December 22, 2:40am. It’s 2:40am and I’m finally getting in bed. Tonight was rough. All in all, the baby was good and I loved spending this time with her, there’s just one major issue – Maddie does not like the bottle. Since birth, Madison has been purely breast fed, and we are fortunate that this came fairly easily to both baby and my wife. I would estimate she has taken maybe 10 bottles total to this point.Tonight she had to take 4. She was not happy about this. Think about it, would you be happy with this choice? You’re used to a boob in your face, now you get daddy with a plastic bottle? What the what?

The first bottle went badly. Bottle two, slightly better. Bottle 3? Epic disaster. Like Hindenburg crashing into the Titanic. We decided on a 4 ounce bottle, she made it through 3oz…in about an hour and 45 mins. The last hour was spent with her feeding peacefully for about 20 seconds and then breaking into hysterics again for about 5 mins. Rinse and repeat. I attempted to put her to bed, clearly still hungry and unhappy, which she did not take kindly to, and the next hour plus was spent trying to calm her down. She fell asleep, but not soundly after that.

This said, there’s one moment I hope to remember in all of this. While trying to calm Maddie down during this epic failure of a feeding attempt, Alexa played “What a Wonderful World” by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (yes, I copied and pasted that last name). I sang along to the song, and Maddie became completely calm. Looking at my 10 week old daughter, the words to the song took on a whole new level of gravity.

“I hear babies cry
And I watch them grow
They’ll know much more than we’ll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world”

There may have been some tears from one of us at this part. There may be again now as I lay in bed writing this.

Maddie woke up at about 2am, and easily took her bottle – 4 ounces in about 20 minutes. She’s snoring in bassinet next to me.

What a wonderful world indeed.

Day 1 in the books. 73 to go.