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1 month

Happy one-month, Kinley (just a few days late)!

This is gonna be a quick post since both kiddos should be waking up soon.  But that's ok because truth be told, one-month-old babies don't do a lot that warrants reporting.

The moment Kinley was born, we noticed how much she looked like her big sister, and the similarities don't stop there.  Like Savannah, Kinley is a pretty laid back kid...only fussy if she's hungry or gassy (which is often).  She eats like a horse...already taking 4 oz every 3 hours.  I'm not sure how we're going to afford to keep feeding her at this rate. She'd gained more than 2 1/2 lbs weighing in at an even 9 lbs on the day she turned 1 month.  Not surprising given her food intake.  She's a great sleeper at night, usually making it at least 4-5 hours...occasionally 6...before waking up to eat.  And she LOVES to be swaddled (thank you Jesus!).  Even during the day, it's the only way she'll sleep for any length of time without fidgeting herself awake. 

One of the only real differences I've noticed between her and Savannah is that she hates the newborn boppy pillow, swing, and bouncy seat...all of which were huge hits with big sister.  But that's ok...there are lots of arms around that like to hold her. :-)

But, alas, I hear squawking in the other room...that would be Miss Piggy hollering for some grub.

All about Savannah

Little sister is receiving so much blog hype, it seems appropriate to even the score a bit.  So this post is all Savannah!

This past weekend, she and I flew to Amarillo to see Gamma and Grrdad and go to Aunt Brandi's baby shower.  We did lots of fun things like go see Great Grandma and Grandpa Short in Canyon and shop for fabric for a new big girl quilt that Gamma is gonna make.  Perhaps the most enchanting discovery Savannah made while at her g'parents' house was the M&M dispenser.

It didn't take long for her to figure out how to turn the knob to get more to come out, then she'd hold the little door open and stand there eating them one by one.  Her Daddy and I both love M&Ms, so she comes by this talent honestly. 

She was really sad when I had to take her away from them at the airport.  I mean...really sad.  But she did exceptionally well on both flights, despite the one home being smack-dab in the middle of her naptime.  And I learned there's only one effective way to entertain a tired 21-month-old on an airplane....with an iPhone camera.

She loves to see herself on the screen when the camera mode is turned around for self-portraits.

And a funny face or two is always a must!

The child is pretty addicted to technology.  Need to teach your kid shapes, numbers, letters, etc.?  There's an app for that.  No, really.  There is.  That's how Savannah learned all of her shapes. 

You have to be careful when you let your kid play with your phone semi-unsupervised though...or else you end up with a bunch of pictures like this in an album...

And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

Lately, I've noticed a trend of photographing Savannah when she eats.  Maybe it's because several weeks ago I was beside myself because she seemed to eat next to nothing for the better part of a whole week.  It's a refreshing change of pace for her to ask for food and actually consume it too.  Her absolute favorite, regardless of the time of day, is strawberries.  Or as she calls them, "wah-beh-wees".



S'more bites



Being shy and hiding behind her crustless pop tart

 Maybe she's about to grow...that's my only assumption...because last night (well, between getting home from school around 2:30 and going to bed at 7:30) she ate at least a whole cup of strawberries, 3 or 4 s'more bites, an entire can of sliced pears, a whole grilled cheese sandwich, some cheesy ritz bits crackers, and a fair portion of my chicken and dumplings...not to mention the empty cup she kept bringing to me and asking for more to drink.  I don't know how her little body held it all!

She never ceases to amaze me with her learning at this stage either.  She picks everything up so fast.  It's crazy!  I wish I had been keeping better track of what she's learned and when.  But, I haven't, so let this be a general record stating the kid is a genius! ;-)  Just kidding.  She is pretty darn smart in my opinion though. 

She'll go to the dentist for the first time next week (Lord have mercy on us), and her second birthday is just around the corner.  I can't believe it.  Where has the time gone?!?!  I'm so grateful that I've gotten to stay home with my little snuggle bug!!

Counting down

So I'm 32 weeks today.  Maybe counting down to d-day is a tad premature at this point, but hey, a girl needs something to focus on, right?  I'm guessing I've got more like 6 weeks to go rather than 8 anyway.  Does that make it better?  I say yes!

I had an appointment to check on baby girl yesterday and everything is great.  I measured a little more than 32cm, my weight gain is on track (hallelujah!), and her heartbeat sounded perfect.  It was the first visit to my doctor's office in ages where I got in and out really quickly.  And was I ever thankful.  There's nothing quite as irritating as wasting spending the majority of your "me" time sitting in a doctor's waiting room.  (I go to the dr on days when Savannah is at MDO...FYI.)  Other than that, I start bi-monthly visits for the next month, then weekly after that!  Little still-has-yet-to-be-named will be here before we know it!  Momma is ready!!!!!

