I can’t believe our baby girl is already 2 weeks old! The last two weeks has definitely been a blur but we’ve enjoyed *almost* every minute of it.

Reagan had a moderate case of jaundice when we were discharged from the hospital, which wasn’t helped by the fact that she didn’t get a whole lot to eat her first 2 days of life thanks to a tongue tie. The day we were discharged we started giving her formula, and within a few days of coming home (after daily trips to the doctor to be pricked on her heal for a blood sample and weighed) she was back up to her birth weight. As of this Thursday she’s up to 7 pounds 13.5 ounces, so she’s doing really well! The doctor noticed this week though that in addition to a tongue tie she also has an upper lip tie, which both have made it difficult for her to breastfeed (and painful for me – she basically relies on biting!). She fixed both the ties on Thursday, but so far she’s still not latching correctly, which the doctor said might be the case because she’s just gotten used to what she’s been doing the last two weeks. So, we’ll see what happens and if we do end up able to breastfeed, awesome, but if not, at least we tried!

As far as sleep goes, I think Reagan has been pretty great so far. She mostly sleeps in 3 hour chunks and *usually* is fine in her bassinet. Her favorite spot, though, is curled up on my or David’s chest, and she’s just so darn cute that when she wants to sleep there, it’s hard to put her down! Either way, I really hope she maintains these sleeping habits because I have a really helpful partner who will be gone for a week and a half starting on the 10th, and I definitely have anxiety about being alone.

Since we brought Reagan home both our dogs have adjusted pretty much as perfectly as we could have hoped they would. Winnie doesn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to her other than occasionally wanting to sniff her. Mater on the other hand is extremely concerned about her and usually as soon as he hears her cry he’s right there to make sure she’s ok! I have a feeling they’re going to be best buddies.

While I’m on the subject of the dogs, I do have an unfortunate update about Mater specifically. If you don’t already know, we adopted him in July (and he’s completely stolen our hearts in this short amount of time) and about a month later we realized what the humane society had said was “dry eye” was actually a pretty serious eye issue. Long story short, we spent about $1000 trying to figure out what the exact issue was, and then the humane society helped out by paying for a CT scan and biopsy. His eyes both wound up healing – at least so far – and the eye specialist was never able to figure out exactly what happened or what caused the issues. He had about one month with healthy eyes and no trips to the vet and then all of a sudden it seemed like he had caught some kind of bug. I took him to the vet and they chalked it up to a back injury – makes sense considering his body type – and gave us pain medicine and told us to try to get him to take it easy as much as possible. Ever since then he’s had bad days and good days, but it seemed like there had to be something more to it than just a back injury. This week he had a really bad day, so we decided to take him to a different vet. This vet was MUCH, MUCH more thorough than the one we had been going to (which explains why we spent so much money on his eye issue before they finally referred us to an eye specialist…but I digress). He decided to take a urine sample thinking Mater may have a urinary tract infection, and when he was getting the sample he noticed multiple lumps in that area on Mater. Knowing he came from El Centro most recently, the vet caught on that he might have TVT. Basically TVT is a dog STD that causes tumors and can become cancerous, and it’s a big issue in Mexico and the Imperial Valley thanks to people not fixing their dogs. Turns out the vet was right, and it’s metastacized to his lymph nodes. The vet assured us that this cancer is extremely responsive to chemo and that chemo doesn’t affect dogs like it does humans. But we haven’t found out how much it’s going to cost yet. Like I said before, even though we’ve only had Mater a short time, we love him SO much. He’s also only 4 years old so we can’t imagine the next several years without him. It’s also really hard not to be angry at the humane society at this point. We are very appreciative of them paying for the CT scan/biopsy because there was no way we could have afforded that when we were being told that the most likely outcome would be eye removal anyway (and THANK GOD we didn’t make the decision to go straight to that considering he’s fine now!), but the fact of the matter is their vets knew he had some type of eye issue and misdiagnosed it as dry eye. Now we find out about these tumors which were definitely there in July – there may have been less of them and they may have been smaller, but they fixed him when they got him and I don’t understand how they missed the tumors in that process. I’m going to let the humane society know he has TVT in the hopes that they’ll be more thorough and think to check for that specifically in the dogs they take in from Imperial Valley moving forward so other adopters don’t have to go through this too, but I’m not expecting them to help out with these expenses too. Anyway, if you could keep Mater (and our bank accounts) in your prayers, we would really appreciate it.

