2008:
2012:
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2008:
2012:
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2008:
2012:
Yep. Life is good. (Also, I need to take more pictures of Lucy with my real camera instead of my phone, or she’s going to wonder why I have all of these crystal-clear pictures of her sister, and everything of her is grainy and Instagram-my.)
Random update of stuff that’s been going on lately:
I went out of town about two weeks ago, and the girls stayed with my parents. It was the first time I’d ever spent the night away from Lucy, and it was stressful for me, but I don’t think she even noticed I was gone. It probably doesn’t seem like a big milestone to most people, but it felt like one to me.
Catie also did great while I was gone.
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Other Catie stuff:
On my way back from my trip, I had a layover in Chicago. It occurred to me that I hadn’t gotten souvenirs for my girls while I was out of town, and I noticed a plush toy T. Rex while I was at O’Hare. (It’s based on Sue from the Field Museum of Natural History.) I figured I could use this to my advantage. So, when I came back, I told her that I had a present for her, but I couldn’t give it to her unless she made me a promise: in exchange for the dinosaur, she has to stay in her own bed all night.
(Wait, have I mentioned that Catie has been getting in bed with me every night for months? I forget if I’ve mentioned that or not.)
Anyway, of course my little dino-nut went bonkers over her new T. Rex toy, and she agreed to the terms of my deal. She’s been sleeping soundly in her own bed ever since. Praise the baby Jesus and Hallelujah.
Also, I found out what kindergarten Catie will be going to in a few months, which is freaking me out completely. I’m going to leave that topic for another time.
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Other Lucy stuff:
She’s cruising around the furniture, and letting go/standing on her own for a few seconds at a time. I’m pretty sure she’s going to start walking any minute now.
It’s funny just to discover the things that she knows. Like, she has this little toy bell at my parents’ house, and if you ask her, “Lucy, where’s your bell?” She’ll find it, pick it up, and start waving it around to ring it.
She’s also starting to dance, which I need to get a video of, because it’s impossible to describe, and completely hilarious.
See also: eyelashes. I melt.
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Other me stuff:
Work is good. I’m still working on a diet and hitting a lot of plateaus, but I’m doing my best and figuring that I’ll get there eventually.
I’m also… um… dating. Which is weird, and I don’t really know how much I want to talk about it on the blog.
I will say this: When I first mentioned this to my mom, she freaked out about it (in a bad way). But she’s chilled out significantly, after I explained my motives. The thing is, I work full-time, and I have the kids full-time, so I’m not out looking for a full-time boyfriend. Quite frankly, I don’t have the time. But you know what? It’s really nice to sometimes put on a shirt that doesn’t have a smear of baby snot on it, and to do my hair and make-up, and to feel cute, and… you know, FLIRT.
It’s fun. And there’s been a serious fun shortage in my life for the past year or so.
See? No baby snot anywhere. Also: HAPPY.
The other thing I told my mom: the girls will not be introduced to anyone that I date. They’ve been through enough instability and upheaval, and I’m not about to add to that.
If/when something starts to get serious (and I don’t expect that to happen aaaaanytime soon), they will be introduced to that person as my friend, just like they’ve met female friends of mine. And there will be no public displays of affection in front of the kids, because it’s inappropriate. Just like there wouldn’t be PDA in front of my parents – again, because it’s inappropriate.
I don’t know why I feel like I need to be defensive on that subject. Maybe it’s because I’m not officially divorced yet, that it all feels kind of unseemly. But I also don’t see how this is doing any harm, and it’s been a pretty big ego boost to find out that there are guys out there who think I’m cute. So I think it’s a good thing.
Lucy’s 9-month well-baby checkup was this morning.
She weighed in at 19 pounds, 14 ounces (I thought for sure she’d break the 20-pound mark this time, but she was 2 ounces shy), and she’s 27.8 inches tall. For those of y’all who care, that puts her in the 76th percentile for weight, and 52nd percentile for height. (I’m thinking that awesome potbelly makes up for the height/weight discrepancy.) She’s also in the 97th percentile for head circumference, which puts her as slightly smaller-headed than her sister. Catie was always off the charts for head size.
The doctor diagnosed her as basically perfect except for her eczema, which she’s had since she was a newborn. I could’ve told you that. This little baby girl is freaking awesome.
She crawls all over the place now, and she is FAST. She’s also pulling up to a stand on just about anything she can grab. If I happen to be sitting on the floor near her, she often uses either my hair or my boob to grab and pull herself up. Not so nice for me, but she’s so pleased with herself, I can’t really get mad at her, either.
She took two steps yesterday, pushing a little ride-on toy car in front of her, so I know that walking for real is just around the corner. I’m kind of terrified.
