Mommy and Sweet Pea

We just got home from the hospital, with our baby still inside me. We are probably one of the few families happy to leave labor and delivery without the baby being born yet. The reason I am so happy is that the baby was in a breech position (head up, more dangerous to deliver, usually lead to a cesarean) and we had a successful procedure to turn the baby head down! It was not painful, didn't take very long, and baby and I are both doing great! Husband is napping on the couch, while I am actually full of energy right now. The procedure, called an external cephalic version, generally has a 50-70% success rate, but I had lots of factors in my favor including the fact that this is my second baby and I have plenty of amniotic fluid. We found out on Wednesday of this week that the baby was breech, went in to a clinic for an ultrasound to confirm and do an anatomical scan to make sure a version would be safe on Thursday, and went in to the hospital for the version today. In between, w...

Christmas morning excitement! Playing with sidewalk chalk on Christmas day. Decorating the tree a few weeks ago. And still pregnant - due in just 2 weeks!

After Stella's bath tonight, Joe picks her up and I come over and give her a kiss. She says, "I love you guys" and hugs us, one, then the other, then both together, again and again. These are the things I want to remember forever.

First half of the post, written a week ago I really wanted to LOVE being pregnant. I wanted to feel "better than I've ever felt," full of life, and beautiful. Well, I'm not as miserable as some, but a lot of things about being pregnant are difficult for me. There have been times I have felt inadequate because of this. Like, why can't I take better care of myself so that I feel more healthy and rested more of the time? But it is just plain hard. I am still awake after midnight tonight because of awful heartburn/reflux. I have eaten tons of papaya enzyme pills, just drank a glass of milk, and have remained upright ever since I put Sweet Pea to bed, but am still having painful burps, that I know will become unbearable if I lay down before the acid subsides. This has been a rough week for sleep, and I was so tired last night after work that all I could do was put away a few dishes before settling down on the couch for the rest of the evening. I went to bed early an...

What I have been doing:Working working working, cooking dinners, walking the dog, cleaning house, planning the baby room, visiting friends, going to yoga, playing with Sweet Pea, going to appointments (midwives, chiropractor, massage), reading, even watching a little TV. Basically, I've been just living my life. Mixed in there, I spent my first night away from Sweet Pea when Average and I took a "babymoon" to Ashland, OR to spend the night and see a play. I survived (barely) five days of single-working-pregnant-parent life while Average helped his dad with a building project in Eastern Oregon. I also went to a Saturday training on teaching Shakespeare, finished the first quarter of teaching, and had and recovered from a terrible cold.We went to the pumpkin patch multiple times and celebrated Halloween with parties and trick-or-treating. In the coming month we will: host Thanksgiving at our house this weekend, go to Gold Beach for Thanksgiving with my mom,...

This just might be the only photo of myself I post this pregnancy. Here I am about five and a half months pregnant, in the tank top and shorts I wore under a dress I wore to work. I have had a few people tell me I'm carrying the baby like it's a boy, but I feel like it's carrying the same way as I did with my first baby, a girl! What do you think?

I just ordered a present for Sweet Pea online. I haven't done much online shopping in a long time since I'm trying to not really do much shopping at all lately, but I love the excitement of getting a package in the mail! I bought her these gardening gloves from Montessori Services. Whenever we are in the garden she wants to use gloves, because I usually am, but she only has two pair of mittens, and they are nice knitted wool ones that don't do so well digging in the dirt. I think these will be great! Sweet Pea LOVES helping me do things, and sometimes she's actually a help and not a hindrance :) The other night she helped put away the clean silverware. She has been really into cooking in her kitchen ever since we got it, and will make us interesting concoctions like hot dog soup with mayonnaise and peanut butter (with toy food, not real). For now, her kitchen set is out on the back patio, but when the weather gets cold we may try to squeeze it into her bedroom. ...

Something that I dreaded, feared, and looked forward to all at the same time finally happened this summer: I weaned my daughter. Or, more accurately, we weaned together. It was a combination of her asking and needing less, my pregnant body producing less, and a very very busy itinerary through June and July that led to eventually completely stopping breastfeeding. I'm not even sure when our last yime nursing was. She started asking for a bottle of milk at bedtimes sometimes instead of nursing, and now usually drinks about 3 ounces of milk or water before going to sleep on a pretty regular basis. She also goes potty before bed now and hasn't had a night-time accident in a long time. My big girl dancing I am a lucky mom. I had no engorgement, no anger from my daughter, and just a few tears when I told her my momma milk was going away. That only happened once that I remember, and made me feel bad for a moment, but she was less upset then than she has been many times for somet...

