OK, I know I shouldn’t post 3 posts in one night, but I had so much fun posting all the pictures that I forgot to update about Seth’s weight gain issues.

We went in last week for Seth’s 6 month appointment.  I had been encouraged that we were gaining weight at the last weight check, where he weighed in at 14 lbs 10 oz, so you can imagine my disappointment when Seth was put on the scale and it only said 14 lbs 1.5 oz. He somehow lost 8.5 oz in one week!  Suffice it to say, we decided we needed to be more proactive in giving him more calories.

Since his appointment I’ve started giving him several bottles of formula each day, along with 2-3 meals of solid foods (cereals, banana, etc) and 3-4 nursing sessions.  I’m hoping all these combinations will give him the boost he needs.  I can’t tell if he is gaining yet, but he does seem to be more demanding of food now, as if he hadn’t really realized how nice it was to be full before.  He is nursing better when I do nurse him, eats the bottles of formula with great interest, and continues to love bananas and cereal.  I haven’t gotten him to venture much further than that on solids, but the doctor said the cereal was full of what he needed.  He also gets a dropper full of liquid vitamins a day.  You’d think they’d flavor those, but they don’t.  He does swallow them though.

Obviously, we still don’t know why we are having to work this hard to get him to gain weight.  The doctor has repeatedly mentioned that I do have small kids, so we don’t expect him to be in the top half of the chart, but we do expect him to gain some weight at this point.  We’ve done tests for infections, and the last blood test had showed a slightly high white blood cell count, so we redid that at his appointment.  I didn’t hear anything, so I am assuming it was normal, but I’ll check next time I go in for a weight check.

We still have our appointment scheduled to check his heart and find out why he has a heart murmur.  That is June 19, so it is getting close.  The doctor is impatient to get those results, just so we know if that is a factor or not.  I got some clarification from him though on what the murmur sounds like, and it sounds like a functional or ejection murmur.  These murmurs are completely natural and do not signify a heart problem.  It is merely the sound of the blood rushing out of the heart.  But, a VSD (ventricular septal defect) can also sometimes sound similar to an ejection murmur, so that is what we want to rule out.  VSD was Emma’s first diagnosis, though hers was due to an abnormally large hole and her murmur (once it showed up) was very distinct.  So we are not expecting anything to that extreme by any means.  Even if there is a VSD, there may be no need for medical intervention.

Will, as you may remember, will also be seeing the cardiologist on the same day.  Sometimes I think he seems like he has outgrown his problem and then he’ll have a day where his feet are extremely blue or red, so I am still glad we are checking it out.