Category Archives: Here we go again

12 Month Check Up…a month late

My baby just had her 12-month well check! Last week, but whatever, life is busy yo. And yes, she did turn one over a month ago. For the record, I had her appointment scheduled for just a few days after her first birthday but they cancelled it…we found out when we got there to check in. That was less than awesome. Since we wanted to do both Rylee’s 5 year check and Reese’s 1 year check together it took a little longer to get them worked in to the schedule together. Annoying but meh, it’s done. 5 shots and 1 blood draw later, on to the good stuff.

Weight: 20 lbs, 6 oz. – 51st percentile
Height: 29.5″ – 71st percentile
Head: 17.75″ – 45th percentile

Teeth: She’s up to 12 now! She cut her first molars while we were in Hawaii. So that was fun.

Food: There’s not much this girl won’t eat. Since our last check-up when I found out she was anemic, she’s been eating pretty much everything we eat. Including lasagna, enchiladas, bacon etc. She loves it all. It’s really funny to watch her feed herself because if you put a few different items on her tray, she will always go to whatever her favorite thing is first. Always. And it seems that she’s gone from loving avocados, to hating them and now back to loving them again. Weird little buggar. We still use the occasional puff and jar of baby food, but less and less. Mainly if we’re headed somewhere and we don’t know what to food options will be we’ll pack them along just in case. And this girl eats.a.ton. We have to cut her off a lot of times because I swear she would eat until she bursts. We’re trying to figure out where all that food goes…she must have a hollow leg like her daddy.

She stopped breastfeeding completely on her own. The last time se nursed was on the morning we left Hawaii to come home. That made a super comfortable 6 hour airplane ride home for me. NOT. At first I thought maybe it was just a nursing strike because of her molars coming in. She had done something similar last night she cut a bunch of teeth at once. I tried nursing her every single normal nursing time for a week solid. No dice. She wanted nothing to do with it. {Funny enough, it’s exactly how Rylee weaned as well.} For the next few weeks we used of our freezer stash of breastmilk, cutting her bottles with 1/2 whole milk that last week. Now she’s 100% on whole milk and taking 2 bottles a day, right when she wakes up and before she goes to bed. She’s not a huge fan of drinking milk from her sippy cups…we’re working on that.

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Anemia Update: We had her blood drawn and retested 6 weeks after her initial diagnosis. During that 6 week time period we had been giving her lots of iron rich foods and a supplement once a day. It took 3 weeks and a call to the doctor’s office to get the results of that blood draw. She was still low. Higher than before, but not where she needed to be. So we continued the supplements. Then at this check-up she had her blood drawn again and we received a phone call the very next day. Her blood work came back great! Her levels are within the range of where they want them. She can drop the supplements and continue to eat an iron rich diet. We’re finishing out the bottle of supplements we have then we’ll stop. She has her next well-check at 18 months and I’m assuming they will test her blood again, but they didn’t mention it when they called so we’ll see.

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Movement: Reese started walking full time two days before we left for Hawaii. At this point she’s getting around really well and just about running. She got her first bloody lip a couple of weeks ago thanks to her wanting to go everywhere on her own. She ate it on the transition from the grass to our front walk. Lately she’s all about climbing. Holy heart attach she loves climbing. In to things, on top of things. She doesn’t really care. If it’s something she shouldn’t be doing, she’s going to do it.

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Other: Reese has picked up the baby sign language fairly well. She signs hungry, please, more and all done. Now we’re working on saying thank you and please in situations other than food related. This girl cannot be scared…it may sound kind of sadistic or weird, but we’ve started looking at it as a challenge. You sneak up behind her or jump out from around a corner yell BOO! and she just laughs and laughs. Now that she’s mobile and she has a clear opinion on things, life is getting interesting! She’s in to everything. We keep all doors closed while she’s up. All cupboards are locked. She loves getting into the drawer that has our potholders and aprons in. She’ll pull out an apron and bring it up to us, essentially asking us to put it on her. Then she’ll just walk around with it on like it’s not even there. It’s the funniest thing.

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She’ll do just about anything for a laugh. I see the makings of a class clown. She loves peek-a-boo and the “uh-oh” game…you know the one…the kid “accidentally” drops something then says “Uh-Oh” and waits until you pick it up. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

We moved her from the infant carrier car seat to a still rear-facing, but bigger car seat. She could care less. I’m finally starting to get used to it…the visibility is pretty much non-existant and I don’t like that.

