Too many things, too little sleep

I have started but not finished several blog posts over the past couple of weeks. I think in general this is the mood in our house - too many things going at once, lots of starts and not so many finishes.

The most stressful issue lately was that Linden started dropping weight percentiles. I weighed her and calculated her rate of weight gain, and it was suddenly significantly lower than it had been. So of course I started to worry immediately.

I called a lactation consultant to assess possible feeding problems. She made several recommendations to help get Linden’s weight back up, some of which turned out to be impossible to follow even though we tried. Like supplementing with pumped milk - Linden would not take a bottle no matter what we tried. We were stressed.


Fortunately, I also made a pediatrician appointment. We went to see the pediatrician, explained our concern, and the pediatrician weighed Linden. She calculated the daily rate of weight gain, and it was exactly the same as it had been the last time we went in, to the half gram. I said this was impossible, so her weight was re-checked. All was fine. No weight problem. False alarm.

I re-checked my numbers, and it turned out that I had in fact made a math error when I was calculating her rate of weight gain. So all that stress was for nothing. I had been quite sleep deprived the night before doing that calculation, and I don’t know exactly what I did but somewhere along the line I made a mistake. So we went to the Dairy Queen drive through, got some blizzards, and put the whole thing behind us. Jeff says I am not allowed to check Linden’s weight on my own anymore.

Some exciting things have happened this week though - the world’s largest T-Rex skeleton took up residence less than half a kilometre from our house. We went to see it right when the exhibit opened Friday morning. It is pretty incredible that this museum is just a short walk/ride from our house, and is free to the public so we can go any time, even just for a few minutes. We have made good use of this museum already, but it is much more exciting now :)

On Saturday we went out to watch the Sikh Day Parade, also just a short walk/ride from home. It was a celebration of Sikh culture, and they gave out food and drink - black pea curry and spiced sweetened almond milk. It was the first of a number of spring/summer parades and cultural events. Summer is by far the most eventful season here. We are looking forward to all the upcoming fun!