Warning: Don't read this post unless you enjoy stories about toddler bathroom trials and antics. Poop is gross - but it's also funny sometimes. I guess I never did that potty-learning update that I promised back in... oh... January I see it was. I guess I was waiting until we were really REALLY done with accidents. They are pretty rare now, but I can now see more clearly that like everything else, this is going to take longer and be more effort than I had initially expected. Not that things are going badly. Not at all. Sweet Pea has maybe one accident a week right now. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I'd say we're 95% there. She likes her underwear, loves picking them herself and even putting the clean ones away in her drawer. She wore diapers again for 4 days in July while recovering from the flu, then seamlessly transitioned back to "undies" with almost no prompting from us. Here's the dirt, though: learning to poop on the potty took a LONG time. L...

I had a huge to-do list at the start of the summer, itemizing a variety home improvement, yard improvement, and personal improvement projects that I wanted to accomplish during my break from working outside the home (I am a high school teacher). I like a challenge. My personal motto, besides "Who dares to teach must never cease to learn" (John Cotton Daana), is probably "Go big or go home" (attributed to Eliza Dushku on the Internet, but used by coaches everywhere). I tend to plan big, and believe I can do it. Sometimes I can, but not always. So far, I have gotten a slow start on my list, but I am gaining momentum. I have exactly three weeks left before work begins again, and I think I'm going to get the majority of my list done. This last week has been a big one for accomplishments. So far, I (with Average) have: weeded, pruned, and beautified the front yard built a kind of retaining wall for the flower bed next to our patio bought blueberry bushes and a h...

We only took about 100 photos for all of July, and we took three trips and went to a wedding reception. Not a very good photo month for me. I always like to have lots of photo evidence of what we've done, and of course the changes in my little girl, to help me remember in the future what our lives are like right now. Our trips were Eastern Oregon twice, and Ashland once. They were memorable, full of good times and learning (Ashland was a class about teaching Shakespeare's plays and I got to see 4 live performances!), and lots of fun with family. I just wish I had more photos to look back on from them. Even at my dad's wedding reception I only took a few photos, and they all seem a bit out of focus. I think there was some dust on the lens. Also, I am now 17 weeks pregnant, and I have very few photos of my growing belly! New resolution: take more pictures. My other resolutions, to exercise every day and clean up the piles around the house, have not been so successful lately, ...

A week ago, Sweet Pea and I took a trip to my hometown, to visit my family. Average had to work, so it was just us gals. Sweet Pea did great on the drive both ways. It is about a 4-hour drive, and I learned my lesson from past trips and planned for about 3 stops, and to be driving during her nap. It worked out! I actually enjoyed her company in the car most of the time, as she pointed out sights along the road, motorcycles, and told me little stories (apparently everyone in our family, grandparents included, will be getting different colored motorcycles and riding around with bunnies). There was no screaming at all. Either she's growing up, or I'm getting better at knowing what is needed to keep little ones happy in the car. Probably both. Here are some photos from our adventure: She's all packed and ready to go The viewpoint in Port Orford - our last pit stop on the way down. We decided we might as well go put our feet in the sand, so... We did! Barefoot i...

Finishing projects that have been on the to-do list for months, like cleaning the car and touching up the paint in my bedroom Sunny weather after days of dreariness Sweet Pea NOT throwing up today after being sick yesterday I exercised! Picking strawberries and raspberries in the back yard with my daughter Sweet Pea took a 2+ hour nap (rare!), allowing me to shower, and accomplish the things on my to-do list Making popsicles out of leftover fruit smoothie No morning sickness or nausea today. I am 12.5 weeks pregnant :)

Hanging out in bed the other morning, my child says to me: "I'm a doggy, Mama. I'm a doggy." Then she licks my face. She likes to talk on two phones at a time. These phones are usually actually calculators, cups, toy walkie-talkies, toy food, or whatever is handy. A funny joke right now is to point at me and say, "That's dada," then point at her dad and say "And that's Mama." We eat imaginary chips and pretzels that she finds everywhere: on the ground, in the bath, under the table, in books. Anything remotely counter-like becomes a restaurant from which she serves us. "What do you want, Mama?" then she runs off to retrieve the imagined item, goes back behind the "counter," and hands us empty air. Make believe is fun!

