birth announcement

Maya 10 weeks

2/20/15

2/05/15

I was surprised at how natural the transition to two kids felt from one. I mean, it’s a bit more chaotic around here and I’m not the mom I was or want to be in some ways, but we’ve never wanted to send her back (even Shep). ;) We like her being a part of our family. Shepherd is always smiley and positive when he talks to her, even if he’s in the middle of a tantrum. At first he asked to hold her a lot but he doesn’t much anymore. Now he says “Hi, baby sister,” or "Hi, little girl" (which sounds a bit creepy) and gives her a kiss and a tickle. He’s not as soft as he ought to be with her yet, so the times where I’ve set her down and let him interact with her have been quite limited. Most of the time I’m carrying her. Lots of times she hangs out in the Moby wrap, and there she nurses and sleeps. She’s getting a little more resistant to being in there now and more particular about how she wants to be held and the positioning when she nurses. She likes to face out more now. If I bounce her on the ball while she’s in the Moby nursing, usually I can get her to be happy and stay in there for a couple of hours, though it's a bit unpredictable lately. She likes being set down sometimes and she likes it best when she can see someone in the room with her. I think I’m her favorite person right now. Sometimes I can see her staring and focusing on me and she smiles sometimes. She’s become lots more of a social smiler. More so in the morning, as was true with Shep, but also throughout the day. She smiles for Tim and me the most—she doesn’t seem to know what to think of her big brother. I think he’s gotten a smile out of her a couple of times maybe, but I think the largest association with his presence may be terror! He is very loud and sometimes he makes her uncomfortable. She sometimes still smiles involuntarily in her sleep. She’s pretty good at holding her head up. She’s rolled from her stomach to her back like twice I think! She’s pretty strong but she also seems delicate overall. I’m not sure how to explain that one, exactly. She’s sensitive but not especially particular, if that makes sense?

She got her first shots ever yesterday (March 9) and it was a rough go of it for a while. Well, she slept at first for a couple hours, and then she was super unhappy/in pain when she woke up. I gave her a dose of Tylenol sort of grudgingly because I hate putting all these things (including vaccines, let’s be honest) in my perfect little baby’s body when she’s so little and has had never ingested anything but the nutrition I’ve given her from my own body, but alas, it helped after several minutes and she got back to nursing and then fell asleep again for another couple of hours. So that was a new experience. I feel like the only time Shep has ever been sleepier than normal is the one time he got sick, like a month ago. Weird. Anyway, I took a bath with Maya later. She only likes the bath if I’m supporting her whole body. She’s sometimes okay to sleep on her own if she’s in a deep sleep already, otherwise she prefers full-body contact. She also sometimes falls asleep rocking or bouncing instead of nursing, so that’s new too. She wakes up more easily if she’s sleeping on her own. We haven’t left her swaddled all that much like we did with Shep. She seems to prefer not to be swaddled for the most part, although sometimes it does help her to stay asleep better. I don’t even wake up much during the night when she wakes up, so I can’t really tell you how often she wakes up. She was getting a good 4 hour stretch at the beginning of the night a few weeks ago, but she might be waking up more now? Or maybe she’s sleeping through the night practically and I don’t even realize it. I couldn’t tell you because I’m just not that conscious for any of it. She still has her mullet; her hair hasn’t really changed much. She likes the car seat as long as we’re going fast enough for her. It’s actually way nicer to have an infant car seat, why didn’t we get one of those for Shep? But they are a huge pain to carry around, I will say that. The instant we slow down or stop in the car, she starts crying as if on cue, unless she's really out and doesn't notice. She hates getting in the car seat.

