Stella turned 8 weeks old on Wednesday and will be 2 months old on Tuesday, the day after my sister arrives from South Africa for a lightning, one week visit. I am so excited for my sister coming, its been hard watching Stella grow and change in the absence of my family. It doesn’t matter how many times we hold her up to the webcam and post photos of her on the internet, its being able to actually feel those chubby legs and blow raspberries on her fat tummy that really counts. In terms of progress Stella is thriving. She had her first set of jabs two weeks ago when I took her to a new Dr for a meet-and-greet appointment. He is a lovely Dr, casual and friendly but very efficient, the only drawback being that despite coming highly recommended apparently the waiting times in his surgery are ridiculous. We didn’t have to wait long to see him this time but I imagine it would be a different scenario if I had a sick baby and a restless toddler. I wasn’t planning on getting Stella’s jabs done that day as she was only 7 weeks old but the Dr assured me its best to get them done early, in fact they recommend 6 weeks now because of the nasty Whooping cough that has been doing the rounds. My only concern with immunisations is that the amount of vaccine given to each baby is the same no matter on the size of the baby. Surely smaller babies would need less of the vaccine? Thankfully my concerns don’t apply to Stella because she is such a big baby. This time around I am prepared for how it feels to watch someone sticking needles into my soft and precious child and I surprised myself by not crying or even feeling that emotional as the kind Dr poked a needle into each thigh. Stella shrieked in protest as they went in but settled easily with a cuddle and was asleep in her capsule soon after. There were no ill effects from the jabs and although I asked Ron to pick up some Panadol for babies on his way home, we didn’t need to use it at all.

The Dr also prescribed some antibiotic drops for Stella’s right eye which had gone from a mild ooze commonly seen in young babies where the tear ducts aren’t properly developed yet, to a greenish pus which he thought was well on its way to an infection. That combined with the saline we continued to use to clean her slightly oozey belly button and the nasal saline drops for her snotty nose meant that nappy changes were a traumatic process for a few days. Thankfully her eye cleared up after two doses of the drops and her nose is almost clear again. Stella’s belly button is still a problem, like her sister she has a granuloma which is when a bit of the umbilicus continues to remain despite there being no blood flow to the area and the Dr advised we just continue to keep it clean and dry and it should be ok. Unfortunately in the last few days the granuloma has started to poke out and bleed so I will be making another appointment with the Dr to decide what we do next. With Amy’s we ended up using silver nitrate which dried up the granuloma immediately and she now has a perfect inny belly button!

I took Stella to the nurse at the Early Childhood clinic on her 8 week birthday to get her weighed again. We had a long wait but Amy was angelically behaved and Stella was asleep so we stuck it out and were rewarded with the news that Stella now weighs 6.1kgs which means she has gained 2.115kgs in 8 weeks which works out to 263g a week. This led me to ask the nurse if it is possible to overfeed a breastfed baby! The nurse assured me that a steep weight gain is common in the early months until the baby starts to have longer awake periods and become more active at which point the weight gain tails off as they burn more calories and sleep less.