the Fam

Stealing a Minute

I'm stealing a minute from my own work time to write a quick Valerie post. She's at Grammy's right now, and Terry took Gabriel with him (after a ridiculous cluster-feed, every hour from 7 - 10 a.m. Seriously - he's now 10 lbs 14 oz, having gained another 13 oz in a week, can he really be that hungry??? Apparently, yes!!)

So, Valerie. She is growing so much. She loves to move and dance and tumble - she's mastered the somersault, and loves to run and jump and dance just for the fun of it. I love her delighted grin when we play "chase" around the house.

She's still not really talking, although her vocabulary continues to grow (she only rarely combines words into phrases). But she's really, really into numbers. She knows all the numbers up to 10, and *tries* to count to twenty ("free-free, four-four, five-five, six-six... ten-ten!") She has trouble pronouncing seven ("eppie" or "sefee") and one ("wu" or "mm") but the rest are pretty clear. She counts steps, toys, bottles in the bathroom, and so on. She can also count backwards from five down!

She's still a bit stressed out by Gabriel, and her new coping mechanism is to bang her head - well, her mouth, really - against our shoulders. This really is hard to deal with. And now she shrieks not only when she hears him make a noise (although not all the time), but when other children get within 4 or 5 feet of her. This makes playground visits a little less fun.

After several months of sleeping through the night, she started night waking again in the week after my parents left. I don't really anticipate this getting better until, oh... maybe 2011?

She's becoming a bit more picky about foods but has a new love - KETCHUP!! Anything dipped in ketchup (even grapes - ugh!) is automatically better. Definitely a Jantzi.

Quick while he naps

Saturday Gabriel - or Gici, as we call him here - it means Piglet in Albanian - was one month old, and I meant like crazy to write a nice blog post about him but, well, it's been a little hectic around here.

He's been gaining A POUND A WEEK. Fat rolls have developed around his thighs, his wrists are creased and his hands dimpled. He's about to bust out of his newborn-sized onesies. He feels like a huge chunk of baby in my arms so it always takes me by surprise when people see him for the first time and say "look, how tiny!"

Our main saga this first month of life with Gabriel - apart from Valerie's angst - has been his gassiness. About 10 days ago it got to the point where I feared he had acid reflux, and we took him to the doctor, who said no, with that kind of weight gain it was more likely overfeeding. He was nursing every hour or hour and a half round the clock - ok, maybe 2 hours at night - and spitting up after every feeding and often in between.

I'd always heard that you can't overfeed a breastfed baby, so this was surprising to me, but we followed the recommendation to use a pacifier to space his feedings slowly further and further apart with the goal of 3 hours apart in the day and 4 hours apart in the night. And it worked, as far as the spit-up goes. For a good 12 hours after our visit to the doctor he was even fairly gas-free. But the gassiness started up again in the form of grunting and fussing every time I laid him down to sleep. I knew from our first peds appt. that he swallows a lot of air when he nurses - very noisy eater, lots of clicks and whistles - so I was just working on burping him as much as possible, and we also started using gas drops to try to get the burps out better.

So Thursday I went to an "ask-a-nurse" group for new mothers; the nurse there is a lactation consultant as well and very knowledgable. It was GREAT - I can't wait for the next one. :-) As an LC, of course she said "you can't overfeed a breastfed baby," and instead confirmed what I'd been reading online - that the problem was an oversupply of milk. He wanted to eat constantly because he was only getting the thin sweet foremilk and not enough of the richer hindmilk. She recommended pumping off the excess after feeding him, seeing how much it was, and then pumping that off before feeding him the next time, slowly tapering down the amount of excess milk pumped off, until we reached an equilibrium. Well, I did what she suggested and got an astonishing 4 oz. of milk off AFTER he'd nursed! Just on one side! The odd thing was, though, that was it for excess. The very next time I nursed him I had just enough to fill him up, with less than 1/2 an oz after. So we have reached our equilibrium there.

The other thing the nurse said is that Gabriel has an unusually high palate; the roof of his mouth is domed quite high. This is not a problem per se, it just means it makes it hard for him to maintain a tight latch and that's why he swallows so much air. She said we could try using a nipple shield to help his latch. I finally went and got one and figured out how to use it, but he doesn't like it - he bites down now when I use it so I'm not sure it's a solution.

So that leaves us with just burping him. During the day it's easy; I'm up and about and I can carry him around in the front carrier (either the baby bjorn or the ella roo wrap) and in that position he eventually burps it all out on his own and is quite happy. Nights are harder. I can spend an hour after nursing him getting all the burps out, only to have to get up again a half hour later to get another bubble out. I think also at night I'm just not as patient or as alert and so we end up doing this up-and-down dance for up to five hours. I'm pretty exhausted.

Valerie never really needed burping so it was a cinch to nurse her lying down and then we'd both drift off to sleep.

oops - he's awake. More later.

Big Sister

Baby G. has been home with us for three weeks now. At the end of the first week I was all ready to write a post about how well Valerie was coping. But now that it has become clear to her that he's here to stay... she's struggling.

The first time she saw him up close (rather than through the nursery window), Terry was holding him and she responded exactly as we'd predicted - "no no no no no AAAAAAAAAAAA!" But he passed G. to someone else and she calmed down. Even when I held him, she pretty much ignored him - unless we directed her to say "hi" or to point to his eyes, nose, ears, etc.

But then the shrieking started. She'd been shrieking before, and I'd tried giving time-outs to get her to stop (it worked to quell the biting), but it really took off during the week when her cousins were here. It was hard for her to have other kids in "her" space, playing with her toys, getting attention from her parents. Someday she'll look forward to seeing them and will follow Solana around and imitate everything she does, but right now sharing is very hard. So she'd shriek every time G. or her cousins would make a noise - any noise at all - so you can imagine it was starting to get on my nerves. It's hard to see her unhappy.

