3 Months old!

Monday Caitlin celebrated her 3 month birthday! She continues to grow before our eyes and has gained almost 5 pounds since she was born (she's 13lbs, 6oz now) and 3 inches of height! This week was a busy one so I'll start at the beginning. Monday was a day off for me and I had planned to take Caitlin to lunch with me to see some friends from my old job. Unfortunately, the weather was horrible so I decided to postpone the lunch and stay at home out of the weather with Caitlin. Caitlin was having fun laughing and smiling so I figured taking her out in the rain would only sour her mood. Then I went to change her diaper.... Upon opening her diaper, I found a messy bunch of poop and found a small amount of blood... I can't even describe the fear that I felt. Although the blood was maybe half the size of a dime, any blood in a diaper is enough to stop a parent's heart mid-beat. I immediately called Toni and while talking to her, took a picture of the diaper to send to her at work. I'll spare everyone that little gem and let you instead enjoy the picture of Caitlin for her 3 month birthday. :) When Toni got the picture, she agreed that it wasn't normal and called the Pediatrician. The Doctor asked that we bring in Caitlin's dirty diapers so that she could send them to a lab to try to figure out what was going on. I stayed with Caitlin and Toni came home and took the diapers to the Doctor. The rest of the day Caitlin continued laughing and smiling.

The next day, Toni took Caitlin to the Doctor and they could find no problems but decided to change Caitlin's formula to a prescription only formula just in case. The Doctor also requested another poop sample and gave us a bunch of containers to transport them in. Caitlin's Nana Bev was the lucky one who got the next dirty diaper and with it, the honor of spooning poop into a jar. :) We're still waiting on the lab results but the blood seems to have cleared up on its own. It was always bright red so from what I've found after countless hours surfing the web, that's actually good news and means that the bleeding happened somewhere close to the "exit" point. If it had been something internal like the stomach or intestines, the blood would have been black. There was some black in the original diaper but none since. The blood continued at a reduced rate for the next 3 or 4 changes and is now gone. We're hoping it was just hemorrhoids or that she strained too hard and not something more serious. We're anxiously awaiting the lab results sometime this week. For now, Caitlin is definitely not enjoying the taste of her new formula but she's making the best of it. :)

In other news, Caitlin continues to try and communicate and has been smiling this week more than ever before. She has also started to grab at things and is growing stronger by the day. Today she also did something that she's never done before - followed us with her eyes while we were walking around. Usually she would focus on us if we were in front of her and if we moved wouldn't follow but this morning at breakfast she was watching us while we were walking! Pretty cool! She also smiles now when she sees us and has even started laughing more. I'm trying to get a good video of that to put on the blog. :)

Yesterday we took Caitlin down to the Greek 'Funstival'. It's an annual event downtown where they serve up Greek food, entertainment and have some vendors selling Greek items. We enjoyed some good food and I even tried a pretty good Greek Beer - Mythos. Toni was the designated driver. :) I'm not much of a beer drinker but it was actually pretty good. We didn't stay too long but I think Caitlin enjoyed getting out of the house for a bit.

Hopefully this week will be less action packed than last week and we'll get good news back from the lab. I'll post the news here as soon as we get it. Hope everyone has a great week!