Week 2: Sleep, spew and sticky eye

Our first week back at home with Baby 2.0 has been a reasonably smooth adjustment. For Tim and I at least – Lady AB has actively been acting up since he started competing for our attention.

We’ve been slowly sorting out a quasi-routine with his feeding, sleeping and bathing so that we can manage him and Lady AB’s routine in parallel. He’s currently feeding every 2-3 hours around the clock so that lends a certain level of predictability to our activities and outings.

Fortunately Baby 2.0′s calm nature has continued into week 2. I thought Lady AB was easy to manage but Baby 2.o is a dream. He barely cries, is very quiet and contented and is feeding and sleeping well, particularly overnight (nothing worse than being sleep deprived at 3am, trying to settle a screaming baby). In fact, the majority of the photos of Baby 2.0 are of him sleeping!

We’ve been blessed with an undemanding child who sports a somewhat serious expression all the time – a relative said that he was an ‘old soul’.

The only (minor) issues we’ve had is that he’s still a lot more vomitous than his sister, so I have been advised to feed him in a ‘football’ hold and to prop him up after his feed for 10-20 minutes to get the gas out. This seems to have alleviated the vomiting somewhat but there have certainly been some spectacular projectile efforts, mostly landing on me and luckily not on the carpet. His vomiting doesn’t appear to have affected his weight gain or his bowels, so other than having to deal with the inconvenience of constantly wiping up spew I’m not too worried.

He has also had a bout of ‘sticky eye’ which I’ve never encountered before. It’s caused by undeveloped tear ducts and creates a sticky, green/yellow mucous which accumulates in the eye. After a week of wiping with breast milk and salty water (as advised by the Maternal Child Health nurse) it still hadn’t cleared up so at 2 weeks old he had his first visit to the GP. He’s now on antibiotic eye drops which will hopefully be more effective, as it’s quite disconcerting having him stare at you through a web of gunk.