Our New Daughter: Doctors, Sleep, and Hats

We love our pediatrician, who is very competent and caring and warm. Still, Lillia does not like going to the doctor. Certain things she deals with well: the waiting room with its toys and wide-open carpeting, the crinkly paper on the exam table. She is less impressed by ear-cleaning and aural examinations of any sort, and by hypodermic syringe-wielding nurses (a tough job) with their so-called “immunizations,” and especially by 25-guage “butterfly”-packing phlebotomists, tasked to collect the seven tubes of blood called for in all her tests. During that massacre, involving two phlebotomists, two parents enlisted as human restraints, and one amazingly strong and limber little girl who was not going to go down alone or without a fight, we got 4 of the 7 tubes in three attempts and called it a day. The Hep B test will have to wait until next time.

Lillia also is not overly fond of going to sleep. It interrupts her play. When we first adopted her in Guangzhou, we had a crib in our room of course, but opted to sleep with her between us in our bed to try to increase bonding. Of course she cried when we turned out the lights, and then cried for the next hour, screaming something about stupid gwailos and being unable to find her toys in the dark. After a few nights of this and a significant amount of hearing loss, mommy and daddy thought she might do better in her crib, and she did. This is, after all, how she went to sleep for the first 10 months of her life. Still we spent several hours pushing her around and around in her stroller, as this was a sure fire way to lull her to sleep when all else failed. Once we were half-way around the world, jet lag took its incredible toll but she eventually did come around, and started sleeping when it is dark and playing when it is light.

Once Lillia does go to sleep, she is down for the count. Currently she cries for about 60 seconds before sleeping when placed in her crib. I am not sure how long she will sleep if I let her because we always wake her up after 9-10 hours to give her her bottle and to make sure she is still breathing. The girl sleeps like a cat. We try to get her to take 2 naps during the day for 2 hours each with varying success.

Ah, and then there are hats. The most fiendish of clothing devices, hats, mommy and daddy say, are meant to protect her skin from the solar flare that is the Colorado sky. Lillia knows better, feeling they are, in fact, an affront to her personal freedom. They get ejected from the stroller approximately 17 times per hour when walking with mommy and daddy. It is a good thing her sunscreen is SPF 45.

Despite this list of dislikes, we are certain that Lillia is the happiest little girl on the planet, laughing and smiling constantly (well, almost constantly), winning new friends wherever she goes. She certainly makes us happy.

Some pictures:

Lillia with her fiercy-face expression. Suzanne calls Lillia her tiger-lily when she is in this mood. I think that Lillia simply has the heart of a lion.