All the Things

I thought I'd do a little update post for anyone who might be interested.  I always like reading these kinds of posts, especially for friends who are far away, so here you all go!  (With pictures, and hopefully nobody cares that many of them are also ones from Instagram)

The Adults:

Sam is waiting on his teaching license from the state.  It's a little annoying because there is a mandatory 6-week (minimum) waiting period starting after your classes are finished, and one of his dipstick teachers only JUST submitted grades a few days ago.  Soooo... we are looking at March for a salaried job, at the earliest.  That probably means he won't be teaching at a public school until August at the earliest, but fortunately he's doing well at Heritage, so he can probably get a position there whenever his license comes through-- at least, that's what we're hoping for.  It's actually pretty frustrating to keep meeting all these hurdles and having to be patient (heaven forbid) in waiting for things to happen.  But as people keep pointing out to me, if we look back at the way things have gone in the past for us, it always seems like we keep hitting these hurdles, but we're always able to get over them and things work out and keep moving forward.  I just wish I could close my eyes and wake up and have everything finally be sorted, you know?  But maybe it's a good thing, because it means we won't be moving any time soon, and we won't have that to adjust to on top of a new baby.

In any case, with Sam done with classes, he's home (and not doing homework) a lot more, which is quite lovely.  And I think he enjoys it too-- there're no deadlines lurking, and he could actually do something for fun once in a while if he wanted to.

As for me, I'm just trying to adjust to taking care of two little kids, and myself, and make sure the house isn't a war zone.  It's tricky running around keeping a toddler from wreaking havoc and trying to calm a newborn, but there are plenty of good moments.  Remy is having an easier time nursing than Rosalind did, which is a huge relief.  However, he does eat way more often-- which is anything but relief.  I'm just doing the grin-and-bear-it thing as best I can right now while I'm adjusting.  Two kids is hard.  Again, wouldn't it be nice to just fast forward to when everything has equalized?

Anyway, I think over all, for now, things are okay for me.  There have been some really horrible days that make me wonder, and then are some days when things seem fairly good, but mostly it's a lot of days just getting by.  I think I've felt people's concern & such for me, which I'm grateful for.  But I don't feel like I'm out of the PPD woods just yet.  So there you are.


The Sub-Adults:

Rosalind just turned two!  Her birthday was a pretty good day.  She got a carrier like my Ergo for her doll/bunny from Grandma Wasden, a book from Grandma Wood, and we got her a wooden alligator and some memory card things (she likes the pictures, we will work on matching later).  She also got 3 balloons and a chocolate cupcake from Sweet Tooth Fairy (I was going to make cupcakes, but with the baby and everything, there just isn’t time or energy...I had to get over some guilt on that one).  We made homemade macaroni and cheese for dinner and she got to watch the Lion King, which is probably her favorite movie right now.  Then she got to take a bubble bath and then went to bed.  I think she had a pretty good day, perfect for a two-year-old.

We also took her to the doctor for her checkup last week, and though she hasn’t really gained any weight, she has gotten taller.  I guess that means the chub is finally slowing down!  A little sad to see it go, but that’s ok.  She’s already in 3T clothes (and I'm going to have to move her to size 5 diapers soon, too), so I don’t really need her to be any fatter.

I was keeping a tally of all the words she knows, but I lost track somewhere between 350-400 words.  That is crazy!  She also speaks in sentences, real sentences, not just words paired together into phrases (which are really more like longer words, if that makes sense).  She is talking all day long about any number of things, most of which I understand, but a lot that I don’t—or at least, I can understand what she’s saying, but it sounds more like she’s just listing words she knows or naming everything in sight, which is pretty funny.  She also really loves songs.  She’s always throwing out lines from songs she knows (from us or from nursery or somewhere else), such as “No more monkeys jumping on the bed,” “Twinkle twinkle little star,” "Itsy Bitsy Spider," “Rockabye baby,” “Clean up,” “Happy Birthday,” etc.

She’s also a little bit of a punk.  She’s at that stage where when you tell her not to do something, that’s a prompt to do it as quickly as she can before you come and stop her.  It’s a little frustrating, and can be really obnoxious to sometimes even scary when she’s doing something to helpless little Remy, but it’s all mostly harmless, and comes with the toddler territory.

She’s close to wanting to potty train, and if she doesn’t make progress herself in the next 6 months or so, we’ll really knuckle down on it, because it would be nice to have her out of diapers by the time she’s 3.  I’m kind of excited about that, to be honest.  There’s a lot of diaper-changing going on these days.