She mostly sleeps through the night now. Not always, but generally. Our routine lately has been that she goes down sometime around 8 or 8:30, and she might wake up sometime before midnight for one last bottle, but then she’s good until morning. So, it’s not too bad.
She eats like a champ. Baby food, finger food, regular table food… whatever you got, she’s game for trying it. Catie was always a bit of a picky eater, so this is kind of awesome to be able to just toss anything on her high chair tray and know that it’s most likely not going to go to waste.
She’s starting to get words here and there, too. The most popular ones are “hi” and “bye,” complete with hand wave. She’s not totally consistent, sometimes she waves and says “hi” to the door, or she’ll say “bye” a minute or two after we’ve left. Still, she’s getting it.
She can kind of say “bottle,” but it sounds like “bwuh”. And “all done” sounds like “nuh-nun.” She definitely has her own little dialect, but we’re figuring it out.
She can say “Pop-Pop,” which made my dad damn near melt. And she can say “Kay!” for Catie.
Still no consistent use of “mama,” but sometimes when she’s upset and wants me, she’ll say “mamamamamama,” which I figure is close enough.
For the most part, though, she is so much fun. We’re past the newborn stage and getting into the fun baby/early toddler phase where she seems to be learning something new every day.
And now that she’s getting bigger and a little more interactive, I’ve found that the dynamic between Catie and Lucy is changing too. Sometimes this is a bad thing – Lucy is mobile and wants to check out toys that Catie has deemed as “hers,” so we’ve had lots of long talks about how certain things have to be shared. Because, yes, of course, Catie has some toys that are very special to her and I don’t expect her to share those. But she also doesn’t get to yank every single thing away from Lucy with a, “That’s mine!” (And a lot of times, the things she yanks away are toys she hasn’t played with in months, if not years.)
But on the good side, it also means they play together sometimes now. Lucy loves watching Catie, and wants to do everything that her big sister does.
I have to say, this phase that we’re in right now is so much fun. I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Once again, I mention that Lucy seems fine in one blog post, so it’s pretty much inevitable that we’d end up at Urgent Care over the weekend, right?
Lucy had been acting a little out of character (grumpy, tired, etc.). Then today, I noticed her pulling on her ears, which is basically THE BIGGEST, REDDEST FLAG EVER.
So, off to Urgent Care we went.
Turns out, filming the baby with an iPhone is a good way to keep her distracted while waiting for a doctor.
The doctor said her ears don’t look infected, but her sinuses are so infected that her ears were clogged (sort of like the airplane ear-popping effect, but for poor Lucy, it was all the time), so now she’s on an antibiotic.
In case you were keeping track, yes, that now makes all three of us on antibiotics.
I’m giving the cats the side-eye. They better not get any ideas. I’m getting sick of shoving syringes in people’s mouths up in here.
I feel like every blog post lately is either “we’re all dying from The Snot Crud OMG send help aaaaiiiieeee….”, or it’s some version of “hey, we survived and I think we’re all better now.”
As for today: I don’t know. I suddenly got waaaaay worse and had to go back to the doctor’s office, and Catie has an ear infection, so at the moment, we’re both on antibiotics. I’m hoping we can knock this out once and for all.
Lucy seems ok for now. She’s got the eternal case of Drippy Nose, but she doesn’t seem terribly bothered by it, she’s still happy and funny and sleeping well.
(Oh man, can I tell you about the sleep? I mean, no, I know I can’t tell you about the sleep because that will jinx it and she’ll go back to waking up every 3 hours. But suffice to say: God bless sleep training. We seem to have hit some sweet spot of sleep, and I know it’s likely temporary and we’ll have to start over the next time she gets sick, or a new tooth comes in, or she hits some other developmental milestone. But for now, it’s so, so good, y’all.)
Maybe this makes me a terrible mother, because you know, unconditional love and all that. But I find her much cuter when she lets me sleep at night.
As for crawling – yes, Lucy is crawling, kind of. She gets herself into a yoga downward-facing dog pose on her hands and tippy-toes, then can’t seem to figure out what to do next, and she gets really mad about that. Sometimes she’ll kind of throw a leg out sideways and scoot like a crab. I’ve seen her do a normal hands-and-knees forward crawl only a handful of times. So, unlike Catie, who started crawling one day and then never stopped crawling, Lucy seems to be taking her own sweet time with this.
Or, you know, maybe Lucy just prefers to sit on the floor and scream for me to come pick her up. It certainly seems like it some days.
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A couple of other random Lucy developments:
1. Probably because Catie and I have been sick so much, Lucy has developed a fake cough. Seriously. If I cough, she smiles and echoes me, like it’s a game. It’s both cute and pathetic at the same time. How many times do you have to cough in front of your baby before they learn this? APPARENTLY A MILLION COUGHS. WHICH I HAVE DONE.
