Tummy time terror

It starts off innocently enough. Just a little guy trying to keep his face out of the couch.


"hey mom, get that camera out of my face, I'm working here."


"you know what? Screw it. This is tough."


And he's down for the count. 1...2...3...


"ARRRGGGHHHH!!!!"
"No! The rookie miraculously rises to go another round!"


Tune in next time to hear our hero say:
"hey Mom, I noticed you finally washed & styled your hair. Looks nice, but it could use some nasty-smelling spit-up all down the left side. Here, let me just hook you up...."

- Posted from my iPhone

Somethings working

Last night Abram slept from 10:45 to 5:45. Yeah, I know!!! That's seven flipping hours!! That's through the night if you ask me! Happy Two Week old baby to me!!! He's two freaking weeks old! What a rock star. That, ladies is why it is a good thing to give birth to a 9.5 pound tank of a child. I didn't have to stress out about sleep training him or listen to him cry his sweet little eyes out, so take THAT, BabyWise! Not so wise now, are ya?
Just kidding. I'm 98% sure that it was just a fluke, and he'll probably be up four times tonight. But whatever. I'll take what I can get.


p.s. Matt says he gets an astrix on that one because he was in our bed. Whatever. All I know is that I didn't wake up feeling like I'd gone a few rounds with a Mac truck.


- Posted from my iPhone

i figured it out

you just love them. i stopped trying to control things & he has shown me how he likes things to go. his way isn't half bad. he's a sweet little dude. i'm calm & enjoying parenthood like never before. (the role AND the nbc sitcom. have you watched it? its great.) this is one of my favorite pictures from abram's birth. he hadn't really cried until they took him over to weigh & poke at him, and when he did, matt started quietly talking to him & he shut right up to listen to the voice that had been saying "goodnight little dude" everynight.

so what does one actually DO with a baby?

It feels like a long time since I've had a baby. Abram is a sweet little nugget, but I'm having such a hard time figuring out exactly how miserable I want to be in these first few months, and in what way. With Sawyer I was well rested, but miserable in that I was being a BabyWise Nazi and hardly left the house for fear of disrupting her precious schedule. I felt like a failure if she didn't act exactly like the book said she would. She started sleeping through the night at 5 weeks, and has always been a good sleeper & an all around awesome kid, so was it worth it?..... I dunno.
Abram is a different kid though. He's a huge snuggler while Sawyer wasn't much of one, so there's that. Also he loves his binkie, which I'm pretty sure is going to magically disappear from the face of the planet, because I HATE it!! He can't keep it in and just as he's about to fall asleep it falls out & he gets all pissed off. Grrrrr.
It would be really easy to have him sleep with us, just roll over & nurse him, distribute snuggles as needed, but I'm afraid of how long that would go on, afraid of squashing him, and eventually we'd have to somehow get him to sleep in his own room, and that'd just get harder every night.
So, where is the happy medium? The only things I know for sure is that I want to help him learn to fall asleep on his own, without nursing/rocking/walking him to sleep. I don't even care if he gets up at night, just as long as he goes right back to sleep, not futzes around for two hours until I feed him again like he has the last two nights.

You know how older moms are always telling you to "cherish these moments while your kids are young...they grow so fast"? Well that's pretty much my mantra, not the "cherish these moments" part, but the "they grow so fast" part. I have to keep reminding myself that this stage is so temporary, SO THAT I DON'T GO INSANE!!!! That's probably not how they mean it, is it?

Confession:
I'm not a baby person.

Please don't hate me or think that I don't adore my baby or call DCFS.

Anyway.

Suggestions? What do you dooooo with a baby???

- Posted from my iPhone

Good times at the instacare!

