I think if I posted as regularly as I should, I would start every post the same way. We are in trouble. Sarah’s personality is shining through, and she’s full of it! Last night at dinner, she was sitting in her booster seat (we decided against the big high chair) and was playing with a bracelet of Jenna’s. There was a pipe cleaner sticking out, so Jay took it away from her to bend it around so it wasn’t sharp. She FREAKED.OUT. Screaming, read face, the whole works. Well, as soon as he gave it back to her, it was like a switch. No screaming, face returned to normal color, and she happily babbled and stuck the thing in her mouth. I would call that her first tantrum. We are in trouble.
September 30, 2009
It makes me sad how much times goes by between these posts. 2 months with no documentation. Everyone knows the first year flies by, and how much change happens every day. And Jenna will be 4 next time I blink.
I am resolving to be better about this because facebook can’t be archived. I want the girls to read this one day and know how their young childhood was. And how I was.
Sarah is so awesome. She cracks me up and she is so sweet and cuddly. She’s into a shrieking phase. She has found her voice in a different way than Jenna ever did. She still loves bouncing from the doorway in her bouncy, and playing on the floor. She rolls around, but isn’t crawling yet. She wants to so bad. She will pull herself up on the coffee table though, so I think she’ll follow in her sister’s footsteps and go straight from sitting and rolling to walking. Not for a while though. I am not encouraging this mobility thing the second time around. She loves to eat. As of last week, and I am officially done nursing. She doesn’t drink nearly as much formula as the books say she should, but somehow she is still growing strong. She eats a lot of fruits and veggies. More then she should, according to “them,” but I’m fine with that. I make all her baby food and she inhales it. I feel like I can hardly keep up with her! That’s OK though.
Sarah is still way attached to me, and we’re constantly working on that. She’s getting a little better in some ways, but I still feel so sorry for those people at church and at MOPS who have to deal with her screaming every Friday & Sunday.
Jenna is her father’s daughter. That kid has energy like nobody’s business. Sometimes I don’t think she is capable of walking. I always thought all kids had as much energy, spunk, and will as she does, but a lot of people comment to me about it. Friends with kids her age, her teachers, and acquaintances without kids her age. To say she is little miss independent would be a severe understatement. Not only does she have to do EVERYTHING herself, but she throw a fit if we try to help her. She can do a lot of things I wouldn’t think she could do at her age though, so it’s not a bad thing. She cracks us up all the time. The things that come out of her mouth are so random sometimes. I am keeping a log of the ones I think to write down, so I’m not that bad. Although she prefers to always be playing, jumping, dancing, running, singing, or climbing, she has definitely moved past her dislike of TV. I’m thrilled about it. I may not lose my sanity (what’s left of it, anyway) afterall. She is currently obsessed with Mickey Mouse. It started out with Dora, then moved to the Backyardigans, and now Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. One thing at a time. I feel very confident that within the next month, she will move on to something else, which makes Christmas shopping difficult at this point.
I am so proud of Jenna. She is so very sweet and has shown a big inprovement in listening. It’s still not her best skill, but she understands now that there are consequences if she ignores me. She is learning things all the time, and enjoying things like coloring, puzzles, and games. She only likes to do those things when one of us does them with her, but it won’t be long before her sister can participate in those things.
That’s the girls in a nutshell. I have been praying for a better appreciation and attitude about staying home with them because I know I am blessed to be able to do it, but sometimes I really would like my life back. I am doing a little part-time work again, and if I can work out babysitting, that should be a big addition to life. But this week has been an eye-opener and has led to a newfound appreciation for staying home with my babies. I have one good example and one bad example of that:
First, the good. I took the girls to the zoo Monday. Just the 3 of us. We had the best time. Jenna cooperated, listened, and enjoyed looking at the animals. I genuinely loved spending that time with her. Sarah rode around in the jogging stroller and never even cried. She liked looking at everything and didn’t demand to be carried. It was super hot, but other than that it could not have been more perfect.