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While she isn’t too into snuggling anymore, she is all about giving hugs before you leave or when you get home and kisses. Oh the open-mouth kisses of a one year old. Slobbery, but almost nothing better than a baby showing their love.

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We had 1-year pictures taken a few weeks ago…I’ll get around to sharing those soon enough.

Second kids do almost everything faster.

Sometimes I feel like these last nine months have been a whirlwind. Time is going by so fast. I looked down at my sleeping baby last night and thought how un-baby-like she seemed to me all of a sudden.

I started thinking about it and it seems like she is doing everything before Rylee was when she was a baby.

I often joke that Reese will be the one to keep me on my toes. Give me premature grey hair.

Her teeth for example, at 9 months of, Ry had 2 teeth. Reese? 8. EIGHT.

She started crawling earlier. She was pulling herself up to standing earlier. She was interested in food at an earlier age. Opening drawers earlier. She started climbing on the coffee table the day she started crawling.

See? On.My.Toes.

So far pretty much the only thing she didn’t do earlier was sleep though the night.

The latest thing she’s doing earlier than her older sister? Throwing fits.

Yup.

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This was this morning. When I had the audacity to put her down so I could pack up our stuff to leave. {Excuse the blurryness. I may or may not have been laughing at my baby.}

I’m not even kidding, at one point she lay down completely, including gently setting her head on the floor, and just wailed.

That’s one thing I definitely could have done without for a while longer.

I think I feel my grey hairs starting to grow.

I always thought there’d be three.

It was something we talked about long before their was ever an engagement ring on my finger…Three kids.

Now fast forward about ten years, a giant mortgage and two kids later…a lot has happened in the last ten years…especially the last 5. Three kids is no longer in the cards for us. For a variety of reasons, really. We don’t think it’d be fair to Rylee at a minimum of 6 years old to be starting over, again, with a baby. Where would we physically put three kids? Then there’s the whole money aspect of it all…our financial situation is much different than we thought it would be during those dreaming years. A third child means we’d need a new car….new cars cost money. And three kids in daycare, well, that’s a lot of money too. We want to pay for our kids to go to college…putting three kids through college wouldn’t be an option. We want to retire someday…preferably before we’re in our seventies. Not to mention we’ve already got two weddings to pay for someday.

There’s a number of people that have told us to do it anyway. That we’d figure it out. If there’s one thing about us, it’s that we don’t rely on the “we’ll figure it out somehow” rule. If that were the case, our girls would be two years apart and not four. We would’ve bought a new car years ago instead of driving around the ghetto-fabulous Buick.

These girls of mine are growing so fast. Rylee will be starting kindergarten in the fall. She can’t wait to ride the school bus. She wants to get her ears pierced. She’ll be transitioning to a booster seat before long. Reese is a crawling machine. She’s got three teeth. We just bought her size 3 diapers. Andy walked into get her after nap one day and she was sitting up in her crib. She pulled herself up to standing the other night.

I used to sort of make fun of moms that talked about getting all emotional and weepy going through and getting rid of their baby’s outgrown clothes. Now I get it. I’ve become that mom. As I go through all of the outgrown baby clothes, I hold up nearly every piece. Think about the memories each one holds. Both my girls wore these. I’ve set aside my favorite pieces to hold on to for my sisters when they have kids. I’ve also set aside a few of my very favorite pieces, like what they wore home from the hospital, to keep in my cedar chest.

Last week when Reese was sick she didn’t want to nurse. At first I thought no big deal, but as the days went on, I wondered if she was just done with it and my heart sank.

I knew right then and there in my heart, I’m not ready for this journey to be over.

It’s a very surreal feeling…coming to terms with being done having kids.

My heart is absolutely full, overflowing even, just watching my 2 girls together, but there’s still that little part of me that thinks…I always thought we’d have three.

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Throwing me for a loop.

This parenting gig is funny. Just when you feel like you’re hitting your groove, something comes up and you’re completely thrown off guard.

Case in point? Ladies and Gentlemen? We have a thumbsucker.

