Parenthood | Darrell & Sharyn

Category: Parenthood

4 Months

Filed Under: Edward, Parenthood by skrdflute — Leave a comment

October 12, 2013

This last month has really shaken things up a bunch. He weighed in at 17.5 pounds and 28 inches long at the pediatricians office this morning. That is still on track with where he was for his two month appointment. Off the charts for height and 90 percentile for weight. We are about ready to transition him from the infant carseat to a convertible carseat. That is a big change within itself but it might not happen for another few weeks. We have started to leave his carseat in the car and just get him out of it but I can’t do the grocery shopping by myself since he can’t sit by himself in the cart yet. So… close….

Playtime: He has started to use his hands a lot more. He loves to grasp toys and stick them in his mouth. He still isn’t rolling over, but we know it is coming. He does it occasionally, but it seems more accidental. He has rolled from tummy to back 4 times so far (and once was at the pediatricians office today). He is more focused on the toy and the feeling of it in his hands and mouth instead of just seeing it move when he swats it. He loves listening to music and watches Darrell play instruments all the time. He has even grabbed the chanter and stuck it in his mouth. He smiles all the time and we get a lot of giggles. They aren’t as allusive as they once were. Darrell definitely gets more laughs and giggles than I do.

Sleep: We hit the 4 month sleep regression a little early and are trying to recover from that. He did a little bit of sleeping through the night and then they slowly got progressively worse. It dropped down to 4 hour chunks (which were normal for him) and then 3 hour, 2 hour and finally one hour chunks. I was more exhausted than I had been since he was born. I felt like I was up all the time and my clock was all screwed up. He is starting to work back towards 4 hour chunks, but we will see where it goes. His naps during the day are fine, it is just bedtime that we are having a hard time with.

Food: He has started to really focus on what we are doing when we are eating. He watches intensely and ‘chews’ with us. Darrell is excited for him to start foods soon but we don’t think he is quite ready. We make sure he sits at the table with us and we give him a spoon to play with while we are at the table. We have been dipping our fingers in whatever sauce we have and giving him a little taste and he is enjoying it and constantly wants more. We are thinking he will get his first food right around Thanksgiving.

Teething: We are pretty sure he is teething. The Pediatrician said that it is just normal for this age with all of his drooling and fussiness. He drools all the time but isn’t fussy every day. I have been running my finger along his gums and I am pretty sure I can see the little whites of his bottom teeth. They haven’t broken through yet and it can take quite a few more months before they do. When he gets extra fussy and running my fingers over his gums helps him, I have been putting a piece of ice in a mesh food feeder for him to suck on. He loves sucking on it and it stops the fussy. Most of the liquid usually ends up all over his clothes, but it does its job.

Clothes: He is now in 6-9 month clothes. There are a few 3 month items that still fit, but it is only the ones that were large to begin with. Some of his 6 month outfits don’t fit him since they run small. He has a few outfits that were 0-6 that Darrell and I love and put on him all the time. One of them no longer fits and the other one is getting close to being on its way to the box in the garage.

Diapers: His diapers are still at the same snap level. They are getting a little small so it is almost time to take them out another snap but when we do, he seems to have more leakage issues. We also prepped and started to use the bamboo liners. We only have 4 of them, but they work great for overnight. When we go to change his diaper before bed, we just add the bamboo liner to the microfiber liner and we are set. It makes his butt a little bit bigger, but he was soaking through his diapers halfway through the night and instead of just changing his diaper, I usually ended up having to either change his whole outfit or letting him sleep in just a diaper. With the added insert, he now goes 12 hours at night without leaking. This is great because he is getting to the age where he should be starting to drop to one nighttime feed.

Tags: EJ

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Through the Night

Filed Under: Edward, Parenthood by skrdflute — Leave a comment

September 15, 2013

The big thing on most parent’s mind when they have a newborn is when will they sleep through the night. Some parent’s are lucky and their child sleeps through the night early. Others, not so much and their child doesn’t sleep through the night until they are much older. I am hoping for an inbetween. I am ok that he isn’t sleeping through the night because he has a great schedule right now and it is workable for me. I feed him before I go to bed and then I still have to wake up twice before we get up for the day. It works for us. So this threw me off guard when Edward slept through the night.