She is not colicky like Shep was, either. What a blessing that is! I am not sure how I could handle being mom to the semi-volatile toddler that Shepherd is with a volatile newborn as well. Instead, we have a rather predictable little girl. She is such a sweetheart. I’m getting used to dressing girls, too. I put a bow/headband on her for the first time last Thursday and Friday for Whitney’s viewing and funeral and felt like I could handle it. I had tried to do it once before and felt like I just couldn’t take her seriously when she was wearing it. I’d called her Shep several times and just felt like it was weird dressing her in girl clothes sometimes before. I am not sure if she’ll be dressed super femininely while I’m in charge, but at least I can handle more gendered items. I don’t know if it’s because I’m better at parenting babies or if Maya is just an easier baby to parent, but beyond those first 3 days of her life when my milk wasn’t in and she was generally discontent, she’s been fairly consistently happy. There have only been 2 or 3 times where she was crying and I didn’t know why and I couldn’t get her to stop easily. I don’t think I could count how many times Shep was crying for mysterious reasons and we would try everything to get him to stop and nothing seemed to help. In retrospect, I feel like there might have been more of an underlying issue than I realized at the time, but hindsight is hard. It also may have had something to do with the way he was born and the general stress and trauma associated with it. I wish I could have done more for him. It’s odd, kind of, because I have left Maya with Tim for all of 2 hours since she was born and I’ve never left her to anyone else’s care. Shep was a different story. I had him in the nursery at the hospital for a while when he was in the light box for his jaundice because I just felt like there was nothing I could do for him. And I left him with Tim because I felt at my wit’s end and like there was nothing I could do then too. So Tim took him on lots of walks and such. It’s good that it was at a time where Tim wasn’t working and he had finished school. He was around a lot more! He feels like he’s missing out on this fleeting and ephemeral phase of Maya’s life because he’s at work a lot and even when he’s home he doesn’t interact with her all that much. She just likes to nurse mainly and I haven’t even pumped at all this time around. Pumping is hard for me and I have a toddler to nurse off my oversupply (if oversupply is even a problem with me, which I really don’t know that it is) anyway. Boo to the toddler nursing thing, but let’s not get into that. Maya’s stats are remaining pretty much in the same range as they have been. She’s about 10.5 pounds now and has grown a couple of inches too. Her head circumference remains around the 50% percentile, her weight about 30% and height a bit higher, though I can't remember the range. She is such a cute baby too. She’s getting eyelashes now. She has a nice round head and such nice proportional features, imo.

We love our little girl and hope she sticks around for a long long time!

round 2, 37 weeks

37 weeks, round 1

37 weeks, round 2

Tim says my belly looks bigger this time around but I look skinnier everywhere else. I think that's a fair assessment of this pregnancy. I've gained less weight this time and it's been concentrated in my uterus more so than my first pregnancy. I'm starting to swell and retain fluid elsewhere in my body at this point, but I can still take my wedding ring on and off! I can still wear the same shoes! My face doesn't look super fat! All good things.

As a tangential side note, I hate due dates. I keep thinking of mine now that we are in the month of and it kind of makes me feel like I do when I lose something. The other day a piece to one of Shep's toys went missing and it was really bothering me. Puzzle pieces are the worst to lose because you can't ever forget that it's gone. The due date is a similar mystery. Baby's just going to show up whenever the heck Baby shows up and this number gives you a sense of some timing but it's only a tickle, a tease. I've been suspecting that I'll give birth early based on a couple of things: (a) this pregnancy is totally different from round 1 and round 1 ended after "40 weeks," and (b) I originally estimated my due date for December 5 based on my calculation of LMP and I just can't let go of that number. Eh, what's a couple more weeks at this point, anyway? Soon is soon.

windows

Shep likes to have his window down in the car lately. When he gets bored of being in the car, he takes off his shoes. Once he threw both shoes out the window. It was actually very close to home when he chucked them, but we hadn't seen. We drove around all along the route we had gone, but we couldn't find them because Tim's mom, who lives upstairs, found them first and recovered them. We've tried to keep our eyes out for other littering from the back window since.

The other day I went to Home Depot and left my brother and Shep in the car while I went inside. Later, I realized Shep had removed his shoes. I only found one sitting next to his car seat. I thought the other one might be in some stuff that was on the floor and didn't take the opportunity to search at the time. Two days later, I cleaned out the car and couldn't find it anywhere. I realized the other shoe must have gotten tossed out when we had gone to Home Depot. On the weekend at night, we were sort of driving in the same area, so I decided on a lark to see if the shoe was still there. It was right where Shep left it.

toddler tyranny

Shep seems to have entered into a stage of full-blown two-ness. As cute as he is, I'm actually struggling to be patient with this phase. It's like doing some backcountry snow sport when there's risk of avalanche. It's kind of fun until the avalanche happens and then you're fighting for your life. Except, I derive no thrill from the possibility of tantrums, as I imagine some people derive from the risk of danger. I don't know; bad analogy. The point is, it's really fun to see his personality and language and interests develop. But it's also invariably exhausting, and often infuriating. Tantrums, which up until a few weeks ago seemed to be an occasional anomaly, now seem inevitable if the scenario he's imagined doesn't pan out exactly as he hopes. I'm trying to walk the line between accommodating the terms he sets (as far as I can understand him--limited vocabulary only takes you so far, though) and thereby avoiding anger and frustration, and alternately trying to set limits and help him deal with his big feelings.

