2 week check up

First of all I want to say Congratulations to our dear friends Jenny and Zack who are now the proud parents of Rebekah May Burkhart! Also a congratulations to my sweet friend Rikki who gave birth to her little girl Sally (on the same day as Jenny). I can't wait to meet your precious girls!

Today was Ava's 2 week check up and she is doing fantastic! She now weighs 7 lbs. 7 ounces and is 21 1/4 inches long. She has put on almost a pound since birth and has grown 2 inches longer. She is growing healthy and strong, such an answer to prayers. The doctor calls her the star baby. That makes her mommy very proud! The one thing that we need to keep an eye on is Ava's neck. She has a slight bit of Torticollis which in simple terms means her head tilts slightly to one side. The doctor didn't seem like it was anything we needed to worry about but we just need to do some gentle stretches of her neck and repositioning so that she gets comfortable relaxing her head to the other side. Here is Baby Center's explanation of Torticollis.

Torticollis (also called congenital muscular torticollis) is a condition that causes a baby's head and neck to tilt to one side. It affects about 2 percent of newborns. The cause is unknown, but doctors suspect that when a baby is positioned in the uterus so that her head is tilted to the side and her neck is down, the blood supply to the neck is cut off. This results in some tightness in one of the two strap (or sternocleidomastoid) muscles that connect the breastbone, head, and neck, and allow a baby to turn her neck. Though the baby may look uncomfortable, this condition causes no pain.

Some things we love about our little 2 week old:
~She makes the cutest little grunts, like a piglet, when she is waking up in the middle of the night to be fed. No cries, just grunts!
~When I unswaddle her she throws her arms up in the air with jazz hands. Always makes me smile.
~She is becoming more and more alert each day and loves to just stare at things with her big beautiful eyes. At least once a day she will stay up between feedings (about 2 hours) and just stare at things, perfectly content.
~I love the way she calms down when her daddy or her mommy is holding her and talking to her. I know she recognized our voices from the first time we held her.