October 2009 Archives

One itsy-bisty, teeny-tiny minuscule rant: I get so sick of stationery companies knocking each other off. The oldest ones are the WORST. They see a new company doing something different and immediately duplicate it. From taglines, marketing tactics, and product assortments, to patterns, color schemes, and websites. Every now and then something so original comes along that it's impossible to knock off. I could name a few. Unfortunately, I don't feel that most of those companies get to see the light of day. Usually, they are started by very talented, superbly creative designers who don't have the business savvy to take the lines big time.

Also unfortunate is the fact that the big few who are the worst about knocking off do have the business savvy to survive, and therefore, do.

C'est la vie.

Really need to get this off the guest room bed and send it to the dry cleaners. Until that point in time, it lies there as a reminder of a magical, skinny, perfect ending and more-than-I-could-ask-for beginning.

Well, the schedule seems to be working, which it turns out could be a good or bad thing. The awesome thing about the schedule is that it is acting as a communication tool between us and Kiddo--a great thing to have with a little creature who can't talk. When he cries it really helps us establish almost right off the bat what needs to be addressed. It's very easy to determine if he's hungry, dirty, or tired just by looking at the clock. That's the pro to scheduling. The con to scheduling is that he's not as flexible while traveling. And it looks like varying locations is NOT working, and is not helping us stay on schedule. I know some babies can "sleep anywhere" and up until this point, I thought we had one of those, but I may have misinterpreted.

We traveled to Dallas this weekend to see friends and family. Kiddo woke like clockwork on Saturday morning--1:00, 4:00, 6:30, 9:00. I was sleeping at noon, so Hubs fed him, and then around 2:30, 5:30, 8:30. It wasn't exactly 3, 6, 9, but it close. My mother-in-law took over at that point, and I think he ate at around 1 and 4 again, and then she woke me up at 7:30 Sunday morning to feed him. He ate a little bit, and was hungry again by 9.

I was thrilled. But since we were about to leave, he didn't get much of a nap in after the 9 a.m. feeding. Everyone wanted to hold him one last time, and kept waking him up. I was getting pretty frustrated, but we got in the car, and prepared to stop around noon to feed him. All went well, until after the feeding. He ended up crying off and on the rest of the way home. It was brutal. After we got home, he just kept crying, so I started to feed him again. By this point in the game, everything is so far off schedule. I think he ate at 2:30, again at 3:30, 5:30, 7:30, and 8. Chaos, right?

I think the point of scheduling babies is to get them used to eating a bunch during the day, to keep their tummies full, so that they don't need to wake up at night as much. The sign that you can drop a night time feeding is when they don't eat much during the morning--because they are still full from the last night time feeding. I can't wait for that day!

I think one thing I learned from this weekend of travel is that even though we can keep him on a schedule for a day or so, the varied sleeping locations and travel arrangements wear on his little system just like they wear on us, and by the end of the second day, he was worn out. I now see why my sister says it wears their entire family out when they've been doing too much for a weekend.

We will see how things go tomorrow. So far, after that last 9:00 feeding yesterday, Kiddo has woken up at 12:30 and then 3:30 a.m. The 3:00 a.m. feeding was short, so I'm assuming he'll wake up ravenous at 6:00, which would be great, because it would mean we could start working towards just one night time feeding this week. I'm happy to feed him once in the middle of the night, and midnight is great--but I would really like to be able to get some shut eye after that, and preferably uninterrupted.

In other news, Kiddo will be eight weeks old this coming Wednesday! Time is flying!

One of the most interesting things I'm learning about parenting is that the books are SO contradictory; people's opinions vary drastically. From the get-go, we heard a great deal of people talk about the book On Becoming Baby Wise. Hubs went out and bought it, read it cover to cover, and reported back: a baby on a schedule is a happy, healthy baby who sleeps through the night. The schedule helps instill order in his life, which makes for easy disciplining later on. Sounds good, right?

Well, here is the reality. There is no such thing as a schedule for the first two weeks. It's completely impossible, and I believe, not healthy for the baby. (Actually, let me just insert this caveat right now: it didn't work for us, and that's what I'm basing my opinion on. Of course, it may work for others). If I had to do it again, I would start working towards a schedule the second two weeks. Trying to schedule Kiddo those first two weeks was not fun.