Now, the bad. And it’s bad. Maybe the worst moment of my life. I’m sure there will be more though. I took the girls to Academy yesterday afternoon to try shoes on Jenna. I had Sarah in the cart, in her cloth cart cover thing. We do this in all stores now, and she has never so much as pulled both legs out of the leg holes. Yesterday when I was on the floor trying shoes on Jenna, I looked up at Sarah and she was hanging halfway over the side, about to fall on her head. I jumped up and tried to grab her, but I was one second too late. I watched her fall onto her head on the tile floor. I immediately grabbed her and tried to console her. She let out one cry, but hesitated a long time before taking that breath back in, and then went pale and limp. I panicked and was just trying to get her to respond to me, when an onlooker asked if she should call 911. I said yes, so she did and it was probably 5 minutes that she was talking to them and I was trying to get Sarah to open her eyes or cry. She was trying to open her eyes, but they were kind of rolling back and she wouldn’t cry. It was the scariest thing I can think of because at that moment I really didn’t know if she would be OK. In those minutes that the lady was on the call, Sarah did start crying, though kind of quietly at first. Then she started crying harder, and I was very happy about that. By the time the paramedics got there, her eyes were open enough that I could see her pupils looked normal. She stopped crying and just got quiet and clingy. They checked her out and said she seemed fine, and gave me several signs to look for. When we got home, she seemed very lethargic and just not herself. She had long blinks and wasn’t very responsive to smiling like she normally is. She is normally a very happy baby (as long as I’m around!). Jay was home at that time, and agreed that she was not normal and we decided we should probably take her to the ER. My mom was going to come stay with Jenna while we went, but by the time she got there, Sarah started to act pretty normal. I fed her and she ate normally. She was smiling again, playing on the floor, and didn’t seem so tired. A pediatrician friend of ours recommended that we take her to get scanned anyway, since it was such a long fall onto such a hard floor. We called Dell Children’s and after an hour, finally got to talk to a nurse. She asked me tons of questions and seemed really surprised there were no bumps or anything. In spite of that, she recommended we take her in. So we did, and we were among hundreds of flu patients. We though this is great–she may be fine, but she may end up getting the flu after this! After a couple of hours of waiting, we decided to leave. It was still going to be hours before we were seen, and she was not showing any signs that they told us were dangerous. Both the paramedics and the nurse confirmed that it is not dangerous for her to sleep–that’s an old wives’ tale. So we talked to a very helpful nurse at the ER who said chances are that if we did get seen, they would not do anything except tell us what to watch for. We jostled her a couple of times during the night to make sure she was conscious, and then this morning she woke up as her usual, happy, hungry self. Ever since then, she’s been fine. The nurse on the phone told me that sometimes it can take up to 48 hours for symptoms to appear if there is bleeding on the brain, and that still has me freaked out. But since she is so normal, I really think God is just looking out for her and she is fine. That’s what most of my brain says…the other part can’t stop playing that horrible falling moment over & over, and thinking she can’t possibly come away from that without so much as a scratch on her head. BTW, the helpful nurse did tell us that sometimes kids will go into shock when something like that happens, and they’ll get pale & quiet. He said that before we even told him about her initial reaction, so that helps settle my mind tremendously.
Long, LOOOONG story, but both of those things make me appreciate my girls so much. I love getting to spend so much time with them and these things make me not take it for granted.
July 19, 2009
Seriously, she’s 6 months old today. How did that happen? I’ve given up trying to post regularly, but I’ll try to make up for lost time. I’m trying to cut down on facebook anyway, and I am still under the delusion that I really will archive this for the girls’ later viewing.
Sarah has hit a magic age. Ahh, 6 months. She is much happier. But so big! I look back at those early pictures of her first few weeks and I want to cry. One one hand, life is much better now than it was then. But she is getting too big!!!
We have her 6 month appointment this week, so I’ll get her stats. But I know she weighs about 18 pounds because when we took Jenna to the doctor last week, we stuck her on the scale. We took Jenna on a Sunday because she had swollen tonsils, but it turns out it wasn’t the strep she’d had a few weeks before that. It took a $12 triage phone call and a $35 “urgent care” co-pay to figure out there was nothing wrong with her. Anyway.
It took a good 5 months for Sarah to quit crying every.single.evening for no apparent reason. So exhausting. But now the colic is done and she is like a new baby. She did find her thumb, and routinely uses it to soothe herself. It’s good because she can soothe herself, but I don’t know how we’ll break that. Jenna never sucked her thumb, but she had a paci till she was 3.
Sarah is not drooling quite as much as she was in the few previous months, but she now has a tooth! Her very own bottom tooth poking through the gum. I am still breastfeeding, but when those top teeth come in, I may need to rethink that. We started giving her rice cereal about a month ago, and now I have started mixing baby food fruit in it. I am making most of her baby food, but now comes the fun part when I actually get to start feeding it to her.