On September 10, we put him down like normal and he didn’t fuss or wake up to eat before I went to bed like he normally does. I just assumed he would wake up about an hour after I went to bed and was prepared for that since I didn’t want to wake him. He didn’t end up waking up to eat at all until around 6am. So he slept from 8pm-6am. This should have been great for me except he wasn’t a quiet sleeper. All through the night, he would fuss and start to stretch like he was going to wake up so I would wake up and prepare to feed him and then look over and he had gone back to sleep. He did it about once every 90 minutes all night. It made me even more tired than I was with our old schedule and I was so engorged that I leaked through everything and I couldn’t get the pump attached properly, so that was no help. I was full all day. They seemed to fill up just as fast as Edward was draining them. He ate so much more often during the day after sleeping through the night. I was basically planted on the couch.

The next night, he slept through the night again. I was prepared this time though. I pumped half an hour before I went to bed so that I wouldn’t be as engorged the next day. Then, he also didn’t fuss as much through the night so I was able to sleep and woke up refreshed remembering how nice it was to get a good night’s sleep.

Unfortunately, those were the only two days of sleeping through the night. He is back to waking up every two hours during the night. I am ready for him to be back on the schedule we had. We will see how he does and when he decides to sleep through again.

I’m doubting anything tonight as we are having a thunderstorm full of thunder, lightning and rain. Edward isn’t to happy with it and made his naps only half an hour today while waking up crying after the thunder.

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3 months

Filed Under: Edward, Parenthood, Photos by skrdflute — Leave a comment

September 12, 2013

This last month has been stressful to say the least. We did a lot of traveling which Edward is definitely a champ at. There are the “wonder weeks” where babies are growing and so they get fussy and like to eat every hour and then cry for seemingly no reason. Edward hit his 12 week one and is still going strong. Once he realizes we are starting to get him ready for bed, he starts crying and nothing helps him. He is fed, has a clean diaper, isn’t too hot or too cold (as we constantly cover and uncover him to figure it out). All we have come up with doing is to hold him and rock him while quietly talking to him to help him sleep. This process can take anywhere from half an hour to over 90 minutes. I usually start the process by feeding him and rocking him, and if he doesn’t go down within 45 minutes, I pass him off to Darrell who tries for half an hour. We only pass off if we are getting frustrated. Once he is down though, he goes back down no problem after eating.

Other than the bedtime routine, everything else has been smooth sailing. He doesn’t always like to nap during the day, so sometimes I end up doing a shortened period of bedtime routine just to get him to take a half hour nap. He is usually up for about two hours and then sleeps for 30-60 minutes. He tends to take about 3 naps during the day.

So our typical daily routine is approximately:

Wake-up 7:30

eat 7:45-8

play 8-10

eat 10-10:15

sleep 10:30-12:30

play 12:30-1

eat 1-1:15

play 1:15-1:45

sleep 2-3

play 3-4:30

eat 4:30-4:45

sleep 5-5:30

eat 5:30-5:45

play 5:45-6:30

eat 6:30-6:45

bedtime routine start 7

usually asleep between 7:30-9

wakes up to eat at midnight, and 4.

During play time, we do a couple things. He likes to sit on the couch and play with a handkerchief. We put him on the mat on the floor and put a mirror over him so he can talk to the baby in the mirror. He gets tummy time in front of a mirror. We sing songs, read books, take walks and he talks to the dining room light. He is starting to reach for items and grab them intentionally. He can’t hold onto them, but he will play with it for a little bit.

We also got our first belly laugh out of him the day before his three months. We had gone to a BBQ at Uncle Kenny’s and Darrell was playing with Edward on a desk and Edward just got a big ole belly laugh going. I am still waiting for mine. He definitely likes to be in a sitting upright position and likes to be involved with whatever we are doing. He talks a lot now and is always making noises at things. He loves looking at words and always looks at Darrell’s white board in his office when we go down there. We wrote his name on it and he just looks and smiles and then starts to talk.

I don’t know his measurements and wont until next month, but I do know he has grown. He is out of his 3 month clothes and is already out of some of the 3-6 and 6 month clothes. We finally took the infant insert out of the carseat and he is getting to the point we might need to go ahead and buy another carseat before too long. We have also started putting him in the stroller without the carseat which is nice because it is less hassle to carry around, but with the way our stroller works, we lost a little bit of space once we did that.

Edward is now taking some naps in his crib and also the first part of bedtime is in his crib until Darrell and I go to bed when we move him to the cosleeper. I think this might be helping in aiding his need for a midnight feeding, so we are going to try putting him in the cosleeper the whole time and see how the nights go.

