Perhaps all babies do this but as we have no experience of other babies we find this kinda strange about Noemie. She goes from smiley/sleepy/content to screaming for her bottle in less than 3 seconds. Of course it then takes a few minutes to get the milk out (she has a mini fridge in her room as we got tired of running down to the kitchen 2 floors down to get the milk) and then to warm it up in the bottle warmer. By this point you would think we were torturing her or something. Glad the neighbors have a baby as well so they probably don't even think twice about the crying. She will then eat like she hasn't eaten in days and when she is halfway through, we stop and burp her. She'll then cry while being burped as she wants to keep eating. So, the bottle goes back in her mouth... or we try and she grimaces at us, thrashes her head from side to side, bites down on the teat (so glad I'm not actually breastfeeding when I see her bite down, lol) and then grimaces some more. Take the bottle out and she cries so you put the bottle back in and she repeats her grimacing/thrashing. After a few tries she'll eat and look at you like "Why don't you people understand that I'm hungry? Why didn't you give me the bottle sooner?" Before we figured this out about her we would stop feeding her as we figured she was full. 10 minutes later she would be hungry again so we would feed her and it drove us nuts. Now we know better and we will sit there and keep shoving the bottle back into her mouth until we are sure she is done (usually she will smack the bottle out of her mouth while keeping her mouth firmly shut so you can't get anything in there and milk just ends up all over the place). My parents were watching this over the weekend and they looked a bit horrified that we were trying to force feed her and that maybe we were hurting her. Then when she would finish her bottle they just realised it was just her feeding routine! Such fun.
She had her kidney scan yesterday where they inject some dye into her veins and then scan her for 20 minutes. That was a blast. She screamed for the first 15 minutes as she was on her back, not being held and had a restraint around her stomach to stop her falling off the bed. She was just about asleep when it was all over. Typical. Today we go back for a consult with the pediatric surgeon who saw Noemie when she was back in the NICU to go over the results of her scan. In other news, we're waiting to hear from the Brompton about her heart surgery date. We got a letter confirming she is on their waiting list and we were a bit surprised by this as we thought we would just be given a date and she would go in but I guess as it's not an emergency situation this is normal. We talked to our cardiac nurse and found that this means she is on the list but that if another patient who is due for surgery is unable to have surgery for whatever reason, they do down the list so they don't waste the operating slot. This means we could get a call at anytime and be given maybe 1 week's notice... or 2 days notice (or perhaps even less) about when her surgery will be. We have a follow up routine scan next week anyway and so long as her status has not changed we're not too worried about the actual date of her surgery as we know it will happen sooner than later. I just hope we do get at least 2 days notice. Imagine if they rang up at 7am and asked us to bring her in at 9am that day. That would suck big time but I guess we don't really have much choice in the matter as it has to get done.
We found a solution to her hating her pram and crying the entire time she is in there. We use her carseat with the adapter for the Bugaboo and she can see out and see us and is not flat on her back so she is happy. We did this yesterday and she smiled most of the way to the hospital and slept most of the way home. It's not ideal as babies are technically meant to lay flat as much as possible but there is no point in having her upset. The longest she is in the carseat is about 30 minutes at a time anyway so not a big deal. It does crack me up to think back to how we had all these ideas of how we would do things before she was born though. We had planned to put her in her own cotbed from the first night home... which turned into we'd use her moses basket in our bedroom just in case she stopped breathing due to her heart to she is now sleeping with us in bed. She sleeps on her front 90% of the time as well... but chances are the SIDS people will turn around in 5 years time and say it's actually safer for babies to sleep hanging upside down and not on their backs so it doesn't really matter how she sleeps now. We thought she would use the pram on her bugaboo for the first 6 months as recommended... turned into she is in her carseat in her bugaboo. We were going to 100% formula feed her... she is now 100% fed on breastmilk that I express a gazillion times a day like a cow and Kirk still refers to me as the milk truck. Based on this, I think a lot of the books out there, the classes you can take, etc., are all pretty pointless. Your baby will tell you how it's going to be.