Sarah rolled over for the first time July 2. She now loves to roll from back to front, but can’t seem to get back over. 
She loves to bounce in her johnny jumper thing, and also she loves to hang out in the bumbo. I love it, too! Her thighs are getting too chunky for it though. She won’t last too much longer in it, I think, but she’ll be sitting up on her own and we can sit her in a booster seat. She sits pretty well now, but falls over. She probably has another month or so before she’ll be able to sit unassisted. I am loving this pre-mobile time right now! Bath time is another fun time of day. She really likes her bath. She got a little too big for the infant tub though, so now she gets her bath in the kitchen sink.
I don’t remember this baby time flying by so fast with Jenna. I also don’t remember loving it so much. I just don’t get tired of holding Sarah. Ever. And I am with her all day long. I guess I just know it goes by fast and she’s our last one. I do get tired of her waking us up in her middle-of-the night I’m-not-happy-and-I-need-you-to-feed-me-so-I-can-go-back-to-sleep fits, but hey, you take the good with the bad. It’s easier for me to nurse her back to sleep than to deal with her crying and waking up Jenna. It’s a recipe for disaster later, I’m sure, but I’ll deal with that when I need to. It doesn’t happen every night.
On to Jenna. What to say about Jenna? She has got to be the most stubborn kid on the planet. People always told me 3 was worse than 2. When Jenna was 2, I remember thinking no, that can’t be. But now I know that it really is worse. People with 2-year-olds ask me how is it worse? I can’t really explain it. I guess she is just smarter about her defiance now. She makes me crazy. Sometimes, in a matter of 30 seconds, I can go from wanting to lock myself in a room in the fetal position with my fingers in my ears to hugging her and telling her how much I love her.
She is non-stop all day. One of our friends (incidentally, the father of a 3-year-old), recently told her “Jenna, your energy level is through the roof.” She just smiled and said “Oh, thank you.” She does crack me up. Sometimes Jay & I have to keep from laughing. Like the other day when I asked if she was done eating. She looked at her plate and said “Does it LOOK like I’m done eating?” The girl does love to eat, but only if it’s something good. Veggies, not so much. Chocolate? She goes ape for chocolate. She has a certain way of saying “chocolate.” She smiles, scrunches her nose, and drags it out. I wish I could get it on video…I’ll have to make that a goal.
Jenna has to do everything herself. EVERYTHING. She insists, and if she can’t do whatever it is that she insists on doing herself, she gets frustrated and cries. But she won’t ask for help, and if I try to help her, she throws a fit. Ahhhh, 3. The upside of that is that by now, she has learned how to open the car door, get in, close the door, and buckle herself in the car seat. She can also unbuckle herself, but I won’t go into that. She loves to do new things. She loves her gymnastics class, her Mother’s Day out (so do I!), her playdates, parks, going for walks, picking flowers, running aimlessly anywhere and everywhere, climbing, and swimming.
We got an above-ground pool in our back yard and it has been wonderful. We have great family time in there, and with the temps above 100 almost every day, it’s so refreshing. It’s so cold, in fact, that Jenna hasn’t wanted to get in lately. That’s kind of surprising, but the girl is full of surprises. She still likes bath time, and I look forward to the day she & Sarah can take baths together.
Jenna continues to be clumsy, just like her mama. Poor kid is always falling down. Sometimes it’s like she doesn’t even notice that she has just fallen on her face. It happens several times a day. Several times an hour. She can fall down when she’s just standing there. That takes talent, doesn’t it? I hate to laugh, but sometimes I can’t help it. She does make me laugh a lot. It’s fun to have conversations with her because she has quite the imagination. And I can see her mind working when I ask her questions. She does talk a lot. A LOT. Like, all the time. Jay & I can’t have a conversation because she’s always interrupting. We’ve been working on that. So instead of interrupting, she’ll just sing really loud or something. One thing that makes me really happy is that she has taken an interest in TV. Is that supposed to make a mom happy? She has gone through her phases, but overall she just hasn’t been interested. Even on road trips, she wants nothing to do with the DVD player in the car. In fact, last trip, we had it positioned so Sarah could watch Baby Einstein on it. Anyway, lately Jenna is really into the Backyardigans. She would watch 6 episodes in a row if I would let her. I haven’t gone that far, but I have let her watch 3. Then the guilt sets in. As much as I love having some time without her attached to my heels, I’m still her mom.