Anyway, we ended up on a decent three-hour feeding schedule, and decided that 3:00, 6:00, 9:00 and 12:00 were easy to remember feeding times. Confession: we hired a nanny, since we both work during the day. She started working for us when Kiddo was four weeks old. For the past few weeks, she's been wonderful about helping us stay on the 3, 6, 9, 12 schedule.

Somewhere between week five and six, I found the blog "Chronicles of a Baby Wise Mom" and started devouring it. Her baby is about 29 weeks old, but she's chronicled the child's life in a Newborn Summary, which I now refer to constantly. I admire this woman, not only for her obvious dedication to her children, but for ability to have three kids and still be able to chronicle in such an in-depth manner. It's some serious commitment. And, I'm eternally grateful to her for how much thinking she's saved me.

If you'll bear with me, I'm going to record Kiddo's schedule here for the next few weeks, if only to keep track of it for my own sake. Keep in mind, this is what is working for us as we work towards a full night's sleep. Opinions are welcome!

So, we're on week seven. And for the most part, here is what Kiddo's day looks like:
1:00-1:30 a.m. - eat, immediately back to sleep
4:00-4:30 a.m. - eat, immediately back to sleep
6:00 a.m. - eat, back to sleep
9:00 a.m. - eat and 45 minutes wake time
10:00 a.m. - down for first nap
12:00 p.m. - wake and eat, 45 minutes wake time
1:00 p.m. - down for second nap
3:00 p.m. - wake and eat, stay awake or very short nap
6:00 p.m. - eat, longer wake time, sometimes no nap
9:00 p.m. - wake and eat.

I try to get him to eat a bunch in the evenings, with the hope that it will get him to sleep longer, so this last 9:00 feeding might be an hour long feeding session with some little breaks. No matter what we do, it seems like his internal clock is going to go off sometime around 1:00 and 4:00 after that.

And of course, if you know me at all, you know that 4:00 a.m. is the magic hour for me to get work done. So naturally, now I'm awake and blogging, while Kiddo and Hubs are soundly asleep. The past few days I've crashed around 6:00 a.m. when Kiddo is ready for another feeding, and Hubs has come and woken me up with coffee at 9:00 after the nanny gets here. To summarize, it's still exhausting.

One other note about this week: I downloaded a baby album from iTunes called "Dream A Little". We put it in the bedroom CD player and, well, it's played all night every night, but seems to have helped drastically. It's like Kiddo gets that when that music is on and the lights are off that he's supposed to be asleep. So grateful for that!

Well, it's finally "finished". I'm sure it will evolve, and I know it's not perfect. The shelves need work, there is a giant red and purple Baby Einstein mobile floating over the crib, we need a lamp for one of the dressers, we need some artwork, and Nana is still making pillows. But here are the final shots.

First off, remember the chair that was going to be reupholstered? Here's the before and after:

And here is the first view you see upon walking in the room. I love the symmetry.

The white chair on the left used to be very poorly upholstered in pink toile. I don't think I have a before picture, but there were buttons on the back, sad stuffing in the cushion, and overall bad fabric for chair upholstery. It's a much happier chair now, and the ecru fabric will help this chair translate from room to room now--it's durable, and in ecru, very versatile. This chair, as well as the night stand and other chair, were all estate sale buys. And that toile fabric was $12 for 36 yards. SERIOUSLY.

On the opposite wall, we have a dresser that used to be black. We painted it white. I'm not crazy about the nickle hardware, but I haven't found anything I like better yet. The shelves were in my bedroom when I was little. We bought the amazing glider/rocker/recliner and it is AWESOME. The little rocker was also mine when I was little--we're going to paint it white and Nana is making a cushion for it.

And here we have a shot of a dresser--this was also part of my bedroom suite from when I was little. This arrangement is what needs lamp and/or artwork. But we'll get there. For now, the room is clean, tidy, organized and usable.

And this room is going to be the next project:

A while back, I had the idea to further develop this blog into stories about the adventures that life sometimes throws at me, but realized that I couldn't successfully do that without first introducing you to the Cast of Characters.

I really didn't have any intention to start those introductions this evening, but I was thumbing through some old photos and came across this one:

It begs to be summarized, but there is no short way to go about summarizing this one.

All that to say, these are two of my favorite people. On the left, we have one E Conrad. She's a BFF. She is really awesome photos, a tad perfectionist, and cupcake grunge. She has an unfortunate love affair with OU, and likes the color green.

E and I date back to the first day in fifth grade, when she, in her scotty-dog-sweater, turned around in her desk to introduce herself to me. Over the course of that seating arrangement, I fell in love with E and her extensive hairbow collection. We bonded in high school over bagels and Dr. Pepper.

