17 weeks

Now that Sam is rolling over onto her tummy on a regular basis, we have stopped swaddling her at naptime and bedtime. Well...you could say that hasn't exactly been going well. That might be an understatement! She keeps hooking her fingers on the soother ring and flicking it across not only the crib but sometimes the room. Other times she still has the soother in her mouth but also a couple of fingers and is unable to latch onto anything. So it's been pretty trying. We had a follow up with the pediatrician yesterday and she said we need to let Sam soothe herself...aka, cry it out and let her calm herself down rather than rely on us to get her back to sleep. This creates a sleep association...she associates getting back to sleep with Shawn or I picking her up and rocking her back to sleep. Then when she wakes up 10 minutes or even an hour later, she's in her crib, we're gone, she's confused and then she's MAD! So we are trying our best to know that we have to let her cry so that she can develop this skill. It is really, really hard to listen to her cry though and not rush in! So we've had some pretty rough nights but as Sam gets used to not being swaddled, it's gradually getting better.

We also had an appointment with a pediatric cardiologist yesterday. Some of you may know that at our first checkup after being released from the hospital, the doctor heard a heart murmur. We were sent for an echocardiogram which is basically just an ultrasound of the heart. It showed 2 small holes in Sam's heart. A simple explanation is that the heart is divided into 4 chambers and she had a hole in between the left and right upper chambers and a hole in the left and right bottom chambers. At the time, we were not sent for an actual appointment with the cardiologist, just the echocardiogram. So our family doctor referred us again but this time requested an actual appointment with the cardiologist. This took us until yesterday to get in. They redid the echocardiogram since it had been so long and also did an EKG on her. Good news...the one hole has completely closed up and the other is so small that the cardiologist couldn't even measure it. He said it's completely fine and that this type of hole is actually pretty common...8/10 babies have it. It goes undetected for the most part because it's such a slight murmur that most doctors don't even hear it. We don't need any extra precautions and no additional follow up is needed. Definitely a relief and very nice not to have that in the back of our minds anymore!

Yesterday Sam weighed 13 pounds and 1.5 ounces and was 24 inches long. That puts her in the 50th percentile for weight and 50th percentile for height.