She loves talking, singing, dancing, playing with (and talking about) her friends (mostly cousins, also my friend Madison’s son Ronan, and others), animals, babies, reading books, and playing and exploring all the time.  I wish we could play outside more, since she really loves that, even in the snow, but it’s very cold and our yard doesn’t have a fence.

A couple funny things: the other night my visiting teacher Liz came over for a few minutes, and after she left, Rosalind said, “Where’d Liz go? Oh, on a picnic.”  And Sam said “No, she went home.  But when it’s warm, we can all go on a picnic together, ok?”  And she looked at him with furrowed brow and said, very seriously, “Why?”  It was pretty funny.  She also is getting pretty good at removing and putting on clothes, which leads to some pretty humorous situations where she’s partially clothed at random times, and we have to try not to laugh because I don't want her to think it's okay to stretch her clothes out.  She also has this funny bow-legged walk she does sometimes when she’s being silly that cracks me up.

Over all, she’s quite a delight, and always makes me laugh.  I’m so glad she’s two, even though it’s kind of a difficult age, and I can’t wait to see her develop her personality even more as she grows.

Sporting her baby carrier and "new hat"

I have a million pictures of her dragging her balloons all over the house that day.  She was obsessed.

So proud it's a fav

"I want chocolate.  Happy day to Rozzie"

Bubble bath!  She was afraid to sit in it at first.

It’s been almost a month since Remy was born now (he'll be one month this coming Tuesday).  I am so glad time seems to be going pretty quickly.  I really don’t enjoy the newborn period, it’s pretty difficult.

At Remy’s 2-week pediatrician visit, they couldn’t hear any issues with his heart, so it seems like we really are in the clear!  That makes me very happy.  Although for some reason I'm still worried, so we'll see at his 2 month visit if it's still clear-- although maybe that's just anxiety talking.  Also, he had grown about an inch and a half in length and gained a pound on top of his birth weight.  That also made me very happy, because he eats quite a lot, and I was worried it was because he wasn’t getting enough milk from nursing—clearly, though, he’s fine, just very hungry and growing quick.

For the first three weeks or so, he was eating every two hours from start to start, which meant that at night we weren’t getting more than an hour and a half of sleep at a time.  It was really starting to wear on both Sam and me, but fortunately, the last couple of nights, he has slept for a few hour stretches between feedings.  I’m hoping to have a five hour stretch regularly soon (in some demented Pediatrician's mind, 5 hours is sleeping through the night...woohoo).  We will see.  We also supplement with bottles of pumped milk sometimes during the day, so some of the burden of feeding him is relieved from me, which is very nice.

He has a horrible case of baby acne right now, which makes me feel kind of bad.  The only thing we can do is wait for it to go away, though.  Some of the pores are very swollen and sometimes he accidentally scratches his face and they pop, and it makes him cry.  But it’s not as bad the last day or two as it has been the last couple of weeks, so hopefully it will start to clear up soon.

Remy does pretty well with tummy time.  Like Rosalind, he has a pretty strong neck for a newborn, and it’s pretty funny to watch him hold himself straight up with a serious look on his face when we hold him, like it’s requiring a lot of his concentration but he’s determined to do it.

He has fuzzy brown hair and brown eyes (you can tell they aren’t as brown as they will be eventually, but they definitely aren’t the “newborn blue” so many babies often have).  His skin is also kind of dark.  Mostly it seems kind of red right now, but again, you can tell it’s going to be darker eventually.  His hair isn’t blackish brown like Sam’s, but more of a medium brown, and when the sunlight shines through it, it looks like golden brown sugar.  He really looks so much like Rosalind did when she was a newborn, though maybe not quite as chubby (sadly).  Actually, I think that's a blessing for me that he looks so much like she did because I feel like it's the same baby, so he doesn't seem quite so foreign, and it's a little easier for me that way, if that makes sense.

He's starting to be alert for longer periods during the day-- though since he was a post-date baby, he's been pretty alert from the beginning.  Mostly he just sits there and grunts (he is seriously the gruntiest baby), but once-- one glorious time!-- he smiled and cooed at me.  That was wonderful.  Of course, I almost cried.

Anyway, again, I really can't wait for him to get older.  I'm really glad we're just about a third of the way through the "Fourth Trimester" and I'm kind of excited to go through some of the milestones again with him.  Mostly I'm very curious to see what he will look like as he grows!  And I'm still holding out for another chub baby-- though if he's not, that's okay, I'll mourn my losses and move on.

I love this picture.

This one too.

His head looks giant in this-- I promise it's not

You might not see it, but he totally looks like Rosalind did

Tummy time

Consternation and baby acne

My view as of late.  He just wants to be held-- sleeping or nursing