I hope Savannah is ready. Earlier today she helped me put together the little sleeper my parents got us. I turned my back for one second, and this is what I found when I turned back around...

Little stinker.  She got pretty mad when I took it into the master bedroom to live until baby gets here.  I have a feeling if I let her "play" in/with it until then...she won't have a very good reaction when little sister takes it over.  It does look like a pretty nifty tv-watchin' chair though.

Seasons

I'm a firm believer that life has seasons just the same as nature.  It can't always be a pleasant spring day.  That's not a reasonable expectation.  Besides, every season comes with its own unique set of joys and challenges.  Even the unassuming spring.  Parenthood, being a path I've chosen in life, is no exception to this rule.  Savannah is on the brink of turning two...just a short 3 months away...and despite nature's season of spring being right around the corner, I feel like I'm walking blindly through a trecherous winter forest when it comes to being a mom.

I have no clue what I'm doing.

I've said this before, but looking back, I'm not sure I really meant it.  Maybe it was just something I was saying because I thought it was the right thing to say...that admitting I had a fair amount of confidence about what to do would in some way jinx the easy-breezy mom season I was experiencing at the time.  In the grand scheme of things, I think Savannah has been a very easy child to raise.  She started sleeping through the night at 8 weeks, has rarely been sick, has a smile that could replace the sun itself, and (for the most part) is laid back and very go-with-the-flow.  She learns things quickly and is a great listener when I instruct her about her behavior. 

Lately, though, she has entered this new phase...I suppose it's the terrible-twos, but hey, what do I really know.  Cory and I are baffled by it.  We follow our gut instincts when we have to make decisions about how to handle what she's doing, but we have no idea if we're doing the right thing.  Lately, the biggest challenge has been her sleep pattern.  She's always gone to bed around 7 or 7:30, and 99% of the time, she goes down without incident.  This part hasn't changed.  What has is that she's now waking up in complete hysterics around 9 or 10 every night.  Every.night.  It's not the type of crying that I hear and think, "Oh, she's just being a brat and wants attention."  It's the type of crying that rips my heart out because she sounds so utterly distraught.  When we go get her and bring her out to the living room with us, she doesn't calm down easily...which affirms to me that she wasn't just seeking attention...but once she does calm down, she thinks it's playtime.  We put her back to bed and start the cycle all over.

Until today, this has been a purely nighttime habit.  But, as I write this, she's standing in her crib...screaming...refusing to take a nap.  She should be waking up by this time, but instead, she has yet to go to sleep.  Or even lay down for that matter.  I question myself constantly.  Is there something really wrong with her that requires my attention?  Is this a matter of willpower and I just have to outlast her to teach her who's boss?  What if has an ear infection {or any other impossible-to-really-know-without-going-to-the-pediatrician type of ailment}?  Am I damaging her in any way by the parenting choices I'm making?  What can I do to end the madness? 

I honestly feel like I'm just flying by the seat of my pants now, and I haven't really truly felt like that over the past 20+ months since she joined our family.  Or if I did, I don't recall it.  When she was smaller, despite how fragile she seemed, there were only a handful of possibilities to explain a given "struggle", and by simple process of elimination, it was relatively easy to solve the problem.  But she's so complex now.  She understands far more than she's capable of communicating.  The list of possible concerns seems endless, but she can't tell me what's wrong and I don't have very many tricks to figure it out on my own. 

Don't get me wrong, it's not all terrible.  She can still be happy and playful, but those times are fewer and farther between than what we've ever experienced before.  I'm trying not to wish this time away...I know I'd regret that somewhere down the road...but I don't know how to cope with this season.  I'm not alone am I?

Can I bleach my brain?

Seems like a weird question, right?  But after the nightmare I had last night, I have never more sincerely wanted to clean my mind out and erase all traces of the memories associated with the terrible scenario that played out in it overnight. 

The beginning is fuzzy.  There are just glimpses of images that would be difficult to describe and probably wouldn't add any significance to the story if I went to the trouble of writing them.  So I'll leave it at I was somewhere with some people at some time.  It was reminiscent of White Deer in some ways.  The only really identifiable person with me was Savannah, but trust me, I'd have preferred for her not to have been there.  See, the entire dream nightmare involved me searching for her because she had been kidnapped or was otherwise missing in some fashion.  I remember calling the police to report her missing after we'd searched everywhere we knew to search.  They followed obscure leads here and there, but to no avail.  The most vivid details involve me being on the phone with authorities at one point describing something suspicious I'd seen that might help the investigation.  A strange man kept passing by pretending not to be listening to what I was saying, but I couldn't shake the feeling that he was interested in what I was relaying to the police so that he could, and I'm speculating here (in the dream), make his next move...as if he was involved in my daughter's disappearance.

