My little Savvy – Savannah Leigh. Already showing a bit of personality.
Update since my last dispatch, which was Mother’s Day, 4 weeks ago: our little family has received a steady stream of visitors since then. In fact, June 1 as I began this blog was the first day that I didn’t have company since before Savannah was born!
My mother, Nana Linda, was there at the birth, and thus got to pose with one of the earliest pictures of Savannah.
When she departed, Nana Maureen, my mother-in-law, made an appearance. (The calico in the shot is Ms. Tylo, whose purrs Savannah heard throughout my pregnancy as she lay cuddled against my belly.)
Then the aunts, uncle and cousins all showed up. My husband’s two sisters, the husband and 3 teenage children of one of them in tow all drove up together from DC just to have lunch with us on our back deck! It was the only day they could all get their schedules in sync, and they piled in the car and drove back to the District at 4pm. I thought they were crazy, but new babies have a way of making people crazy. Here’s my nephew Wesley, astonished that he’s no longer the youngest cousin of the Franco clan:
Then my little sister Leah came up for a week. 
My sister is a biomedical engineer by day, gourmet chef in her spare time. She cooked us things like maple-glazed pork chops with lemon risotto. We love Auntie Leah! http://find.myrecipes.com/recipes/recipefinder.dyn?action=displayRecipe&recipe_id=1981763
So all this family, plus all the friends stopping by… I was really glad for the company! When Steve went back to work there was still someone there to hold the baby while I took a shower, maybe even got dressed (these are time-consuming luxuries I took for granted before baby!)
Being a new mother is HARD! Who thought it was a good idea to put something so tiny and precious and delicate into MY clumsy hands???! I had my first freak-out the night after we came home from the hospital. She would…not…sleep. I’d put her down, she’d scream bloody murder. Pick her up and she’d be fine. 3am. Big blue eyes wide open. Constantly wanting to feed. But then she’d fall asleep and I’d take her off and she’d instantly wake up, screaming for more! My baby was a vampire. 
Savannah Savampire? (BTW Daddy managed to sleep through ALL of this!)
And I was worried about her, too. She’d lost almost a pound of her birth weight – a little more than is normal, so they wanted her back in for a weight check. That and she had jaundice, so they wanted her back in to check that, too. And to top it all off, she wasn’t pooping. Ask any new mom, this is traumatic. When she finally gave us the little brown blessing I was dancing around the house singing “she poopied, she poopied, she poopied!” (Do you get the reference?) http://familyguy.wikia.com/wiki/Shipoopi
The pediatrician’s office, the nurses at the hospital, and the lactation consultants all had conflicting advice – feed her on demand. Feed her every 4 hours, 3 hours, 2 hours, hour and a half… Let her sleep, NO wake her up every 2 hours to feed! FINALLY one sane lactation nurse uttered the words I never thought I’d hear someone from the Breastfeeding Militia ever say: “try supplementing her with formula.” It worked like a miracle! Little Savvy gained 3 ounces in two days and everybody was happy, especially me.
- Savannah’s tricked out nursery used to be Mommy’s “meditation room.”
BTW, here’s a little known fact the Breastfeeding Militia doesn’t tell you: Your milk may not “come in” right away. Meaning baby won’t get enough to eat unless you supplement with the Devil Juice (what most Breastfeeding Militia-types think of formula.)
Here’s another fact I wish someone had mentioned: if you’re given Pitocin during labor, it may delay your milk production even further.
Here’s another: Some newborns only poop once a week, and that is totally normal. Especially if they are breastfed.
If anyone in the medical profession is reading this blog, PLEASE hear my heartfelt plea. Pass this information along to new mothers. It may have prevented me from crying my eyes out in the shower at 4:30am several times that first week home!
I’m happy to report things have gotten a LOT better since then. I think it’s because I’ve RELAXED about my motherly duties. When I first got home, honest to God, I was keeping a breastfeeding log. No kidding: Time of feeding, minutes per feeding (per boob!) whether the diaper was pee or poo, how much formula we had to give her, whether or not we swabbed the umbilical stump with alcohol… yeah. That lasted two days. We’re a lot less uptight now!
When the umbilical stump finally fell off, we were free to give Savannah her first real bath, which she loved. The water temperature has to be exactly right, though – if it’s even a little too cold she will let you know! 
Memorial Day weekend, we took Savannah on her first long car trip to Boston. Steve needed to help his brother install a security system in his shop, and I didn’t want to be home alone with the baby, so we made a little vacation out of it at Nana Maureen’s. Savannah was wonderful in the car – we pulled over every 3 hours to feed her and she slept most of the time other than that. She even joined us for lunch at Cracker Barrell without incident. She was so good, we decided to take her on a little adventure – Savannah took her first boat ride on the Merrimack River in Newburyport at 21 days old!
I’m planning lots of little family adventures for us…
So now we’re back home and I’m finally spending a lot of time alone with the baby. But we have a good system going so Mommy has a little time to get some other things done, like this blog and finally going through all the baby clothes everyone’s given us. I came across these hand-painted Onesies from my family baby shower.
My sister had this idea for a shower game, everybody gets a white Onesie and a set of paints, and customizes a t-shirt for the baby. Here are my two favorites:
My little Demon is quite an Angel, actually…
’Til next time!
Outlook on NEPA
Brett’s feeling better and has rescheduled his May 15th date. With this new lease on life, you know he’ll be rockin’ out! So I want to make sure these tickets get in the hands of those who can really appreciate the poetry of Poison. Read on:
![Lil Pea too[1]](http://blogs.wkrz.com/files/2010/02/Lil-Pea-too1.jpg "Lil Pea too[1]")
My name is Kameron Jacoby and I am 9 months old. One of my favorite things to do is dance (I just recently learned how!). My favorite music to dance to is the Black Eyed Peas. So I put on my Will-I-Am attire and decided to go dancin, but not before making my sign for Fergie!
Dani’s Uncle Rob from Plains submitted this Lil’ Pea pic to win tickets to see the Black Eyed Peas in Philly March 3rd and passes to hang with the Peas! “Totally something Fergie would wear” he writes in his e-mail. Yeah I can see that! 