The cool thing about E is that we "get" each other, in a three-hundred-and-sixty degrees kind of way. I can send her weird text messages like "I just saw gasoline for $2.44 a gallon and thought of you", which doesn't mean an lick of anything to non-E people. I can tell her that in my color-coded alphabet brain, the letter "E" is green, and she'd probably say, "Well, of course it is." And that would be that. Hubs and I love to get together with E and her hubs--they like dogs and the lake and frosty beverages, so it's safe to say that we're sort of the Four Amigos.

During the course of the pre-wedding events, E decided that the goober on the right, one Maus Walter (names have been changed to protect the guilty), would make a good adopted cousin. She's right. Maus Walter is a very good cousin, and being a rather smart and sweet fellow, with a tendency to adopt lost things himself, has a tendency to be rather adoptable. Maus Walter adopts cacti (if that's the plural of cactus), turtles, snakes and bugs, cousins, a Doberman, and most recently, a short and darling girl from Stillwater, OK.

Maus Walter was, according to his mother, an eleven pound baby when he was born. I think the extra weight must have been in his cranium, because he's always managed to be one step ahead of his peers in his studies. He was pre-med at OU, and now he's in med school in Philly. When Francie ate ant poisoning, Cousin Maus helped me calculate what she ate, researched what meds she needed, and drove us to the emergency animal clinic. He's an awesome guy, and needs to get through med school fast, and come back home to meet Kiddo and hang with Speidi (the short and darling girl from Stillwater, OK).

So, to make a short story long, in the scrapbook that I will hopefully get around to making someday (as Maus Walter's mother would insist), the caption of this photo will be: "If this isn't proof that we had one heck of a wedding, I don't know what is."

This is the kind of love that happens when best friends and best family collide: everyone gets adopted and lives happily ever after.

Some people make my skin crawl. I do not like doing business with those people.

One orange flavored energy drink. An old ipod. Three miles. Forty-five minutes. And a new-found knowledge that "me" time now involves self-torture.

That was my escape this morning at 5:45, after laying in bed for four hours with a sleeping newborn on my chest, snoring husband by my side, and burrowing dogs at my feet. I got to the gym, jumped on the treadmill, and started a light walk. Miley Cyrus hit the playlist, and I picked up speed. Just as I was about to quit, LMNO's "Romeo" started playing, and I was in the zone. I couldn't stop. Forty-five minutes later, dizzy, I stepped off.

I love the bar at the gym--they have smoothies, energy drinks, and healthy munchies. Having no idea what was melting down back at my house, I ordered a 2-egg white omlette with turkey bacon and fruit. Delighted to not have dishes to do, I scarfed it down as the sun came up, and headed back home.

It's still quiet in here. Husband is still asleep, baby is still asleep, dogs are still burrowed in bed. Almost like I never left. I'm the only thing that has changed--stinky and sweaty, a little more revved up from the energy drink (and waiting for that crash) and a little more worn out from the run. My head hurts, but that's nothing different from the past twenty-four hours.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to be healthy, creative and organized all at the same time. Right now, I feel like I'm picking one thing over the other. Between me, kiddo and work, there is going to be a short end of the stick. I'm definitely sacrificing my self at the moment--but that won't work for long. If anyone knows where to tell me to find that balance, I'd appreciate a cc on the memo.

Kiddo,

You are four weeks and one day old today. On October 2nd, tomorrow, that officially makes you one month old. And what an incredible, exhausting month it has been.

The moment they placed you in my arms, my world changed forever. In an instant. Before that split second in time, I was a skeptic. This motherhood thing? Possibly not for me. But then you were there. I started bawling. You had blue eyes. I bawled a little more. You squawked at me. I bawled some more. They took you away to clean you up, and I had your daddy take my camera phone and take a picture and bring it back to me, so I could keep looking at your little face. And when they brought you back to me, I held you and fed you. And your Nana and Poppa and Uncle Toothpick and Mimi and Carpa all came to say hello. And I didn't want to put you down for the rest of the day and that first night.

We brought you home from the hospital and were afraid to fall asleep. You slept in the pack and play in the family room. In hindsight, it's working out well--you sleep through anything! Television, a very loud barking Francie, slamming doors, the vaccum. For almost an entire week, we made sure there was an awake adult with you at all times. And I don't think we turned the TV off that week--it kept us awake. Call us a little paranoid, but we didn't mind. We were in love, and the fall was picking up speed.

