Emma and Hannah: Hannah enters Emma's world

A lot has happened since the last time I updated this blog. Mainly Emma’s world was turned upside down with the arrival of her baby sister – Hannah. Hannah was born at 1:42 am on August 24. She was 8 lbs 15 oz; 21 inches long and had a full head of very black hair.

My labor was fairly easy – my water broke on August 23 at 6:30 pm; I was at the hospital by 7:30 pm. I got an epidural, pushed for 10 minutes and out came Hannah at 1:42 am. After Hannah’s birth, I can now confidently say that I had a natural birth with Emma!

Emma thus far has been a great big sister! She is very loving towards Hannah and very helpful with her. If Hannah is crying, Emma will tell us that she needs to eat – sometimes though Emma will say she needs the pacifier and she’s right. We think Emma is better at distinguishing Hannah’s cries than we are. Emma also helps change her diaper and will sing all kinds of songs to her. Emma loves to give Hannah kisses and when she comes home she always wants to see Hannah. It seems that Emma isn’t fazed by Hannah’s appearance in our home and she has welcomed her with open arms.

The six weeks leading up to Hannah’s birth were difficult for us with Emma. We changed her crib into a bed because she climbed out of her crib. While she didn’t hurt herself it was time for the crib to be changed. For about a week Emma was fine sleeping in her bed but then all hell broke loose and I mean hell! For the first time, Emma got really sick at night and vomited all over her bed. She couldn’t stop vomiting and it really scared us. It was so sad to see her in that state because she was just so upset. Jamey ended up sleeping with her in the Queen bed in her room because she didn’t want to be left alone – plus we were nervous. Well that was the end of it for us – after that, Emma would get up in the middle of the night and come visit us – usually twice. It was quite difficult to get her to go back to sleep let alone in her bed so there were many nights that I slept alone in my bed and Jamey and Emma slept together. It was a horrible habit to get into but we were completely in survival mode. And if we were able to get Emma to sleep in her bed she would wake up between 5 and 5:30 almost religiously. It really was brutal. Then if that wasn’t bad enough, our great little sleeper who we used to be able to put in bed at night, say goodnight and walk out the door decided that wouldn’t work anymore. We had to stay in her room until she fell asleep. That could take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half. We were held captive! It was horrible and putting her to bed was completely unenjoyable and we dreaded it. This behavior didn’t end when Hannah was born so you can only imagine how tired we were. We would get one to sleep and then the other would be up. We couldn’t handle it anymore and talked to the doctor along with a sleep consultant to get some advice. Everyone said for us to put the gate up at her door but we were really reluctant because when we originally did that she went ballistic!! We tried everything else the sleep consultant recommended – a sticker chart, write up the bedtime routine and go over it with her a bunch of times during the day and again at night. While it didn’t work perfectly Emma started getting up only once during the night. We were finally making progress. But we needed more – we needed Emma to stay in her room all night and we needed to stop being captives in her room at bedtime. So after many weeks, we did what the doctor suggested – tough love. We put the gate up and let her scream. Here’s a little write up Jamey put together. It seems that the email has made its way around the internet because Emma is such a fighter and what she did that first night was hilarious to people… not to us though – it broke our hearts!!

From Jamey:

We finally decided that after two months of fighting with Emma to go to bed (usually an hour to 1.5 hours) and her waking up one to three times a night that something had to change. We decided to gate her room and let her put herself to sleep.

Tuesday Night

At 8pm after 30 minutes of sitting with her I walked out of her room. She was of course wide awake and asked me not to go. The next 47 minutes produced the overwhelming feeling that we must be the most evil parents that ever existed. We totally ignored all her pleas for assistance. Over the course of the next 47 minutes she cried; pleaded for us to let her out; professed her love to both each one of us; cried more; claimed to be sick, vomiting, bleeding, and hurt; begged us to open our door so she could see us; jumped off the queen size bed in her room numerous times, claiming injury; slammed her door, opened her door, hit her door; tried in vein to get the gate down; tried to climb over the gate; turned on her lights; took off her pajamas and diaper; peed on the floor - told us that she was doing it; claimed she wanted her pajamas on; told us she was cold; begged for us to let her out; cried more; threw her bunnies behind the crib and begged for them back; took out all of her and Hannah's diapers; threw a shoe in the diaper pale; told us she was naked; and cried some more. Finally, she turned off her light, shut her door, got in bed, covered herself with a blanket and mercifully fell asleep totally naked. She woke up once in the middle of the night for 30 seconds, crying and asking us to let her out, fell back asleep and didn't wake up till 6:30 am on Wednesday (an extra hour of sleep for everyone.) Ironically, I slept like shit.

