What is this obsession with ice?!?!

We just solved this mystery...

Whenever Ellie is allowed to drink from an adult glass, which she does rather adeptively, she has started to stick her hand down into the liquid to grab or search for ice. It's a game to her, and she loves it. We don't.
Well, as I sat asking myself why she insists on clamoring for the ice chunks, I haphazardly popped one into my own mouth. C'Mon, Mom! She has been imitating me. I haven't even been adding liquid to my glasses, just crushed ice. I chew it (yes, I know it's bad for teeth...but it has helped me to stay hydrated and really quells nauses.

Lesson: look to yourself first, Moms, when you can't figure out a wacky behavior.

Tricky little hands!

After mass two weekends ago, we headed to the hospital to visit our new nephew.

While watching the Steelers game in the waiting lounge (thus, the serious face...it was the final drive and Pittsburgh was behind), Dave felt something in his pocket.

Ahuh, she pinched the tag/sign that the ushers wear at church.

Oh the pride...

Baby Girl Update

Well, one of our biggest struggles recently was a nasty cold...she was pretty cheery through it all.  I finally caved after she wasn't able to breathe through either her nose and mouth enough to eat or drink.  I wasn't able to get any liquids into her, so I knew it was time.  Poor sweet child, she suffered really badly through this cold.  And it went on for 2 WEEKS!  She cleared up her nose on the 13th day, and we finished off the antibiotic for her bad ear infection that was starting to blister.  BAD MoM! I kept thinking she was teething or something!

I guess it pays to keep your Mommy intuition in check. :)

Mommy tip: don't stress about your kid feeling dependent on a pacifier - anytime they have a bad cold, you can help them kick the habit.  Logic here: they can't breathe through their nose, so they need to sleep using their mouths to breathe - thus, they can't breathe and suck on the pacifier.  They choose breathing. :)

Overdue

Wow - sorry for the overdue posting here - I'm going to have to make it short, since Ellie's on her way up from a nap. 

I realized it's been almost a month since I last posted!  Crazy. Quick synopsis of the big things that have come and gone:

• Trip to Germany and Austria (basically the reason I went missing on the blog for a month). Lots of funny stories from this trip that deserve their own post.
• Baby play dates that get so much better each week!  Because the 'play' date actually involves 'playing.'
• Dave has been shooting a LOT. So there's lots of post production that I need to get on - thus, my time normally spent blogging went toward my 'other job'. Which I enjoy just as much, albeit keeping me away from my fun social avenues. :(
• Switching rooms around in the house so that Ellie now has almost an entire room to be safe and play in.  I'm sure the commitment to the kid is much to Annie's chagrin, but it's nice that I can be in the kitchen and keep an eye on her destruction.
• David has been super Dad.  He took on watching Ellie all day yesterday from awakening to nearly  sleeping - he was exhausted when I got home and said, "I don't know how you do it every day." (HUGE GRIN HERE)
• She's started sleeping through the night!
• Nana visited and saved Mama on a few occasions.
• Oh yea, and we're pregnant!

All of these items deserve their own post, so I'll have to get on that!

Glad to be back!

xoxo

Today. I found out how strong I am.

Disclaimer: this post is not for the weak of stomach and should not be read within an hour of eating.
We were supposed to go to Connecticut to visit Annie's house. My Mom, Dad, Ellie and I were scheduled to make the trip today; but after a miserable weekend of teething and sleep deprivation, I had to make the decision to stay home.

Now what made this a particularly hard decision to make was that I've been struggling with feeling like a shut in recently. Elizabeth, as we just had diagnosed (thanks Heather!), had roseola. The fever was insane, but she's on the mend with the fever gone. Just the rash, which isn't contagious. Oh, and a fantastic bout of teething. All of this has turned our usually amulet sweet angel into a terribly cranky, achy, child at times wailing in searing pain. Yup, it's been a fun weekend. :) poor girl. So with having cancelled so many of our outings last week and putting just about everything on hold to comfort our baby, yes, I began to feel depressed. Because frankly, it was depressing! Who wants to feel sick! Shout out to Heather who felt the same way with Pippa's cold last week.

Alright, so back to the strength finding.

No Connecticut, but yes to a Wegman's trip in Mount Laurel. Also, we have had pictures at the adjacent Costco for almost 4 months. (I figured I should pick them up.) with an itemized shopping list, good spirits and sleepy baby, we headed out after our first nap.

About midway down 295, Ellie started smiling at me and being playful. I told her how much I love having my happy daughter back and singing to her in the rear view mirror.

