Duke's 5 weeks now

The time is flying!

We had a great week. Duke FINALLY lost his umbilical stump at 31 days! It was driving Mommy way more crazy than Duke.

He started smiling right when he turned 4 weeks and woah, can that melt your heart. Just this morning I had him in the Moby while I did some dishes and I looked down to catch him gazing at me and smiling (I cried a little). SO cool! It also is a nice way for Daddy to leave for work in the morning when he gets his baby to smile at him on the way out the door.

I started running again and oh how I have missed it. Did 6 miles of mostly walk/jog on Monday and did a faster 6 miles today with more jogging. I plan to do this at least 3 times per week and try to get SOME sort of fitness back.

Our photographer sent me all the newborn pics she took of Duke so I am going to share some of them now. Debra with Brand New Soul Photography is amazing!! You can check out her stuff at:

http://www.brandnewsoul.com/

Growing up

Here's a few pic we've taken over the past week or so via cell phone camera! FYI, his umbilical cord stump FINALLY fell off at day 31! Crazy. We've been having fun with friends and family this week. Auntie Linda came by on Thurs. We went for a walk and played. Amber and Tia visited Friday, then Karen came by and brought us dinner!

Friday night we went to Bunco and got to hang out with cousin Alex, baby Brook, and little Emily! It was a fun baby fest.

Last night we went over to Nana and Papa's and as you can see Baby Duke

took a bottle from Daddy for the first time! We were very excited.

23 Days old today

His umbilical cord STILL hasn't fallen off. I called the doctor yesterday though and they weren't worried about it! Going for a record here I suppose...

Duke visited the cardiologist

On March 1st, we had to go see the pediatric cardiologist at Swedish. Duke has a slight heart murmur at birth that Dr. Sliman (our amazing pediatrician) could still hear at his check up at 8 days old. He didn't think it was anything too serious but wanted us to get it checked out to be sure. Needless to say, we were terrified. Jeff always assured me (and continues to do so) that was everything was fine. I was still scared out of my mind!
The appt was at 1:30 PM on a Tues so I took my mom (Jeff had to work). We went down there and saw Dr. Pham (who was also amazing and had great bedside manner). They weighed him (up to 9 lbs 8 oz), did an EKG on him and took BPs on all four extremities. Then Dr. Pham performed his physical exam and after listening to his heart decided he wanted to do an echocardiogram as well to see exactly what was going on.
That was a VERY scary 30 min. I thought for sure they were going to find something horrible and was already picturing heart surgery on my infant!!
After the long wait, we returned to the examination room where Dr. Pham came into the room adn happily pronounced, "Great news!!".
He told us Duke has something called Peripheral Pulmonary Stenosis or PPS and that he will in all likelihood out grow this swooshing sound by the time he is 1 and the PPS will go away (once his pulmonary arteries grow to catch up with the demand of blood flow). Otherwise, the Echo showed his heart to be perfect!
This was a great relief and we can finally move on and enjoy pur healthy baby boy!!