Sometimes his feelings are disturbingly big. The other day he had a serious breakdown that seemed to come out of nowhere. After waking from his nap (his nap was quite late that day and his schedule was totally offm so maybe that's why), he started crying and spiraled quickly into a demon-possessed two-year-old. He was so full of rage and anger, screaming and crying, flailing and hitting, refusing to be held, completely unresponsive, and going on for more than a half-hour. I had no idea what to do and I had no idea what was wrong with him.

Luckily most episodes are not this extreme and his anger a bit more short-lived and thus easier to ignore, but I still find myself quite annoyed and exhausted by his wildness. Taking him shopping is such an adventure. Any stair rails are for him monkey bars to hang and swing on. Any time we hold hands is a time for him to jump and hang. Any time he is set down on the ground, it's a time for him to run wherever his whims take him. For him, maybe shopping is a really grand adventure. But for me, not so much. Instead of holding his hand while we walk together in the store, I have to either follow him as he escapes around every corner or try to hold a squirmy thirty-something-pound child, which for my out-of-shape body, is no easy task. Suddenly, the whole purpose for my trip becomes something I  don't care much about getting and can wait until later for.

Yesterday, we were at a store where I found a cute $2 t-shirt for him to wear. When I showed him and asked, "Do you like this shirt?" he got pretty excited about it. The excitement extended to him trying to take off the shirt he was wearing already and put on the one that belonged to the store, demanding I help him accomplish his task. I didn't want to do it, but I put it on. Then he wanted me to take off the tag, and I did that against my will, too. Later at the register, I apologetically gave the tag to the cashier saying "He liked it so much he wanted to wear it immediately!" In the same store, we got strawberries, which he was set on eating immediately as well. He would take one or two bites out of one strawberry, but if he got anywhere near the stem, he handed it to me. And I couldn't just set it back in the container. No, I had to eat it.

In retrospect, these things are mostly amusing, but in the moment I often feel like I'm nearly out of mind trying to figure out how to handle my wild child.

stitches

Apparently there is a reason that rotary cutters have guards on them. They are sharp and should not be left on the floor. Shep found that out by getting a rather deep cut that ended up with us in the Primary Children's emergency room last Saturday because the urgent care clinic doesn't offer any sedation when doing stitches. I felt like I deserved the mother of the year award for being awesome and facilitating the whole incident. So instead of the million other things it seemed like we had planned, we spent the morning with our little trooper in PCMC. But now the stitches are out and the wound is healing fine, and we can finally go swimming again.

antics of our two-year-old

I wanted to document a few of Shepherd's antics lately. He seems kind of like a real person lately, someone I can kind of talk to, but nevertheless someone who is really bad at carrying on a conversation.

• A lot of times he'll do naughty things and my response will be, "Why did you ______, Shep?" He usually looks at me earnestly and seems to proffer a pretty substantial explanation, with his funny hand gestures and facial expressions, but I have no idea what he's saying.

• The other day, we went on a walk in the neighborhood. Shep has developed an attachment to the children in one particular neighborhood family, it seems. Recently, he saw one of them walking up the aisle at church and followed her to sit with their family for a solid portion of the meeting. On this particular walk we were on, we went past their house on the other side of the street. Shep was riding his trike, which we push because he doesn't pedal yet (we got this one for him not too long ago, and he loves it), and suddenly he wanted to stop and get off. I accommodated and he proceeded to run across the street and up a little bit until he got to the right house. Then he knocked on the door. The kids whom he loves were home, luckily, and welcomed him to play with them. The whole thing was just so funny. I had no idea he knew exactly where they live!

• The other day I was working on an editing project in bed after waking up. Shep was hanging out in the bed with me watching Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. (He's watched so much of that show lately, which I have used as a crutch in order to meet this editing deadline.) He decided he wanted to get up and play, but I stayed in bed editing and didn't follow him. Then a little while later, I heard a faint "mommy" through the window. Realizing he was outside unattended and imagining him running into the street into oncoming traffic (not an unreasonable fear--this kid likes to run into the street a lot), I bolted to get some clothes on and go after him. When I reached the door, he was trying to open it from the other side. Apparently it's time to childproof the door so he can't escape!