Azra's third week

Azra is now 18 days old. She is slowly filling out. We weighed her a couple of days ago and although she wouldn't stay still long enough to get an accurate reading she seems to be around 3.6 kg. The last couple of days have been easier. Before that she was crying quite a bit but now that I think about it I think it might be related to my bean consumption and that she just suffers from gas problems. Maybe I should wait for her digestive system to mature a little bit before indulging in my love of beans! Of course it could be just being a baby and be not at all related to this. She still does have times when she gets a bit cranky and these are usually around 1-3 pm if she has not had a sleep since the morning. Unfortunately a lot of the time she will only go to sleep when she is breasfeeding and laying next to me. If I get up and put her elsewhere to sleep she usually wakes up 10-20 minutes later. Let's hope this is just related to her being a newborn and just out of the womb! However she will sleep in her bassinet at night, providing she has fallen asleep after breastfeeding. The other time is at night. We are still trying to keep her up from 7-10pm. Probably later when we get ourselves organised we will try to make these hours earlier. Around 9 she starts crying a bit. We then give her a bath and that calms her down. She loves the bath but she doesn't like getting dressed afterwards! Is it because of being taken out of the water? Then I feed her, put her to bed, she usually wakes up 20 minutes later. I feed her once more, sometimes twice and then she is usually in bed by 11pm sometimes as late as 12pm, depending on how much she cries. Last night she was truly asleep by 11 and then she woke up at 5.30am. People are saying that I should wake her up every 4 hours to feed her but I figure if she were hungry she would wake me up. Plus I tried this when we were in hospital and she would not feed, so twice I put her back to bed without feeding. I don't try this anymore! Plus it is not as if she is not getting enough milk during the day. The only disadvantage may be one for me where I am literally exploding with milk when she finally does wake up.
Talking about her crying she has a very loud impassioned cry. I think when she is older she will be a very passionate person and she will let people know what she wants and what she doesn't want. Maybe I am reading to much into the behaviour I am seeing now but it certainly seems like this. I sometimes wonder what the neighbours are thinking sometimes, when she is literally howling and we can't console her!!! I don't know why I should care though! We had some visitors the other day and when she started crying I tied to stop her and the really nice thing was that they said let her cry. That was refreshing. I think that babies just need to cry sometimes, I think they are trying to express something, missing the womb or something (we can't understand). She is also smiling a bit more nowadays. Yesterday she smiled just as I lay her down on her cushion getting ready to breastfeed her. The smile wasn't directed at me this time but it still made me happy! I see her every now and then smiling, sometimes she is sleeping! Nice dreams???? Physically, apart from filling out a bit, getting chubbier cheeks and liking to lift her head up and swing it around (especially when she is on your shoulder), there is not much of a change. When people come over if they make an observation that she looks like me, Husnu says very confidently ' yes, but she will change to look more like someone from the Black sea'- let's see! Below is her photo at 18 days. Maybe in the next entries I will make more of an effort to take photos with us in them as well. By the way the cat,who was a little scared of Azra when we first brought her home from the hospital, has become used to her and now even comes into the bedroom when we are in there with her and now even jumps onto our bed when she is there. A big advance! I guess he got sick of not getting an affection!

Azra's second week

Azra is 12 days old today. Yesterday we got her footprints in paint. Not so easy as she is an extremely active baby. She was active inside the womb and maybe even more active outside. She hardly stays still for a moment. Trying to photograph her without a flash always leads to blurry photos! Even her footprints were a little blurry as she always managed to move her feet! She has the loveliest feet, especially the way she puts them when she is feeding.
We have had a few learning points in the last 5 days. Now I am breastfeeding her whenever she seems hungry. Breastfeeding is a mixed bag I think. It is an amazing feeling to know that you are able to feed your little baby with only your body and some additional water, amazing that your body is able to know how much milk to create through how much the baby drinks. The body is amazing ( as I have always thought) right from the creating of this amazing baby through to the milk, need I go on? Sometimes rather than feeding her straight away, when she starts exhibiting signs that she will cry, I start entertaining her (It doesn't last very long but distracts her for a little while when I think she is drinking too much). I have learnt that she likes the sound of Nil Karaibrahimgul! That's good as I have 3 of her cds. Azra can stay relatively still when I play her cds, providing she is not dying from hunger! But usually I just feed her when she wants it. Most people seem to agree that this is how it should be until the baby is about 40 days old, which is when they say regulating their intake to every 3 hours or so could be implemented. Usually she is happier this way although yesterday she was a little fussy, crying a lot during the day. Her system until yesterday seemed to be to wake for the second time from 7-8 and then feed and then go back to sleep, but yesterday no matter how much I fed her she wouldn't go back to sleep until about 10am. Today the same thing happened so I just changed her position and put her on my chest and she slept that way. Little things I am learning about her! Today we had a little accident in our bed. I put her to sleep in our bed after her 3rd feeding at 11am. She is only around 3.5kg now so she is wearing the diapers 3-6 kg. However sometimes the poo might come out the top of them out the back. This has happened a couple of times at night. Today when she did a wee (or a few) it also came out the top at the back and of course onto our sheets and mattress protector. Being wet this upset her making her cry. I wanted to change the bed and wash the sheets at this early hour which was a little difficult while holding a now screaming baby, trying to change her out of her 1 hour ago clean clothes. I was thinking we were going to have a repeat of yesterday. I was exhausted yesterday after looking after her for a whole day by myself. Lucky when Husnu came home he immediately started taking interest in Azra. Of course he can only do so much and he can't do anything in the feeding department seeing we have decided only to breastfeed.