To end on a lighter note, something else we did in Reagan’s first two weeks was take family pictures! We’re so glad she came before Thanksgiving so we were able to take these pictures while Amelia was with us. Be on the lookout for a Christmas card soon 🙂

Here’s some of my favorite pictures we took. Mater pretty much stole the show though, amiright?

Also, today we ventured out to go to a friend’s daughter’s birthday party. It was a pajama party and I got David to agree to get matching Christmas pj’s:

Alrighty, if you’ve made it this far good for you! Hopefully next week I’ll be back with better news about Mater, and continued good updates about baby Reagan 🙂

 

Why hello there! I figured my first post here could be an update on baby Reagan and what’s going on / why she isn’t here yet…especially considering we took a fun little trip to the hospital last night!

I haven’t been shy about complaining that I’m over being pregnant, so I’ll spare the details but my biggest issue for about the last week has been horrible sciatic nerve pain on my left side. Back issues run in my family (thanks dad!) and I have dealt with sciatic nerve pain before, but nothing has ever come close to this level of pain – I’m not exaggerating when I say I can barely walk. Also I should mention we live in a 3 story townhouse and have 2 dogs that need to be walked a few times a day. I’ve tried everything at this point aside from going to a chiropractor or for acupuncture – I have a heating pad, I’ve bounced/stretched on my exercise ball, gone on walks despite the pain, taken the safe dosage of tylenol, and had a reflexology massage and nothing has helped. So my goal in going to our doctor’s appointment last night was to get the doctor to take pity on me and schedule an induction for this weekend (due date isn’t til Thursday so I assumed they wouldn’t schedule anything before then) if she doesn’t come on her own. I was disappointed but not surprised to learn I’m still only 1 centimeter dilated even though I had my membranes stripped last week. I was surprised to hear my blood pressure had spiked. I’ve shocked myself by having a mostly perfectly healthy pregnancy, I’ve even lost weight and my blood pressure has gone to a more normal level than it was pre-pregnancy, as a matter of fact.

My doctor was concerned enough by the blood pressure increase to tell us to go to the hospital to get monitored and get labwork done, so we came home, grabbed our bags (I had a feeling we were jinxing ourselves by getting the bags!) and headed there. They took blood/urine samples and hooked me up to the monitors, and the first blood pressure read was actually normal. Then the urine labwork came back showing protein in my urine, which the nurse explained was cause for concern of preeclampsia combined with high blood pressure (either one by itself is ok), but since the first blood pressure they took was normal, she was pretty confident I was fine and they’d send me home. A few minutes later the machine checked my BP again, and it had jumped, so we were back to thinking we might be admitted/induced. The next 3 BP checks went down and the last one was pretty close to normal, so the doctor on call felt comfortable sending me home as long as I get checked out again within 48 hours. Not going to lie…while I don’t want my perfectly healthy pregnancy to take a turn for the worst in the home stretch, I was relieved knowing I might finally get some relief from the back pain by being induced and just getting her out of me!

Where we’re at now: I’m home, alternating sitting on the couch with a heating pad and bouncing/stretching on the exercise ball and (thank God) David got sent home from work to help around the house and with the dogs and be here in case a miracle happens and Reagan decides she’s ready to come out on her own. We’ll go to my doctor for another check-up tomorrow morning, and again I hope if my blood pressure is back to the normal range that she’ll just have mercy on me and schedule an induction for this weekend (or earlier). Considering how concerned she was by the increase in blood pressure last night, I have a feeling if my blood pressure is still on the higher-end of normal, she’ll order an induction sooner than this weekend.

In the meantime I’m going to *slowly* start getting some Christmas decorations up to keep me moving and to not have to worry about anything other than a tree once Reagan IS here. We’re also still holding onto hope that she’ll be here quickly enough so I’m not still in full-on recovery mode for Thanksgiving, when my dad and stepmom will be here from Tennessee and David’s daughter, mom, dad and sister will be here from Fresno. Please say a prayer that Reagan comes, ideally on her own, in the next couple of days!!!

Also side note – being in the triage area for labor and delivery was extremely unsettling. I did NOT enjoy hearing the sounds of other women in labor! I also felt slightly bad we were just sitting there watching the Holiday Baking Championship on TV while the girls around me were clearly in a lot of pain lol.

I’ll post another update after our appointment tomorrow, unless we’re in the hospital having a baby 🙂