I got a faint whiff of a number 2, so was thankful I'd added baby wipes to our shopping list. After pulling into a clutch parking spot, I was greeted with a huge grin and laughs as I opened the rear door. Ellie was returning to her giddy self, finally! Her face was covered in chunky orange goo. I thought, oh, poor baby! She threw up! And I quickly recounted what I'd fed her for breakfast. Oatmeal and applesauce. Hmmm... Not orange colored. Dreadfully, I looked down her body and discovered, to my horror, some of that same chunky orange goo peering out of her pink cloth diaper.

Oh. No.

It's poop. There's poop on her legs. There's poop on her arms, hands, feet, neck, mouth, eyebrows, eyelashes, up her nostrils, inside the ears, hair, sippy cup, pacifier. The carseat.

So rallying my senses and reminding myself to avoid breathing deeply, I grabbed the carseat, the diaper bag and my purse. The brisk walk to grab a shopping cart offered a lovely dripping from the carseat onto my right foot. Awesome.

A beeline down the baby aisle and snagging a box of diaper wipes, we were off to the restroom. We'd pay for them after. As we opened the bathroom door, I caught a glimpse of a woman in her Mid-eighties teetering toward the only handicapped stall, of course housing the changing table we were after. Most older women are so cheerful; sadly, this woman was as unhappy as she could be. She turned around to ask why I was allowed to bring my cart into the bathroom. She said her husband was waiting outside and they got into a fight because he wouldn't come into the restroom too. Then she asked me how old my baby boy was. (I mentioned she was in a pink diaper, right?) Ellie must've thought it was a ridiculous question because she showed her displeasure by (truly) vomiting on me. The older woman said, "oh, she just threw up on you." Ellie thought that assessment was equally dumb and vomited again. Now, with vomit running down the inside of my shirt, my arm, hands, and a baby smeared with poop, we watch the woman continue the inch by inch, foot, then cane, then other foot, then cane again move into the stall. I gave up, (judge all you want) and decided the sink was going to have to do.

Tearing open the box of wipes, I started with her face and hands, then tackled her body, then opened the diaper. The irony, the diaper didn't capture much of the poop, it was almost empty. Ha!

Finally cleaned up, the woman finally comes out of the bathroom stall, just as I'm dousing Ellie from head to toe in antibacterial lotion. (side note: it made me laugh when the same older woman walked out without washing her hands, but there couldn't have been anything dirtier than what we put into the trash can. Ha!). I scrubbed the carseat, bagging the clothes, diaper, pacifier and sippy cup. I wedged the carseat on the bottom compartment to air out while we shopped.

Ah, what do they say? Cleanliness is next to Godliness? At that moment it felt it! I marched over to the coffee bar and treated myself to a large latte. Yum!

For some reason, I felt surprisingly happy. I felt like if I could avoid vomiting, find remarkable patience and actually rouse some humor out of this, then I really can take on this motherhood thing.

Who knew I would discover my inner Mama strength in a ration of diarrhea? (dealing with the notion that my daughter may have attempted to consume her own feces? Well, I'll save that for another day.)

Items I Previously Thought Were Useless

1. Baby Bathtub - so many people said that I'd never need/use them.  I would end up bathing her in the sink, etc.  I registered for a $15 ultra basic sling for the baby, but then returned it right before she was born after the advice that it'd go to waste.  Lesson:  BUY ONE.  I wound up not bathing her  (very often at all) because it was such a complete ordeal to bathe her for the first month.  First of all, you need four hands when they first come out since they need 2 hands just to support their bodies and head.  Then you need another two hands to soap & wash quickly! And the reality is that they do NOT love being held out under a faucet or anywhere outside the cuddly loving arms being hosed or lovingly poured upon.  No matter how gentle you are, they just don't like it.  My advice: crank up a space heater, have a nice luke warm water awaiting the baby in the tub that has a sling for the infants in it; get everything you need right next to you and settle in for about 20 minutes on your knees.  Now that she can sit up, she doesn't need the tub, but I don't know how she would ever have gotten clean within the tub in the first 6 months.
2. Thermometer - I always figured I'd be able to feel her head and know if she had a fever.  Not true.  When the first cold comes along, you're suddenly at the drug store thinking the $80 instant thermometer seems reasonable.
3. Bibs - I thought it was just for food, so I'd only need one or two.  Reality check.  They drool. A lot. And they do it early and often.  I wasn't prepared to 'bib' her just to keep her clothes from being soaked (especially in the winter).  Buy extras from the dollar store. Granted you take them off when you're trying to impress someone with how put-together you kid seems, but you keep it on right up until you make your debut.
4. More than an average of 3 onesies/day for each week - I remember thinking, how many outfits can one child wear!?! And then she came along...(with ownership that I just don't love laundry...so that might factor in...somehow) and somedays she'd go through 7-8 onesies in one day. Spit up, poop, pee, more spit-up, drool, a bath, hopefully no more poop and you're averaging 5 outfit changes.  Now I had a spitter, so that could be it too.  I remember being grateful for the dozens of clothes she had early on.
5. Swim Diapers - Always figured the regular disposables would be just fine.  What I didn't account for was the triple sized blow-up the diaper experiences once you're in the water for more than 3 minutes.  Heather and Meghan (mama friends) couldn't stop laughing that Elizabeth instantly quadrupled her body weight with the swollen diaper - making it nearly impossible for her to even move her legs. There should've been a picture.