Update from Wednesday night:

I stayed in Emma's room for 10 minutes, she did not fall asleep, so I left at 7:46. So I tucked her in bed, walked out, shut her door, locked the gate, and went in our room. I heard her sit up in bed, scream once, run to the door, open the door, scream at the gate for 10 seconds, then run back to her bed and go to sleep. She was asleep at 7:47. She never made another sound the rest of night. This morning when I got her, she said "I like the gate, it helps me sleep."

This not only worked like a charm but she only screamed that one night. We thought we were going to have to endure many nights of her screaming and getting out of bed but nope – she got it, she doesn’t cry when we leave, she stays in her bed all night and has been sleeping longer. Needless to say, Jamey and I wish we had done this a LONG LONG time ago!!!

The other big thing/transition that happened in Emma’s life is that she started preschool. She started the Monday after Hannah was born. Believe it or not, I was able to take her to preschool so I could see her off on her first day. That was something that was really important to me and I was so happy I could do it. Emma was a real trooper. She was looking all around her classroom and taking everything in. She is such an observer! When it was time for us to leave she didn’t want us to and she cried. The teachers told us it was best to just leave because it is easier on the kid – so we did. We were told that she didn’t cry that long which made us really happy. When we went to pick her up she said she had a good time and that she liked school. Emma continued to cry during drop-off for the first week but now she is fine. She looks forward to going to school and will give us a kiss goodbye when she gets there in the morning.

Emma made a new friend named Willa. She is a day younger than Emma. It is very cute because she tells us every day when we ask her what she did at school she responds that she played with Willa. She has yet to learn the names of the other kids in her class but that will just take some time. At least she knows her teachers names – Trisha and Rachel.

Emma’s learning tons of songs at school and will sing them all the time. It is really cute to listen to her sing – she has such a sweet little voice. She also learned the Hamotzi and the other day during breakfast she told Jamey that they needed to sing it before she ate – guess that’s what comes along with sending your child to a Jewish preschool.

Now on to Hannah – we call her Hannah Banana or Hannah the Grunter. I swear I never knew a baby would grunt the way she does. She grunts all the time and will keep me up at night because she is grunting so much and so loudly in her sleep!!! I should take video of it so she can hear how loud she was when she is older. She is a really sweet and fairly easy baby though. She is a fantastic eater which makes life so much easier for us. When we left the hospital on Sunday the 26^th her weight dropped down to 8 lbs 4 oz. There wasn’t too much concern because that is less than 10%. When we went to the doctor on Tuesday, she already put on 2 ounces as my milk came in and the doctor was really happy about that. We were told to come back in 10 days for a weight check to make sure that she was gaining at least an ounce a day. I wasn’t concerned this time round about Hannah gaining weight because she ate so much!! Plus I knew I had a lot of milk and breastfeeding was much easier this time round. When we went back to the doctor 10 days later, Hannah weighed 9 lbs and 3 oz. Quite the little eater/chunkster. Because she gained so much weight we are now able to let her sleep through the night – or as long as she will sleep for. The last couple of days she has been getting up once during the night to feed which isn’t too bad. We are getting some good stretches – about 4 hours or so for ourselves and then another couple after her nighttime feed. We can’t complain considering she is less than 4 weeks old. Hopefully she will start sleeping longer at night which will be really nice.

Her umbilical cord fell off pretty quickly but it was oozing which made us nervous. When we went back to the doctor for her weight check the doctor put some silver nitrate on it to close it up. She told us that it shouldn’t ooze anymore and that her belly button should start going down too – it was a bit herniated. The next day it didn’t look so good so we called to talk to the doctor. She told us to put rubbing alcohol and Neosporin on it – that worked like a charm. It cleared up and now her belly button is looking really good.

There was one other issue we had to deal with – Hannah’s white blood cell count. The hospital accidently ran a test that showed her white blood cell count. The results came back that her count was really high but they didn’t know why. They ran the test again and while it was still high it did go down. The doctors weren’t concerned about this as many babies have high counts at birth due to the trauma they go through during the birthing process and their numbers are usually out of whack the first week. Plus, Hannah was doing so well and looked so good that they didn’t think anything was wrong with her. To be on the safe side though, we had to go get her another blood test during her second week of life and the results came back stellar. As we all knew, Hannah is perfect!

She really is a cute little girl who is making her mark in our family. It will be fun when she is more alert and we can tell more about her personality. For now, she is our dark haired beauty who sleeps most of the day.