After more than a week of dreary, rainy weather, the Willamette Valley is finally sunny and warm this afternoon. I should be outside, catching up on the massive amounts of weeding I need to do, playing with Sweet Pea and Glen in the sunshine, and brutally murdering the slugs and snails that are trying to eat my teeny tiny plants. Instead, I am inside, catching up on uploading photos to facebook, since I haven't updated in about two months. Sweet Pea is playing with my makeup bag. Even though I rarely wear makeup, she is obsessed with it. On Fridays at her daycare the big girls get to play with makeup, so she thinks it is the coolest thing ever. Our plans for tomorrow include the final toddler dance class, family music time and new books from the library, a meeting with a possible doula client, and a 3-year-old birthday party. It will be a fun, full day! Sunday is open so far, which is good because maybe I'll actually get to some of the yard work that needs doing. I am just so...

My husband and I both lived large chunks of our own childhoods without a television. We talked about it before we even planned on children of our own in any kind of concrete terms, and agreed: kids don't need to watch TV, and shouldn't watch it very often. We managed to keep Sweet Pea TV-free until a month or so before our flight to Hawaii. My brilliant plan for entertaining her on the flight was watching shows on the iPod touch, so we started warming her up to the idea well in advance. Somehow, between then and now we have progressed to her watching an episode of Sesame Street or Cat in the Hat on Neflix on demand (we don't have cable and only get a couple of channels) most days. How did this happen? As with most habits (and vices), it was gradual. She started asking for Elmo more often, and we started turning to it more often as something to occupy her while we cooked, cleaned, etc. Confession: I have even left her inside with the TV while I mowed the lawn (I used to ...

"Rose, do you have a plan?" Average asked, as I began aggressively yanking sheets up plastic up out of our front flower bed. No, I didn't. All I knew was that I didn't want plastic in my way anymore as I tried to plant my three new flowers, and I didn't want to see it poking up out of the ground, or pull chunks of it up as I was trying to weed, as I had been doing all afternoon. I can accept that plastic has many uses, but I don't want my garden to be one of them. Over time it loses its functionality as a weed deterrent, and slowly breaks down but never goes away. I have ranted about this before. By the end, I had filled half of our garbage can with plastic, unearthed a broken section of drainpipe for our gutters, and turned over all of the bark mulch (apparently barkamulch is not a real word) in the area next to our house so it looks like new again! Luckily I married a man who can make a plan, and he brought out a rake and a shovel and helped me ...

I saw a commercial for an absolutely idiotic product the other day. Sorry to the people who invented these, but seriously? Disposable paper towels for your home bathroom? Don't we already use too much paper with our kitchen paper towels, our toilet paper, and our paper napkins? I have been trying to get away from using disposable products, not trying to find ways to bring more into my life. We do still have paper towels in our kitchen, and I use them occasionally for greasy or dirt messes in the kitchen, but I mostly try to use cloth towels, napkins, and cleaning rags. They do just as good or better of a job, don't fall apart in your hands, and don't need to be constantly replaced (costing money and natural resources). Why in the world would you want to add ANOTHER costly disposable product to your bathroom, when most people already have plenty of good hand towels? The commercial shows many people using the towels after not thoroughly washing their hands. OK, that is ki...

A few years ago Average bought a digital camera. He searched for a while to find the most indestructible (least destructible?) one out there. He ended up with an Olympus Stylus 770 SW that is shock and waterproof. It quickly became the main camera we used, even though I already had a nice Nikon film camera, as well as a digital camera. This one was indestructible! And it fit in our pockets! Why would we use something else?! An added, fun benefit of this camera is that Sweet Pea can use it without scaring us too much -- except that one time she started swinging it around her head... So, for your entertainment, here are the artistic photographs of two-year-old self-portrait portrait of mommy portrait of dada Ok, she didn't take this one, obviously, but isn't she cute? That last photo is watching Saturday morning TV, while I do the dishes from the night before that I was too tired to do at the time. Do you ever let your kids use the camera? Interesting result...

