the rollercoaster of parenthood...

just when we thought that we were done with the emotional ups and downs of raising this little girl we got hit with some more bad news. ugh. at today's doctor's appointment annabel weighed in at around 10 ounces less than she weighed at last's week's visit. and only about 5 ounces above her weight from a month ago. you don't have to know a whole lot about a baby's development to know that they really should not be losing weight. so this is not good. dr. g told us to go home and feed annabel as normal but then give her a bottle of formula after each nursing. we will then go back in tomorrow for another weight check. depending on what the scale says at that time we will then move on to the next step. if dr. g thinks that there's something going on then we may need to have some bloodwork drawn and have some other tests run. unfortunately this may include being checked into the hospital for 24 hours. ugh again. so say some prayers at 250pm friday afternoon that we'll have a good follow up and figure out what the problem is.

so what could be the issues? well, it could be that annabel is just not eating as much as she needs? she eats every 2 hours during the day but sleeps all night. maybe cheryl's milk supply needs a boost and after that annabel will get the volume that her tiny little body needs. another possibility could be that cheryl's milk is not high enough in calories. nothing about cheryl is fatty so maybe her milk is not fatty enough for the baby. if this is the case then we would most likely be stuck supplementing with formula for the next few months. another possibility is that annabel has something medically wrong. an infection. a bug that she caught. or something else. who knows? she has not been acting differently the past week so that would be weird but its possible. and finally, maybe the doctor's scale is busted. if that is the case you will bet that this new papa will raise some holy hell for the worry and anxiety of the past day but then we would have an answer. whatever it is we hope we can figure it out soon and quit all this conjecturing and hypothesizing...

the part that makes this whole thing suck so much is that we were finally thinking that we had a handle on all of this. so many people kept telling us, "it gets easier..." well, today i wanted to punch all those people in the head. if this is easier then i don't know what to expect later on. but as has been the case many times already, "this too shall pass." we've figured out everything else so we'll get this taken care of too. just really hoping for the scale option. :)