us not to use it).

By our follow up appointment the next week, I knew something wasn't right.  Gretty was more fussy than normal and her suck seemed to have gotten worse.  Well, I was right because when she got weighed she had barely gained any weight.  This was so discouraging because we have already gone through so much.  The LC determined it was because I had a low supply and that I had to start pumping after every single feeding...again (8-12 times a day).  This my friends, is why I haven't been on the blog recently.  So this is a snap shot of my day to day life now:  Gretchen wakes up, feed her for 30 minutes, pump for 30 minutes, put Gretchen down for a nap, put milk in the fridge or freezer, wash pump parts, wait for G to wake up from her nap (by this point usually another half an hour or an hour if I'm lucky), then repeat. I had a bad day when we got home from the LC...I had bad days before, but this was one of those sit in the shower and cry type of days.  I was so discouraged but determined to push through since had already come so far.

After that day of crying and being depressed and feeling like everything was my fault I did some research on my favorite breast feeding website, KellyMom.com. I determined my supply wasn't the issue because of my pumping output. Every time I pump after a feeding, I will get 1-2 ounces - always more in the morning - and this is on the high end of normal...anything more for a full time breast feeding mother is over supply or a woman who just responds well to the pump.  I started paying more attention to her suck and have determined our problems are because of her jaw clenching...I can literally see her chomping down. Everything I've read said this is something they grow out of but can take several months. In the mean time we have been helping her get a good suck on our finger before I latch her on and I will massage her jaw while I feed her for a little bit. It seems to help some but now it's just a waiting game before I wean myself from the nipple shield because I seriously need it for my own protection at this point. She also is able to get more with it. We still have to give her a bottle because she can't seem to get enough on her own, but we are down to giving her only 2 extra ounces a day (which we give to her at night and it gives us a good 5-7 hour stretch of sleep!)