Boppy's main resident these days...

Hilarious Mommy Article - Must Read

An Aerial Disaster

baby yoga

The View

Heather/Pippa and Meghan/Connor and Ellie/I signed up for Mommy and Me yoga.  I was thinking it'll be the refreshing relaxing yoga of days past. 

Um...not exactly.

The kids drowned out the nice soothing meditative sounds on the sound system.  Ellie was crawling all over the place; when I tried to pull her onto my chest to do a move, she pulled my shirt down to nurse; I tried to do a move where I stand on one leg and lift the other horizontally.  Ellie had another idea, she wanted to be lifted off the ground by grabbing onto my ankle and desperately trying to not let go.  Oh and this was accompanied by some real tears.  Yoga must be killing her mom - clearly that could be the only reasonable excuse.

That was last week.This week, it was awesome!!! I was able to plan better - got there early and fed her both real food and nursed.  She was able to nap beforehand, so Elizabeth felt pretty comfortable playing by herself.  The only time I had to really focus on her was when she nearly took out a fellow yoga mom (standing on one leg) by sneaking up from behind. I thwarted her attempts to grab her leg and stand up with inches to spare. 

Regardless, this week was a tremendous improvement. I got a nice bucket of sweat going (which is my goal) and no big incidents. 


Overall, a major success!  Here are some shots from the day. :)

Little victories

Last night, David and I were having dinner. I had steamed some very small pieces of zucchini and didn't mash them. We put them in the middle of her tray in hopes she might become interested in using her hands to start feeding herself. Since she places everything in sight on her 'direct-to-the-mouth-conveyer-belt' I thought for sure she'd pick it right up.

A Blueberry Morning

Instead, we got some fake crying noise, grunting in the spoon's direction (we had a second course of scorn squash) and a complete disinterest in the zucchini. After about 5 minutes we move on. Oh well, we said. Guess she's not ready yet. I had talked to Heather about Pippa doing just this, so I knew it was within her developmental ability.

Not terribly disappointing, but parents are great at getting excited to try something new only to learn it rarely works on the first try. So I started feeding her the acorn squash. We were all using utensils when all of the sudden we see her slam both hands down on the zucchini and bring them to her open mouth. We look on in amazement! Then she did it again. David puts his hand up to quietly high five and my eyes filled with tears. Yes, tears. And yes, I deserve to be teased for crying because my baby picked up food. So exciting!!!

Little moments that surprise you.

We had halved blueberries for breakfast...on to something new!

Silly Grandpa - he was helping play dress up

Pants on the Head

Food Update

The girl's getting it down. She's a champion spoon eater. It doesn't really matter what's on the spoon, as long as it's reloaded as soon as she wipes it clean. If you're not fast enough, you'll be treated to a pounding of the right hand on the tray table and some bizarre fake crying noises.

It's most astounding how much Elizabeth can eat. One of my greatest fears in this whole food thing, aside from the obvious choking, is that I will somehow teach her to overeat and pressure her into a lifetime of being overweight. They say breastfed babies develop a sensor in their bellies to let them know when they're full, but it still sits high on my list of neurotic mommy fears.

The strange thing that she does when she's eating is she sticks her left hand, well up to the fingers at least, into her mouth after nearly each spoonful. After overcoming questions of infant bulemia, we've learned from Heather that Pippa does it too. Phew!!! My Mom swears that she's exploring the textures in her mouth, but when my helpful husband pitches it, the hand in mouth makes him a little crazy. (it takes twice as long to feed her when she's 'exploring' each bite!)

wonderfully delightful compliments

I was sharing some of the surprisingly wonderful compliments my husband has showered me with.  Two years ago, I would have laughed at women thinking these kind words would melt their hearts and well up the eyes with some light tears.