Yesterday Sawyer had a bit of a fever so we just kind of hung out at home. That was a huge change from the globetrotting lifestyle we've adopted since Abram was born. Actually yesterday's missed ballet class was supposed to be our inaugural foray out into the world with two kids. We opted for the instacare instead when I realized that the fever I thought she had been napping off all afternoon had actually risen to 104.9. Scared me witless I tell you. She had also developed this weird chemical-burn looking thing on the back of her calf,


that I was starting to think was some sort of poisionous spider bite. Matt left a closing in the hands of Thor (his boss, not the Norse god of thunder) and met us there, apparently bawling & praying the whole way there. She has cellulitis, a bacterial infection of some nasty sort. The doctor said he was surprised she hadn't had it before because her excema makes her skin more fragile. So she got a shot & antibiotics & was skipping around a half hour later.
So today we had to go in for a follow up and it had grown, so guess what! Yup, 'nother shot AND a blood draw just for fun. And not just any blood draw, oh no, a blood draw by two of the most frighteningly troll-ish looking nurses I've ever laid eyes on. Not kidding. Facial worts with big old hairs growing out, huge burn scars, gnarly rough old hands....it was almost comical. These are the women they put in pediatrics?? Sorry, I know this sounds soooo mean. Anyway, I had to pretty much lay down on top of Sawyer while they did it to hold her still. Abram had slept like an angel until this point, but woke up to participate in a screaming duet with his sister, then promptly went back to sleep once she was done. It sucked.
On a brighter note....
So far I'm the luckiest mom of two on the planet. Abram gets a sleepy nurse right before we go to bed around 11 then again at 4 am, and then sleeps till 9. He's a week old today & I could handle this schedule forever.
I think going from zero kids to one was way harder than one to two for me personally. With Sawyer I was so anal about BabyWise that I never took the time to just enjoy comforting & being with her. It was always "the book says she should be soothing herself...the book says she should only eat for this long...blah blah blah.". Lame. With two there is no time for that, he eats, he sleeps, he poops & that's about all my requirements are this go round. It feels good. Sawyer is warming right up to him. Every second he is awake she wants to "see hims little eyes". She pets his nose & holds his hand & sniffs his head. I love it.

- Posted from my iPhone

abram's birth documented

okay, so here's the deal. at abram's birth, God sent down his personal photographer to document the goings-on. I'm not even kidding, that's how good she is.

Jessica Kettle, ladies & gentlemen.

The chic pulled an all-nighter at 6 months pregnant to do this HUGE favor for me & acts like it was actually me doing her a favor. Unbelievable. Well, at any rate, I am stupefied by the beauty of her work. So yeah, go to here to check out my baby's birth. Don't worry, there are no bits nor pieces that ought not be on the Internet.

And as for baby, he is awesome. Just a calm little old soul. He loves to be snuggled & really only cries for communication purposes. I am 100 thousand times less crazy this time around than I was after I had Sawyer, going au natural was the greatest. Honestly. It was so freaking fantastic to actually be working with my body & have the amazing support of my husband in what I was doing. words cannot express. If you have any desire at all, like at all, to go sans epidural, I would totally encourage you to do it. Recovery has been so much easier & the baby has been so alert & fun without any drugs in him right from the get-go.

The funniest thing about him though, is the fact that this is how he is with his binkie-

not even kidding. We've named it Precious. And Abram is a fiend. Sawyer didn't even even once take a binkie, so I frankly don't know how I feel about this. Actually yes, I sure do, especially all night when it falls out of his mouth & he needs someone to put it back in. that's not fun. but other than that (and engorged boobs) we are doing great. I've been completely blown away by the amount of love & support that our friends, neighbors & family have shown us. blown away, i tell ya.

Sawyer is doing pretty well, I think we prepared her as well as we could, but it's an adjustment. she has done a few little random things that are weird, like last night, washing her hands with toothpaste instead of soap....odd. does someone feel that she needs a tad bit more attention, perhaps? she's so cool though. She keeps trying to say this little saying that my nephew taught her "you get what you get & you don't throw a fit", but most times it comes out as a more directly applicable variation on it, like if I've asked her (repeatedly) to go choose her books for bedtime, she'll saunter off to do it finally, saying to herself "you go get your books & you don't not get your books."

each day we get a little better adjusted to life with two kids, and it looks like it's going to suit us just fine.

Look what I made!

Abram Douglas Davis
9 pounds, 8 ounces
22 1/2 inches long
6:04 am Thursday May 6 2010
gigantic feet
patient old soul
and yes, no epidural
awesome, life-changing, beautifully spiritual birth. More details to come.





- Posted from my iPhone

this time last birth....

