feeding, feeding, feeding

We had an exciting weekend with LOTS of feeding Kate. Everything has been going very smoothly with Kate and this past Friday we were looking forward to her weight check. She's been eating better than Drew ever did at this stage, so we were quite surprised when we put Kate on the scale on Friday and found that she's been losing weight! While we will always encourage Kate to be active and eat healthful food, we did NOT want her to get any smaller. She tipped the scales at a petite 5 pounds 13 ounces, and we were all concerned.

Jana and I resolved to increase our feeding efforts, and thus we spent this past weekend completely focused on bulking Kate up! (I'll let you know if it worked later in the post :) Kate continues to look like a little old man. Jana and I agree that without the pink clothes we'd have no idea if she was a boy or a girl. However, we do think that she's adorable and the cutest "little old man" girl!!

Drew has been helping us look out for Kate, and in this picture he was tickling her. Drew likes to go up to people and gently touch them saying, "Tickle, tickle!"

This past Saturday Jana and Drew went to MSU's small animal day, which involved checking out some of MSU's farm animals. Drew went with two of his friends from church and daycare, Ella and Maddie (and their mom and dad too :) Maddie is almost exactly Drew's age and is one of his good friends at daycare.

Jana learned that it is pretty difficult to keep track of Drew at a farm and to take pictures, so I'll only post this picture. The highlight of the day for Drew was getting to milk a cow. The rest of the day on Saturday he would look up at me and say, "Dad, I milked a cow. Dad, I milked a cow. . . ." I am happy that Jana and Drew got some mother-son time because Jana's been keeping busy with feeding Kate. The other thing that Drew liked about the trip was riding a "city bus" from farm to farm. He's seen buses around for quite a while, but this was his first time riding on one.

Also on Saturday, our friends Nate and Meg and Dan and Sandra visited. Dan and Sandra also have a new baby girl, Lorelei, and Nate and Meg are expecting a baby in July. It's so much fun to all be having babies at the same time. Lorelei and Kate are only about five weeks apart in age. Kate's got some growing to do to catch up!

In an effort to bulk Kate up, Jana and I have given her lots of TLC. We carry her all around the house enjoying her snuggly warmth.

We've been doing this a lot lately: finger feeding! I can literally almost do this in my sleep. I've been trying to help out Jana as much as possible, so after almost every time Jana breast feeds I step in and give Kate some additional food via finger feeding.

Now that the work week has started, Jana has taken over on the finger feeding and continues to make sure Kate is taking in enough. She's just not doing well enough to get all her meals through breast feeding yet! Due to all our efforts over the weekend, Kate gained several ounces in weight. Yay! We had another weight check this morning and Kate had gained back several of her lost ounces. Now that we've got forward progress on Kate growing, we're going to continue our efforts and we'll check back next week. We are so excited that Kate is getting bigger!!

Here's one last picture of our tiny little girl. She is still so small at just over 6 pounds. Who would have guessed that Jana and I would produce such a tiny one?!