You had jaundice. The doctors made us take you in for a check up on Saturday, when you were only three days old. They said you weren't getting enough food. We came home and fed you formula, since my milk hadn't come in. I laid on the floor with you on my chest, in our bedroom, the brightest spot in the house, so that the sun would make the jaundice go away. We had to take you back in for a checkup on Sunday. The doctor said you looked lots better, and that we just needed to keep doing what we were doing. So your daddy stripped you down to your diaper and took you outside and sat in the bright, bright, sun for 15 minutes. Your first little sun-bath. On Tuesday of the next week, we took you back to the doctor for a weight check, and you were in the clear--almost back to your birth weight!

During the second week, your daddy had to go on a business trip, and left us alone for three days. Your Auntie B brought dinner over one night and held you. She LOVED holding you. She wrapped you in a blanket and cuddled you for hours while we sat and talked. She loves you so much. Later that night, when you projectile vomited all over me, I called her, panicking, at one in the morning. And then I called your Mimi. I was so worried. Everything seemed ok, so I just kept a close eye on you. You slept in your vibrating bouncy seat on the bed beside me, so I could hear you breathe. The end of that week, we took you to your two-week weight check, and you were 8.5 pounds!

Over the next week, your little vomiting spells got worse and worse, and more frequent. We finally took you to the doctor when you were exactly three weeks old. The people at the pediatrician's office must think we are nuts--your daddy and I always both go to the appointments. We're so tired, it takes two of us to remember what the doctor says. He told us that your esophagus was probably irritated and gave us some medicine for you. It was scary for us, but the medicine has helped a bunch--at least you aren't projectile vomiting all over us! It looks like you are going to be a bit of a spitter-upper, though. And that's ok.

The fatigue caused some frustrations. Your daddy and I only want what's best for you, but sometimes "best" took two different roads. I'm a germ-freak, and don't think anyone can wash their hands enough. Your daddy thinks I don't keep you on a strict enough feeding schedule. I pretty much let you eat whenever you are hungry, and he says we need to be feeding every three hours on the dot. Thankfully, at the end of four weeks, it looks like we've figured some of that out.

At the same time, we've laughed a lot. In one morning, you pooped on me twice and peed on me three times. The laundry has been incredible--three loads a day? Your umbilical cord fell off during a onesie change, and we couldn't find it. Francie did though, and I had to snag it from her before she ate it as a treat. Last night, we put you in the little infant seat, and laughed at how you slumped over. It will be a little while longer before you're able to sit in there. You make some pretty funny faces--from scowling to serious to peaceful.

You are grasping things, and moving your head from side to side. You can lift your head when you are laying on your stomach, but can't hold it up for very long. You have really long fingers with really short nail beds (like your daddy). We can't figure out who you look like, though, only that you have my lips.

Occasionally, you've given us a bit of a smile--just a tiny little upturned mouth. No giggles, yet, though. You make plenty of noise, with soft little grunts. You can really go to town on your paci, too, when you want to. You LOVE being swaddled. We actually had to go buy more receiving blankets to wrap you up in, because you kept spitting up all over the few that we had. You love that bouncy chair, too. I love that bouncy chair more than you do! And you love car rides, once we get you in the car seat.

You're not a crier, and definitely not fussy. When you're hungry, you want food, but you're sooth-able, as long as someone is holding you. You don't mind your diaper being changed, as long as your daddy's hands aren't cold. When you do cry, Francie is the first one by your side, staring up at the crib, or sitting by the bouncy seat, licking your foot. Generally speaking, I think God gave us a pretty easy baby, and I can't tell you what a grateful momma I am to Him for that!

Kiddo, we have been so blessed by your arrival. We have had so much fun, despite the sleepless nights. We are so excited to see how you grow, and feel so privileged to have been charged with your care. I hope we do a good job--we are so worried about making the right decisions for you. I'm worried that I'll spoil you, but then again, it's probably not possible to spoil a baby with kisses. We are, of course, biased parents, but we think you are the most adorable thing EVER. I have never met someone so darn kissable. We have kissed you lots, and lots, and lots this month. I'm usually not affectionate, or emotional, but those are two things you have brought out in me, so I'm signing off teary-eyed, and I'm going to go pick you up and kiss you some more. I am so grateful for you.

Love always,
Momma

p.s. Your daddy calls you "Squid". I'm not sure why.