I've been thinking bunches lately about this whole waiting period of "when in the crud is this baby going to get here already?" It reminds me of waiting for Sawyer to get here, and I can't help but be completely overwhelmed by gratitude for life & all that comes with it, good & bad.
this time last birth we were...
.....living at my parents house while they were on their first mission, a huge blessing, but also extremely frustrating to me as my nesting instincts took over my brain & made me want to rip carpet & wallpaper up & redo their entire house
...anxiously hoping that by some miracle something would happen with Matt's job so that I wouldn't have to go back to work after I had Sawyer
...completely obsessed with a certain other baby of ours & I personally couldn't imagine having enough love in my heart for Matt, Charlie AND a baby (seriously, I really thought that)...driving a minivan, which frankly sucked, but was very serviceable, and was an incredible sacrifice on Matt's part because he sold his beautiful truck (man, I love him!)
...rather more fat in the face than I am now. With Sawyer, and with Abram, my main goal was to keep it under 200 pounds (please remember that I am six feet tall). With Sawyer I succeeded, with Abram not so much, I was 201.4 today. wowza. But I like to think that it is due to the fact that I have a higher percentage of muscle, and it weighs more than the fat, right? Right? Because although my hands & feet look rather hobbit-like this go-round, at least my face seems to have escaped the swelling....unmedicated. On my part at least, and I'm so super excited to see how a little Wellbutrin XL does to combat the icky postpartum I experienced with Sawyer
...super uninformed. Super ill-prepared. But we made it okay, Sawyer is still alive & clearly didn't suffer too much from our lack of any idea as to what we were getting ourselves into.

But really, can you ever prepare for something that life changing? You have no idea how different things will be, you can't even imagine the love, frustration, humility, anxiety that you will go through. But especially the love. I have come to understand so much why the family is "central to the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His children". How else could we have any idea of how much He loves us? Of how easily He will to forgive us if we just are even a smidge repentant? Of how much He wants to "open to you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it"?

(one of my favorite photos courtesy of the lovely Laura Dugovic)

I talk all the time about how cool I think my kid is, but that really just scratches the surface. It's a futile attempt at explaining something that I cannot even wrap my brain around, let alone my words.

And I cannot wait to see what having Abram will bring into our lives. I cannot wait to find out what kind of a person he will be. When I was about 13 I met a cute boy named Abram. He was nice & we watched 4th of July fireworks together on his trampoline at a joint family barbecue. But the thing that I love about this name is that to me it speaks of potential. Of the potential that we can have once we "let go & let God." I hope that our son will get this concept. Of how much better and easier our lives become when we stop thinking that we can control everything, that we know better & just trust that we do have a Heavenly Father who knows & loves us. Heck, I hope that I will one day get this concept. I'm such a control freak, even in conceiving this baby. I know I had to be put through the wringer with those two miscarriages to come to understand that His timing is vastly more important (and correct) than my timing. I was trying to plan having a baby around our vacation schedule for Pete's sake!

Anyway, I'm just so grateful to be given the opportunity to attempt to raise another child of God, man, what a responsibility! It's kind of ridiculous, actually.

The Lusty Month of May

Ever since I was a little girl being carted around in a beat-up station wagon my very favorite broadway musical has been Camelot. I remember listening to the soundtrack holding the cassette tape cover tenderly, gazing at the beautiful 60s artwork & thinking that Vanessa Redgrave was the most beautiful woman on the planet. Now knowing the story, I'm surprised my mom let us listen to it. It's completely immoral, but whatevs, it's got great music, right? Anyway, the point of this story is that it's May! And every single May 1st I get the urge to dance around a Maypole & sing this song at the top of my lungs, and for the most part, people look at me like I'm a nut because I think most people aren't familiar with this musical. It's a very sad thing to me. Do you know it?
Anyway, today I'll be singing this

and tonight I'll be watching the whole 60s-arific film with my husband, I don't care if I have to chain him down & prop his eyes open with toothpicks. He's gonna love it, by damn!
And p.s. Julie Andrews also played Guinevere in another film. It's not the same. I adore Julie Andrews, but Vanessa Redgrave just....ohhhh....she's amazing, the intonation in her voice in all the songs.....ahhhhhh. You can totally see how she became kind of a medieval skank, Lancelot didn't stand a chance.