I believe this will be a multi-topic post. I don't normally like to do that much but it has been a while and I have a lot to share! First, I'd like to explain the reasons for the long delay between posts (besides me just being lazy and feeling like watching a TV shows on Netflix on demand with Average after Sweet Pea falls asleep at night, rather than blogging). I had bronchitis for A MONTH. It has been awful. I am still coughing a tiny tiny bit but I have gone running twice in the last few days and didn't die or need to use my inhaler so I think I am pretty much better. I used a variety of homeopathic remedies, took vitamins, and ended up also taking antibiotics, Robitussin with codeine, and using my albuterol inhaler multiple times per day. I drank a gallon of elderberry juice. Nothing seemed to really work more than anything else, except the inhaler, which would allow me to breathe, without coughing until I gagged (I even vomited one time), for a while. During this bou...

Cough Cough Cough That's what I sound like all day long right now. This whole week I have only worked 2 days, and when I am at home I am either laying on the couch or in my bed coughing and coughing. I have had THIS cough for over two weeks, following a different cough-cold that lasted nearly a month but was much milder, and I'm going to the doctor tomorrow. I really really hope he has something helpful for me since we have a high deductible heath insurance plan, meaning anything non-preventative comes straight out of my empty pockets. This cough has made me grumpy. Sorry to my family, friends, co-workers, and students. It's not you, it's the cough. In other news, Sweet Pea turned two years old last weekend! I plan to do a whole post about that sometime soon, complete with adorable photos (hopefully - I haven't even looked at what we took yet). Our little angel is two years old: a walking, talking, potty-using, kindly bossy, occasionally screamy, but mostly fun a...

We have never cut Sweet Pea's hair, and it has gotten longer than shoulder length, and is pretty wild with a cowlick in the back and some curls. She doesn't like to spend much time sitting still, so we have always had a hard time getting it pulled back nicely. Luckily, our daycare provider is amazing with hair and so Sweet Pea comes home in the afternoons with such pretty creations as these: Double french braids (pay attention to the hair only, please) Pigtails with zigzag part Ponytail with headband She LOVES having her hair made pretty by her daycare provider, and I have learned a few tricks about how to get the hair smooth, how to not pull, and how to get it to stay in. I still am nowhere near as skilled as I'd like to be someday, but I have gotten better! The tips I've gotten so far are: use a spray bottle to mist the hair as you brush it out; hold the hair above the point where you are combing or removing a hairtie; and use the tight rubber bands.

My daughter amazes me every day. Sweet Pea says complete sentences like: I'm sitting down; I want some milk; Dada eat that. She sings songs, "reads" books, and rocks her babies to sleep. She has strong opinions: "turn it off, Mama" "I need that!" but still says thank you and please most of the time, which makes me so proud. She tells us she's "going running" then takes off down the hall, and spills things and then says "oops, I dropped it!" The rough times lately, that feel like we are entering the 'terrible twos,' are the occasional ten minutes of crying over something as small as not getting a second squirt of toothpaste on her toothbrush, or having a pen taken away that she was about to use to draw on the wall. Most of the time we can avoid this kind of total emotional over-reaction by offering a trade, explaining an alternative, distracting, or making it a game, but sometimes she is just too focused on the thing th...

We started potty training on Saturday, today is Wednesday, and we have only had 1 full accident per day Monday through today, not counting during sleep. Pretty successful I feel! Yesterday at daycare she held it all day then peed during her nap, and today she peed in the potty for her daycare provider. Yay! The method we are using is kind of a cold-turkey thing but Sweet Pea hasn't requested a diaper except for getting ready for bed the first night. So, I am selling most of our cloth diapers! It was a hard choice because we would really save the most money in the long run if we just kept all of these ones for the next baby, and it will be hard to say goodbye to some of our pretty pretty Goodmamas. Is it weird to be attached to diapers? The reason I decided to go ahead and sell now is that #1 we could really use the cash now, #2 we have very very limited storage space in this house and I don't want to buy yet another storage tub to hold items that we won't use for more tha...

Tonight is our second night of a three-day focused effort of potty learning. We have been through probably 30-40 pair of underwear, 2 sets of sheets, and many M&Ms. About an hour ago Sweet Pea sat on the potty and peed more than just a trickle for the first time since she was under  a year old. So exciting! She has definitely been getting the idea over the last couple of days but for some reason has a hard time really letting go when she's sitting on the potty and will pee again a few minutes after she gets off. We are using the three day method and I have really positive feelings about it. I will share more later but just wanted to dash off a quick update since it's been a while. Happy three day weekend!