Captain Underwear and the Amazing Yellowgirl!

I'm happy to report that Max's mystery virus has resolved and his extreme case of the crabbies has vanished -- he's back to his regular (mischevious) fun-loving self. He loves to "help" Mom with the laundry and has discovered the joys of wearing underwear on one's head. He's recently started shaking his head for "no," which is very cute, especially since he usually does it while he's doing something naughty (like throwing the unwanted portions of his dinner over the side of the high chair for the dog to eat). He loves to pat (gently) his baby sister, give her kisses (licks) on her head, and lay his head up against her. He also tries to steal her bottle whenever given even a smidgen of opportunity, run off with her burp cloths, and push her swing (with or without her in it) while yelling, "Whee!" You have to love big brothers. ;)

Max had his well-baby checkup today. He is current weighing in at 25 pounds and is 32 1/2 inches tall. Big boy! He appears to be doing some catch-up growing -- he went from being in the 10-15th percentiles for height and weight to approximately 33% for both height and weight (I forget the exact percentiles -- they were both in the low 30s). He's doing everything he should be doing for his actual age, so he's just about caught up to his peers. I'm guessing that after his next developmental appointment in November, he'll be discharged from the developmental follow-up program. Happily, he didn't need any more shots -- he's all set for his vaccinations until he's four (barring flu shots, if we decide to get them).

Molly is four weeks old today and eating and growing like crazy -- she weighed in at 7 lbs, 4 oz on Saturday. Unfortunately, her jaundice does not seem to be fading like we would expect and we actually thought it was a little worse over the weekend, so Molly had to go back and visit the doctor. They checked her bilirubin levels again (another heel poke *sniff*) and the levels are still higher than they would expect at this point. Based on the lab results and the fact that she's otherwise acting fine, the doctor thinks she has breastmilk jaundice. It's a type of jaundice that is basically harmless, but caused by breastmilk and would explain why she's still jaundiced at this late date. So, to try to rule out any other more serious reasons for the jaundice, the doctor asked us to put Molly on formula for a day and recheck her levels tomorrow. If the levels go down significantly, then we know the cause of the jaundice and can stop worrying about it. If not, she'll have to have some more tests and probably go see a GI specialist.

Of course, feeding the baby formula is the LAST thing that Mom wants to do, but if it'll save Molly more heel pokes and more invasive tests, then we'll do what we have to do. No offense to any formula feeders out there (and I know breastfeeding isn't an option for everyone, especially preemie folks), but formula is NASTY! It looks gross, tastes gross, stains everything, is ghastly expensive, and smells like the puppy milk replacer that we used to feed orphaned baby animals when we were involved with the Wildlife Rescue. Molly's definitely more spitty on the formula -- thank goodness we only have to use it for a day! Of course, that means that the stash of extra milk we have in the freezer is growing even faster than normal and threatening to overrun all the "real" food.

We've recently migrated to Blogger Beta, which shouldn't really have an impact for our faithful readers. ;) Beta does have some additional privacy features which we aren't going to activate at this time, but might consider doing so in the future. We've recently been made aware of a fairly disturbing experience that someone had with their baby blog, making us rethink our public blog position. At this point, I'd like to leave it open to the public, but if we have any trouble at any point then we'll have to lock it up and people would only be able to access the site if their email was on an "approved" list. The URL to the Flickr site will be changing -- I'll post the updated link as soon as I've finished mucking around with it.