2. She’s started waving bye-bye and saying “ah-bah,” sort of like bye-bye. The only problem is that she seems to have no idea of the appropriate context of how or when to use this. She says bye-bye to the bathtub, to her toys, to the TV, to her own shadow. I think she just likes doing it over and over.
3. According to her teacher at daycare, she learned to say “uh-oh,” but I have yet to get her to repeat that one at home. The few times I’ve tried saying “uh-oh” in front of her to see if she’ll parrot it back to me, she just laughs at me like I’m hilarious. So, who knows.
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Unrelated to anything: I’m in the process of registering Catie for kindergarten. I just… man. That’ll be a whole other post someday, when I come up with the words to adequately express my feelings about it. For now, I think “overwhelming” about sums it up.
It’s generally a bad idea to talk about a particular parenting style on the Internet, because it always leads to disagreements – breast versus bottle, stay-at-home moms versus working moms, natural childbirth versus medicated… all of those arguments we’ve had a hundred times or more.
Which is why it’s probably a bad idea for me to write about this, but a couple of posts this week got me thinking about it, so here it is.
I’ve started sleep training Lucy.
Let me back up: for the past four months, my mom has been living with me, so the idea of letting Lucy cry it out simply wasn’t an option. My mom is respectful of my parenting decisions, but she’s also a grandma, and it goes against her instincts to let her grandbaby cry. Besides, I never would’ve let Lucy cry it out when she was younger than 6 months old anyway.
But lately, bedtime with her has turned into this ridiculously elaborate dance, and it basically feels like she’s training me, instead of the other way around, and I have to put a stop to it.
Lately, Lucy’s sleep routine has been:
* Bathtime.
* Bottle.
* She starts to fall asleep on the bottle, then wakes up and wants! to! play! (Which, WTF? Wasn’t the whole POINT of the bath to make you sleepy, kid?).
* She rolls around on the floor and plays for at least an hour, sometimes longer.
* She eats some solid food – because I figure what the hell, we’re awake, and maybe having a little extra in her tummy will make her sleep longer. (Tip: it doesn’t.)
* Play some more. I get increasingly desperate for sleep.
* Another bottle. This time, she falls asleep while drinking it.
* Burp.
* Caaaaarefully transfer sleeping baby to crib. If she wakes up, she screams bloody murder, then I have to pick baby up and rock her until she falls asleep again, then repeat transfer process. (This may take up to 5 times or more, before successful crib placement actually occurs.)
* I crawl to bed and collapse, and pray that she sleeps through the night. Which she’s done, like, maybe 4 times in her life. Normally she wakes me up after 3-4 hours.
So. That’s completely ridiculous, right? I mean, I know it is.
The thing is, when I’ve tried to let her cry it out, I end up caving in. She screams and screams, and eventually I just can’t take it anymore, so I go get her. (Of course, the message she receives from this is, “If I scream loud enough, Mommy will come back and get me.” So that’s completely useless.)
Last night, she woke me up at 4 a.m., as per usual. I gave her a bottle, burped her, and put her back in the crib. As soon as I set her down, she woke up and started shrieking. I sat down on the floor next to her crib, reached through the slats, and tried to pat her and comfort her, to get her to go to sleep on her own.
I did that for half an hour. She never stopped screaming.
Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I could feel myself starting to get angry – which is completely irrational, I know. She’s a baby, she can’t help it. But she had me up past midnight, then woke me up less than 4 hours later, and I was just exhausted and I couldn’t take it anymore. So I left.
I lay down in my bed and I stared at the clock. Lucy screamed for 22 minutes, then she finally fell asleep.
(For the record? Catie slept through the entire thing.)
I don’t feel that guilty about it – I mean, she wasn’t hungry, she wasn’t sick or in pain. She was just pissed off and didn’t want to sleep. Or she didn’t know how to get herself to sleep. Which is mostly my fault, because I haven’t made her figure out how to soothe herself yet.
I don’t know if this is something I’m going to do long-term. All I know is that I’m raising these 2 girls by myself, I don’t have a partner who I can tag-team for nighttime duty. And I have a full-time job, and I am useless during the day if I don’t get enough sleep. So I have to do something.
This is less about a particular parenting philosophy, and more about basic survival.
Besides, based on the smiles and laughs I got this morning when she woke up, I’m pretty sure no major long-term damage has been done. Yet.
In case you were wondering what it sounds like at our house ALL THE TIME now.
(TwitVid won’t show up in an RSS reader, so you need to click through to see the video. Sorry about that.)
Actually, I take that back. Usually Catie is louder than Lucy. So you combine the two of them shrieking and it’s no wonder that Mommy is slamming a handful of ibuprofen every night. (My eeeeeears.)
I mean, it’s sweet. Of course it is. But, man. The VOLUME on those kids.