In anticipation of Jessica’s 8-week check-up tomorrow (wow – time has gone so quickly…!), I took her to the health visitor clinic last Wednesday (11th April) to have her weighed again and her length measured for the first time. Her weight is still perfectly in line with her birth weight and is now 5.63 kilos (12.5 lbs). She measures 59 cm (1 ft 11.2 in), which apparently is in perfect proportion to her weight – so in summary: Jessica is a perfect baby!
I took the opportunity to ask about Jessica’s feeding again, as it’s still all over the place when it comes to amounts and times of feeds, and was again reassured. Erratic feeding patterns aren’t a concern for babies, more for mums who like to be organised… But if I can put up with it, I should let Jessica lead the way. I haven’t been doing anything wrong, it’s only that some babies take longer to settle into a routine than others, so I should forget everything I’d read in books about how soon this ‘should’ happen. (Since then I have also learned from a couple of friends that their babies took even longer to get into that magical routine, so reality certainly is different to the books – but then how do you know if it’s your first baby…?)
I asked how much food Jessica should be having and my health visitor told me that for Jessica’s weight she should have 150-180 ml on average, split across 6 feeds a day. Jessica has many more feeds than that, ranging from 40 to 190 ml. I know since we’ve kept a little feeding log for a while now to get some sort of an overview and to serve as a reminder of how long ago and how big her previous meal was to get an idea of how much milk to put in the bottle for the next one (since we try to mainly give her breast milk we wouldn’t want to offer her a full bottle every time and end up having to throw most of it away if she’s still pretty full from a large feed not long ago). A quick estimate over a few days showed that Jessica gets more or less the average that the health visitor quoted. As with any individual, she’s more or less hungry on different days, but it all obviously balances out – since Jessica still is gaining weight at exactly the ‘right’ pace, she must be doing okay.
Finally, a small acknowledgement of pressies received – Jessica has had so much from people and we are very grateful! I’ve taken another piccie of pressies that didn’t get included previously. I’m well aware that these aren’t all of them either, as for example the pram, baby bath, cot mattress plus bedding and other things were kindly given us by friends and family.
Gabriella