First things first: Maya is a whopping 11 lbs, 2 ounces and 23 inches long. That puts our little monster in the 97th percentile for babies her age.
That was the highlight of her checkup this afternoon. The lowlight was the vaccine (luckily, just one shot this time; next time: five!). You’d think her chunky thighs would insulate her from the pain, but her little arms shot up in the air immediately and the crying ensued. Kari may have shed a tear or two herself. Luckily, both girls recovered quickly, and we were soon home dealing with the fallout from the other part of our doctor visit.
The doctor, referred to as a sleep Nazi (if I remember correctly) by the nurse practitioner at our last appointment, recommended we go ahead and get started on sleep training our soon-to-be 5-week old. Her daughter, now 14, was sleeping 10 hours a night by the age of 5 weeks, she said. Music to our ears.
It’s getting there that’s going to be the problem. Will Maya feel abandoned if we let her cry 15 minutes before comforting her? Will she still feel loved? (Of course. We hold her, hug her, kiss her, feed her, play with her all day long.) Is she too young to start sleep training? (Who knows?)
In the end, we didn’t rush into it tonight, but we’ll see how the next couple nights go and figure out where we want to go from here. A sleeping baby, four hours, five hours, or more sounds wonderful (if a little out of reach) after a month of feeling like we were stuck in an episode of Lost, waking up every 108 minutes to save the world baby.