• "The house looks amazing!"
• "I didn't expect such good food." (in response to nice surprises about marriage)
• "Great job on the bushes!" (I trimmed them)
• "Look at Mary's awesome garden."

Who knew?!?! Honestly, I feel such confidence and self worth when I hear things like this.  Yes, it seems super lame to you single people.  Just wait.  Your hearts will light up when your husbands/wives dole out special 'nothing' compliments too.  

Driving Already..that was fast!

Tiny Cherub

These were quick shots from when she was supposed to be sleeping, I found her like this.

6 Months! What?!?!

It can't be 6 months already! I can't believe my baby girl is 6 months-old! Wow.

Tricks: she's dragging her body all over the place these days. She's able to sit up, albeit with poor posture. When she's on her belly she will get up on all fours and rock back and forth. Dave swears he saw her take one or two movements forward (aka crawling), but we made a bet that both of us need to see it for it to count as legit. This morning she pulled herself up on her crib to a slanted standing position. Craziness! I guess I have to change my viewpoint on where the dangers lie!

Life: is surprisingly going well sleepwise. She's been sleeping much more consistently now that we've started solid foods. After months of sleeping best on her belly, our baby is now a side sleeper. She seems to sleep best on her side. She'll flip back and forth without waking up. With the megaheat that we've had recently, the window air conditioner has been on almost nonstop! I liked the energy saver. Setting, which regulated the air temperature, kicking on when it got past the temp. Here's the bummer, every time it would kick on or turn off, she'd wake up! The sudden change in noise brought her out of sleep. So. We've just kept the air conditioner on a higher setting, and we let it run.

She's probably going to need white noise once we take it out in the fall. Sigh. Can't win 'em all.

Teaser!

We don't dare talk about it.

We've become as superstitious as hockey players refusing to shave their beards during the playoffs.

If you kid sleeps through the night suddenly, you don't tell anyone, for fear of taking for granted that it might never happen again.

That great nighttime storm two nights ago provided our first full night of uninterrupted sleep. Around 5:45 I ran down the hall to her room, Dave must've heard me scurry and followed. I gently touched her shoulder, didn't feel anything. I tried her arm, and still no discernable movement, so I began pocking her to evoke some sort of response as my panic started. Dave shouted in as much of a whisper as he could, "what are you doing?! Don't do that!"

I couldn't help it! And fortunately she didn't wake up until after I hopped out of the shower.

She made it through her first night alive; she can do it again. Just have to make sure we don't talk about it.

"We make plans and God laughs."

This is how changing diapers looks these days...

Flip on over kid! 

Dear Babies

Why does the routine that was so successful so well for so long suddenly not work?

We'd love to know.

Much appreciated,
Moms

Apparently not pooping for 6 days isn't really a problem.

Not for adults, but for breast fed babies it's a milk production situation that works itself out. Who knew?!

The first time she hadn't gone in I think it was 4 days. I was driving home from my parents' house and frantically called Dave's cell. He was outside building a shed, so he wasn't able to get any of my 7 methods of communication. (voicemails, texts, screams-just kidding about the screams.) I was just begging him to go get prune juice for me to drink. He said I was yelling at him when I got home. I didn't think that I was, just merely talking loud enough so he could hear me over the wailing.

He encountered another Dad in the prune juice section who was all too happy to share some advice. He indicated that they gave their child prune juice, in a ratio of 2 (water): 1 (prune juice) as early as 4 months.  Since we were right at 4 months, David came home and shared the vast knowledge obtained in the juice aisle with his frantic wife. 

So we mixed up the potion and she gobbled it up!  Here's the hindsight.  The poor baby was HUNGRY.  I've since learned, and it makes perfect sense, that babies grow a lot around 4-5 months.  They need more food and so if they're being breastfed, the supply needs to crank up to meet demand.  When she's not pooping, it means she's not eating enough, which is also why she seems terribly upset and wails in stomach pain - it's called hunger.  I had no idea, so of course, I gave her more prune juice - which she continued to lap up (again, clearly hunger, but what did I know?!)  Then I learned part 2 of the prune juice encounter: gas.  It's the smelly stank of putrid. I kept mistaking the gas for her poop, but it wasn't so.  The poor child had awful gas.

Lesson Here: our bodies are meant to work - let them. :)