Jump ahead a little bit now, as whatever followed that scene got fuzzy again.  I very clearly remember being in a house and that it was getting late in the day.  The sun was going down and we'd yet to find Savannah.  I couldn't just sit idly by anymore waiting for her to turn up on her own, so I decided to go looking for her.  I didn't have a plan, I just walked out the door and started screaming her name.  A person, presumably a neighbor, was walking by and looked at me like I had completely lost my mind.  I didn't like the looks of him, but quickly lost focus of that vibe when, out of the corner of my eye, my daughter came stumbling out of a bushy area looking totally exhausted and disoriented...wearing her famed devil horns.  I ran over and practically tackled her to the ground in an embrace I wasn't likely to end on my own. 

But that's when I woke up.  Not just the regular kind of up out of a bad dream.  I'm talking I bolted upright and tears were streaming down my face.  I couldn't catch my breath which sent me into a coughing fit, and I immediately reached for my phone to call Cory.  It was the only course of action I could think of at the time. 

This was the most awful and realistic dream I think I've ever had.  It shook me to the core because the emotions I woke up with were what I imagine to be as close to the real thing as possible.  Thankfully I can only imagine since clearly my daughter has never been missing.  Talking to Cory helped settle me down and surprisingly I was able to doze back off for a short time before Savannah got up for the day.  When I went to get her, she was extra snuggly with me...maybe she sensed what I was feeling...and I was happy to oblige.  Let's hope that was an isolated dream incident.  I don't think I could handle the stress of waking up like that very often.

Lifting the world's weight

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had been experiencing some emotions, not fun ones at that, and almost had a meltdown toward the end of last week.  Well, meltdown might be too strong, but I was a little teary-eyed and found it difficult to really put what I was feeling into words.  I managed to do it eventually, though, while Cory and I were out and about after my baby check-up appointment this past Friday.  Basically it boiled down to the fact that reality was sinking in that we'd soon have a newborn to add to our lives.  But a little bit of background information might help lay the foundation for why I was, for lack of better terms, freaking out on the inside.

A few weeks ago, things had been particularly hectic and tiring.  Cory had been sickly.  Things at his work were stressful and frustrating.  I'm sure I had one struggle or another with Savannah (as all mothers of toddlers do from time to time, be it major or minor).  I entered my third trimester of this pregnancy, which is a fancy way of saying I'm flat worn out all the time.  And our communication, mine and Cory's, was just...off.  You know what I mean, we were regularly misunderstanding each other, taking things personally that weren't meant to be offensive in any way, getting annoyed by each other's quirks, etc.  Things were just "off". 

At one point, Cory initiated a conversation about it all in an effort to figure out why we were in such a funk and correct any correctable behaviors or patterns.  Admittedly, it wasn't the most productive conversation we've ever had, by no fault of our own individually.  I'm sure I took away from it a number of things that weren't intended, one of which left me asking myself "How am I supposed to be everything to everyone?  I'm only one person."  So from there, when thoughts of a new baby were mixed in, I more or less felt like I had the weight of not just the world, but the entire universe sitting on my shoulders.

That weight had taken its toll on me, and by the time I had 50 grams of glucose coursing through my veins...which is enough to make a crazy person insane...I wasn't capable of hiding my fears anymore.  As coherently and simply as possible, I explained to Cory that I was worried about successfully being able to do all the things I do now AND take care of a new baby.  Looking back on it, it's easy to still hear what was coming out of my mouth.  It was a lot of phrases that started with "I".  But what I was saying and what I was really feeling and thinking didn't exactly match up.  "I already have so many responsibilities..."  "I have to be the perfect wife am a wife."  "I have to be the perfect mom am a mom to Savannah."  "I am about to have to be the perfect mom be a mom to another child."  "I have to keep a perfect house take care of the house." You get the picture.

Almsot instantly though, Cory settled my worries with one simple explanation.  "We're gonna get through it.  We're gonna adjust.  We've got each other.  We'll work together."  We, as opposed to me.  What a novel concept, right?  He reminded me that a little flexibility would be necessary....which was his gentle way of saying that the house doesn't always have to be spick-and-span, that getting some rest might have to take precedence over washing dishes or sweeping the floor, and that spending some quality time together wasn't contingent on having all of the chores marked off the to-do list.  As much as I hate to say it, I know that will be a struggle for me.  There are some things that don't bother me a whole lot...unfolded laundry and some other random stuff.  But there's plenty that irks me to no end...muddy dog paws on the tile, dishes in the sink, carpet in need of vacuuming...this is a much longer list.  You'd think the mother of a toddler would get used to be more accepting of messes, but that day hasn't come for me yet.  Maybe it'll take this second child to push me over the threshold.  We'll see.  I'm not holding my breath, but I am vowing to work on it.