Baby Girl - first few days

Baby Girl (trying to come up with a great blog name for her) is 20 months old. Baby Girl is our fourth foster placement. She came to our home at 10 months in October 2011.  She was in relatively good shape as far as foster standards go, but a good bath was the first order of business.  We filled up the sink, and when I started to take off her onesie, old dried up food fell out of her clothes.  She loved playing in the water, but poor baby was so confused that she would play for a minute and then realize where she was, and start to cry.  Sometimes she would play and cry at the same time.  She has a small, light birthmark on her cheek that I kept trying to wash off until I realized what it was.

Baby Girl came to us with a blanket, a random assortment of clothes, some too big, some too small, all in need of a wash, and a bottle of milk.  I asked the CPI (child protective investigator) if mom had given her any instructions as far as Baby Girl's schedule and she said, "No, I was lucky to grab up this much before mom kicked me out of the house."  We got her fed, (Thanks Mom for the emergency trip to the store for formula and diapers) in her jammies and finally to sleep.

She had our hearts from the first minute of course.  She is such a sweetie and it didn't take long until she settled in.  She was crawling, but wasn't too adventurous, which was soooo different from the baby we had just before Baby Girl came (her story soon).  She enjoyed the toys and could entertain herself for fairly long periods of time.  We have just been loving on her and enjoying her since then.

Apparently she had been off formula for some time, and didn't seem to care for it much, so the doctors agreed that we could put her on whole milk and supplement it with pediasure.  They generally advise whole milk at 12 months, so she wasn't that early at 10 months.  She also hadn't been to the doctor since she was 3 months old, and so was very behind on her shots.  We are just now caught up, due to the mandatory waiting time between some of the shots.  We were going for shots just about every month for a while, Baby Girl got to the point where she would just start to cry the minute we went back to the examining area.  Even if they were just doing her weight and measurements.  She was also underweight,  right on the line of failure to thrive.  Once she started having regular meals, Baby Girl proved that she can EAT!  I wasn't too worried that she would catch up.

Well this post is getting quite long and so I will save some things for later dates.