Anyway today after the crying, changing and washing, I fed her. After feeding her she looked at me in the eyes and unbelievably for the first time she smiled up at me while looking in my eyes. What an amazing feeling this was. I cried! Now I understand what for ages other mothers have been telling me about motherhood. Some friends have even gone so far to say that having a child is the only worthwhile thing you can do with a man!!! (usually divorced friends!) I will never forget this look for the rest of my life. It was such a beautiful moment. I think probably these feelings are unable to be understood until you actually live them, or at least that has certainly been how it is and has been for me.

I am starting to see little bits of her personality. She gets very impatient very quickly. For example when she is breastfeeding and there is not enough milk coming or maybe she has emptied the breast she starts crying extremely loudly and her little legs and arms start pumping like a windmill. Sometimes she sits passively at the breast not even sucking hardly and then starts crying when there is no milk. This impatience could be either from me, from her rising sign being a leo or maybe all babies are like this???

Azra's first week

Azra is now 6 days old. She was born on the 5th July at 7.35am in the morning after a 24 hour labour (the active part only was 24 hours!). In order to give her the best possible start to life I wanted to have a gentle birth completely drug-free. Fortunately nature was on my side and I was able to do this. I did have to have some oxygen at the end as Azra's heart rate was less than ideal at that stage. I can't say that the birth was easy or pain-free. Although I am a trained hypnobirthing educator, honestly I was only able to use it until the last 7 hours of the labour whereupon I sort of lost it as the surges (contractions) were coming 2 minutes apart and that took me unawares. Actually the first few hours of Sunday morning the labour sped up incredibly. The labour was going really slow Friday night and Saturday, but after a 40 minutes walk outside at 11pm Saturday night it sped up amazingly. Pretty much all Saturday the contractions stayed 5-10 minutes apart with no improvement on the 1cm opening, although effacement was complete. Then just in a few hours opening was complete.
The actual birth itself conformed to gentle birthing principles, thanks to my doctor (Gulnihal Bulbul at Sema hastanesi here in Istanbul) and my midwife (Asude ebe, also here in Istanbul). There were few people present, the doctor just every now and then towards the end, the midwife, my husband, my friend who I trained to be my hypnobirthing companion, a nurse and a cleaner. The lights were turned down as Azra made her entrance into the world and she was given to me immediately to hold. That was amazing. We just looked at each other. For nine months I had been wondering what she was going to look like and here at the end I was able to see her. She was beautiful. I wanted to cry but all I could do was let out a strange cry like sound. My husband (who never cries) cried though as he witnessed her birth. At the top is a picture taken of her in the hospital on her first day of life. The hospital likes the tradition of dressing girls in pink!
We stayed in hospital for one night as the hospital likes to monitor babies for 24 hours. We left Monday morning.
She seemed quite calm, but of course mainly she was just breastfeeding and sleeping. When we got her home she was much the same for the first couple of days. Then we had a few problems as we couldn't quite get the feeding quite right. Was I supposed to feed her whenever she cried or less then that? She would feed for 10 minutes and then sleep for 10 minutes and then cry and seem to be want to feed again. That seemed too much. Then she was vomiting quite a lot. One person told me that I was feeding her too much. So I started feeding her less. That just led to more crying and problems for us. The we figured that maybe for Azra she wasn't feeding very well and she needed to feed more. The vomiting decreased and what I tried to do was let her feed till she finished (generally 10 minutes in the day) burp her and then try again. The made her happy, but sometimes she needs an extra feeding and then she might sleep for an hour or 2 if we are lucky.

What we also are trying to do is to keep her up in the evening so that she sleeps at night as she sleeps really well this way. We entertain her (!!!) to keep her awake and not crying, feed her and then bathe her at 10. Feed her one last time and then she is asleep at around 11pm. At the moment this keeps her asleep until about 4 am where I feed her again and then she falls asleep until around 7.30am, I feed her again and she falls asleep in our bed and then she will wake up again around 10ish. This to me is worth trying to keep her awake after 7pm!

In her first week this is all the has been really happening. She lost a little weight. She was born at 3.19kg and 50.5 cm. On Wednesday when she was weighed at the hospital she was 3.065kg. She has great facial expressions. She loves the sound of our voices, especially mine. I spoke to her a lot during the pregnancy. She seems to really hear my voice. I even sang to her to entertain her in that 7-10pm slot. She loved it! We are just getting used to each other now. Husnu has been home for this whole week which has been good. Next week though I am all by myself! Let's see how I cope!
Here is today's picture.

I just looked at her rising sign, her sign being a cancer is nicely balanced by the rising sign being a Leo!