As for cloth diapers, we are still rocking it. I am currently doing about 2 loads every other day right now. One for diapers and one for spit rags since he is still a spitter. However, I am thinking that soon I will only have to do them every 3 days. We are consistently using about 15-16 diapers in those two days so we still have 9-10 more when I do laundry. I was going to try not to do diapers on the second day and wait until the third, but the best time for me to wash them is after Edward goes down for bed so I just wash them to be on the safe side. He doesn’t poop all that often (sometimes we only have one poopy diaper when we wash them), and it was something we worried about when it first started happening, but he does poop at least once in a 48 hour period, so we aren’t worried anymore. It doesn’t bother him, so we try not to let it bother us. 🙂

We are still breastfeeding. It is getting easier now that he is getting better/faster at it. I still try to pump so that we always have a bottle in the fridge, but for awhile, I was only getting a couple ounces (and I only like pumping once a day) so when Darrell would feed him, I would still have to go in since it wasn’t enough. I started to eat more avocado and Oatmeal and then only pump half an hour before bed and now I am getting about 4-5 ounces.

Tags: EJ

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One year…

Filed Under: Edward, Infertility, Parenthood, Photos by skrdflute — Leave a comment

September 11, 2013

One year ago today, we sat in a little room waiting for the doctor. The nurse came in and we confirmed that the vial they were giving us was indeed our donor. Everything we wanted and hoped for laid in that vial. It was the last vial from the donor we had: the last chance of a brother or sister for Pixel: our last shot at trying for at least a year while we saved up money.

Everything looked good going into that room. The medications had worked like they were suppose to, I had three beautiful follicles and an amazing lining. The exact same scenario that we got pregnant with Pixel and Bit 10 months ago.

We were excited. The doctor came in, did the procedure and wished us luck as he walked out of the room. We sat for another 10 minutes and then I got up off the bed and got dressed. The nurses wished us luck as we left and gave me a form for a blood test in two weeks. I knew it would be a long two weeks waiting to see if it worked.

It ended up being a very long 9 months, but Edward is finally here and we are so happy. We are thankful for the science that allows us to get pregnant and the doctors and nurses who were there every step of the way and helped relieve any anxiety they could.

Tags: EJ, IUI #4

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Two Months

Filed Under: Edward, Parenthood by skrdflute — Leave a comment

August 7, 2013

Time has just flown by. I can’t believe that he is already two months old. I can still vividly remember giving birth. He has grown a lot in the last month. He is now 25” long (off the charts for height) and 13#9oz (90th percentile). He has slowed down weight gain and is only gaining about 1.5oz per day instead of the 2oz/day he was at 1 month. He is starting to outgrow a lot of his 0-3 month clothing. Some of the 0-6 month we have are starting to fit him nicely which makes me doubtful that we will end up being able to use them when he is 6 months. I need to go through his clothes and put away the ones he outgrew and prep the next ones as I only have up to 3-6 month out right now.

He is starting to smile more and more on purpose and in reaction to us. I love it! He is getting the cooing and the giggling going to. This boy has truly wrapped me around his little finger. (I’m pretty sure Darrell is wrapped around the other one as well. :P) We love getting lots of photos of him (as I’m sure you can tell), the downside is that he doesn’t know what to think of the phone. He will be smiling and giggling but as soon as he sees the camera, the smile turns into a WTF face. We are trying to get sneakier about getting photo and video of him smiling. It is definitely hard to get a good one. Thank goodness we have digital photos with the amount of photos we take.

Edward has got a bit of a tummy, so we had to pull the cloth diapers out a snap. Makes me happy he is growing but sad that he is growing so fast. We have also found out that he sleeps much, much better on his side than on his back. Once we started putting him on his side, he started sleeping for anywhere from 5-7 hours at a time at night. It makes this momma happy that I am getting sleep! The only issue we have had lately is that he goes down for naps just fine during the day. but once it hits about 6pm until about 10:30-11, he is nursing every hour and refuses to sleep. He gets cranky and just seems like he has hit the stage where he is so tired he can’t sleep. We are definitely working on that and I hope it gets better. We are a little tired of one of us trying for half an hour, the other one trying for half an hour and then the first one goes back for another half hour before he finally goes down. Then it is easy peasy until the next night. He wakes up and gets a feeding between midnight and one and then doesn’t wake up until between 6-7. Eats and goes right back down until 9am. This is a lot like he was in the womb as he use to have his “dance party” every night around 9pm.

He loves holding his head up and ‘standing’ on us. We have also found that he likes sitting and facing forward so I usually hold him on my lap facing forward a lot and he will just sit there and look around while gnawing on his hand. Still hasn’t found the thumb reliably, but has gotten the thumb/forefinger suck down.

We are just enthralled by this little boy and are completely in love. Darrell is excited and ready for #2 already. 🙂 – not happening for another year at least.