Nervose Forældre

I forget what time we got home with Molli, but it wasn’t long before the previous entry was blogged so you can just look at the timestamp. I’d guess it was around 10am at the latest.

(I’m not leading up to anything scary, so unclench your abdomen.)

Trine fed her not long after we got home. She figured Molli had a pretty good meal off her. Afterwards she burped her and we changed her and she gave no indication of wanting to sleep.

She was awake, wide-eyed, and pretty active (for a creature whose idea of “activity” consists of flailing her limbs around and squeaking) until about noon, when Trine went in to take nap. I sat with Molli in the living room and she nodded off herself at about 12:15. It was the first sleep she’d had since we met her at the hospital a little after 9:00, and she’d been awake then. So she’d been awake at least four-and-a-half hours.

Unsurprisingly, once she conked out she stayed conked out. She woke up now and then, briefly, to eye us sleepily and look around at this strange new home of hers before zonking out again. She was supposed to have had a 1pm feeding, but we figured she’d let us know if she was hungry, and we knew she must have been tired. By 3pm we were wondering what to do. She was supposed to feed again at 4pm and still hadn’t had any of her 1pm food. She was sleeping like an angel, which naturally terrified us. How could she sleep so much?

(That’s right: we were nervous because a baby that had been conceived just 36 weeks and two days earlier had been asleep for three hours after having been awake for more than four.)

Trine called our nurse and asked what to do. “Let her sleep,” came the obvious reply. “If she still hasn’t eaten by 5pm, though, maybe you could bring her in and we’ll give her the tube.”

4pm came and went. By 4:45 we were, frankly, kind of scared. She kept sleeping! We tried to wake her up by means of psychological abuse, pretending to change her diaper—an activity that almost always wakes her up. Yes, she squirmed and squeaked and peered at us suspiciously through heavy-lidded eyes, but she seemed so tired. And shouldn’t she have been hungry?

We drove in to the hospital at 5pm. She woke up as we entered the neonatal afsnit. By the time we were in “our room” she was crying her hungry cry, and moments later she was eating off Trine like a pig at a trough. She ate and ate and ate. She was fine. Then we burped her and she slept—waking only periodically when we poked her to be sure she was still alive.

The girl has not given us one good reason to be anything but absolutely confident in her health and well-being, and we’re basket cases just the same. God save us when she gets her first cold!

Anyway, a couple more pictures from her home visit:

The answers to the first picture are: (1) yes, Molli was in the lift at the time, and (2) no, Ollie’s curiosity did not have the proverbial effect—but it might have if he’d given any indication of aggression.

The answer to the second one is: no, I’ve never seen anything sweeter in my life. (Trine’s cuddling with Molli on our bed just moments before we returned to the hospital.)

We’re going to try again tomorrow. We know she can handle it: the question is, can we?