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Rylee was never a thumbsucker. Never even took a pacifier. Never. Not even once. Don’t get me wrong, she figured out other ways to self-sooth. At a pretty young age, she developed a habit of sucking on her tongue by folding it in half in her mouth, if that makes any sense at all. Then just around the 1-year mark she discovered the love of blanket she’d never even used before and has hardly been a day without it since.

I get the idea of self soothing. And trust me, I encourage it! The last thing I want to do is use my nipples as a calming mechanism. No.Thank.You.

But since I never dealt with the thumbsucking with Ry, I’m kind of at a loss. As soon as Reese discovered her thumb, we figured we’d nip it in the bud and we started covering her hands with those newborn gloves. No luck. She’d either wriggle out of them or just suck right though them.

A couple of times we kept her from sucking her thumb while she was going down for a nap. Sure after an excruciating amount of time, she eventually fell asleep. Then no more than 20 minutes later when I went in to check on her she was sucking her thumb. In her sleep.

Within the last couple of weeks, we’ve kind of given up.

So now I’m at the crossroads of, do we continue on with allowing the thumbsucking, or do we try and transition to a paci?

There’s pros & cons to both. And there’s definitely not a lack of passionate opinions from people on the subject, either.

To be perfectly honest, I’d really prefer neither, but I feel like there’s obviously a reason she’s doing it. Sucking is the way she’s self-soothing, so at this point I’m just trying to figure out which is going to be the lesser of the evils.

She obviously already knows where her thumb is and has no trouble getting right into her face parts. If she had a paci and it fell out in the middle of the night, the last thing I want to have to do is get up, walk across the house just to stick it back in her mouth. That kind of defeats the purpose of self-soothing, no? Then again, there’s the argument that it’ll be easier to break the paci habit…I don’t want a thumbsucking 12 year old.

Not going to lie, I kind of think the thumbsucking is cute, but that doesn’t stop my practical side from taking over. All I see are dollar signs and orthodontic bills in my future every time she does it.

This girl is growing and changing daily. In some ways, she is so much like her big sister and in other ways, not at all. I’m loving every minute of it, but she’s definitely keeping us on our toes!

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As with so many parenting issues/decisions I feel like this one is to be continued

Oh, and did you see my post yesterday?

Happy Friday!

 

Boobs = NBD

Just a week before Reese was born, I sent out a plea for help to the interwebs. How should I explain breastfeeding to Rylee!? I was freaking out.

Turns out? You guys are way smarter than me. But, of course I knew that already, hence me asking you for your advice!

I opted not to “prep” Rylee with any sort of talk before Reese was born.

On the day Reese was born, immediately after she was…uhh…out (?)…we had skin to skin time and she began to nurse right away.

She nursed and nursed and nursed.

It didn’t seem like she’d ever stop, and Rylee was anxious to see her baby sister so we let her come in the room. She asked what Reese was doing, I explained that she was eating. Rylee looked a little confused so I explained to her that some mommies feed their babies this way and others use bottles. She seemed content with that answer and asked when it would be time to give Reese her bath.

Since then, it hasn’t been a “big deal” at all. She is curious, like any 4 year old would be. She asks questions. Especially when it comes to pumping. I answer them honestly and as thoroughly as I can. When she’s happy with the answer, she moves on and never mentions it again.

She’s caught me off guard with how nonchalant she’s been about the whole thing.

Like…when I was telling her I needed to go into the office one day last week, not realizing I was taking Reese with me, she became super concerned and said “But what if Sister gets hungry!?” Then when I told her I was taking Reese with, she was concerned about my coworkers seeing me while I fed her.

And one day last week I was in the bedroom feeding Reese when Rylee came in and sat next to us on the bed. Reese must have had a gas bubble or something because she unlatched and started crying. I brought her up to my shoulder to try and console her. Next thing I know, Rylee is looking at me, at my boob and back at me. Points to my nipple and says “uhhh…mom…you’re…dripping.”

The other day, as I was helping her get dressed, she asked me if kids have milk in their breasts.

Pretty much any time Reese cries, Rylee will shout to me “Mom, I think Reese is hungry again!” or “I think you need to feed Sister!”

And my favorite question so far…{asked as she’s motioning toward my chest} “Um, mom? What’s the nice word you want me to use for those things again?”

Moral of the story? I never should have underestimated my kid. Because she’s awesome.

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