I've realized that it helps not only to make a point of spending time with her, but to really give her my focused, undivided attention, even to the point of ignoring G's little grunts (he's very gassy, so they're quite frequent) and waiting to respond to him until it's clear he's ready to eat or needs to be changed. I try to validate her feelings - "you don't like it when Gabriel makes noise" - and reassure her that she's still my baby and I love her very much. I've even stopped referring to Gabriel as "the baby" and just call him Gabriel or "your brother." Someday they will appreciate and be thankful for each other - it might be 30 years, but it will come (hopefully sooner than that!). Right now I figure that what I can ask of her - and of him too, come to that - is that as they grown into social beings they treat each other with respect and kindness. The love and affection will come in time.

I'm missing my mom tremendously right now - realizing in full just how much she was doing for us here, as well as the emotional support. Thankfully there's still another grandmother in town.

Growing Boy

Today was Gabriel's due date - we had a check-up and learned he has gained a whopping 13 oz. in one week! He now weighs 7 lbs. 4 oz. Typically they expect newborns to gain 1/2 - 1 oz a day, and he's gaining almost 2! His jaundice is less too. All good news!

One Week

Gabriel is one week old today! Our angelito is sleeping on my lap as I type. He's doing really well. We had a check-up on Monday, where we learned that he'd gained 2 oz. since we left the hospital Friday, which was great news to me since I'd been worried about his sleepiness while nursing. He tends to fall asleep after just 5-10 minutes, although then he'll wake up an hour and a half later for more - especially at night! They had us check his bilirubin levels, which are 13 (22 or higher needs treatment); just to get the blood drawn we had to wait TWO HOURS at the hospital lab which was pretty much NOT our first choice for how to spend the day... but oh well. It worked out.

Our first night home was rough, but we seem to have evened out a bit. Terry re-organized our room (he's sleeping in a bassinet next to our bed) and put in an A/C unit so it's been quite nice, and the system seems to be working well (of course, at this point the system also hinges on Grandma Irma doing a ton of laundry...)

I've found that my recovery has been much easier and faster this second time around, which isn't to say it's been a breeze - I had quite a bit of back pain, especially the first few days, and could only manage to sleep sitting upright. I felt quite like I'd spent the night on an airplane. I can lie flat now and it's heavenly. Yesterday I went to the chiropractor, and today I stopped taking my pain meds altogether and feel quite achy, but nothing unmanageable.

We've also managed two family outings already - a brief foray to our Star Trek group Monday night, and last night to a DREAM Act fundraiser at Qdoba. It felt good to get out and sniff the air - especially since we've been getting rain!

Baby pictures!

Mom and baby Day 1!

All this and the World Cup too...!

He's here!!!!!

Sorry for the long delay in the announcement- but he's here! We're home, resting and recovering, learning our way around parenting a newborn AND a toddler simultaneously. More on that later... and I promise pictures too...

For now here are the stats:

Gabriel Tobias
born at July 7, 2010, 11:07 a.m.
6 lbs. 12 oz, 19 inches long*

came home Friday July 9, 2010, 2:30 in the afternoon.

Happy day!

* plus a fraction but I'm not sure what the fraction was.

48 hours

Not to make anyone nervous or anything (Terry!), but I just looked at the clock and realized that 48 hours from now - unless I go into labor before then - we'll be in the OR about to meet our son. This ever-present awareness has made it hard to sleep the last few nights as we lie awake thinking about names... deadlines (Terry)... to-do lists and the physical recovery ahead (me)...

I am so thankful that we made it to this date, given the scare we had in May. 7 weeks of bedrest has been both a blessing and a marathon of waiting. But here we are. For me at least it's a lot less scary than last time. I feel more confident, knowledgeable, and prepared. I'm SO glad that I was able to do bedrest at home and not in the hospital this time. I am so thankful that my parents were able to be here taking care of me and Valerie and for all the help we have had from my in-laws and our babysitter! Thankful to all the people who have brought meals over - some more than once - and taken the time to check in and see how we're doing.

It's hard to believe, as I feel Baby Boy kicking around inside, that so little time is left in this gestation. I want to make sure to be mindful of these moments and enjoy them.

Soon and Very Soon

... we are going to meet our son! Hard to believe. He's wiggling away, an active boy, but there are no signs of labor so I'm pretty much assuming we're going to keep our cesarean date at the new hospital Wednesday morning.

Today I dressed V. in her patriotic 4th of July outfit so that people will think she's a local:

Vote!

We are still on the fence about names... although the poll so far (see sidebar) has a pretty clear front-runner... you can write-in suggestions in the comments as well! I temporarily changed the sidebar background color so you can read the names better.

The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of trendy/popular names, and we'd also like a name that's interesting or somewhat unusual, but not too "weird." It's all very subjective, I know. We like Tobias because it's a family name (Leaman branch), although I really don't like the nickname Toby - negative association from a kid I knew in grade school - and we like Oscar because of Oscar Arias and Oscar Romero - and I like how it sounds in Spanish and English. And we like the nickname "Oz." Although most people are first going to think of Oscar the Grouch.

Boy names are hard.

Favorites

Valerie has developed some very strong preferences for certain things, including the number 9. She looks for the 9 on the digital clock in her room, on the CD player display (although her favorite song is track 8), and among her magnetic number set. In fact when she sees the 9 on the clock her whole face lights up with a big smile and she claps her hands. This developed about the time she learned the word for the digit. (She can now name them all except 1 and 7, and counts to five.)

She also looooooooves this book. Especially the "very fine animal called the Iota," and the heart-shaped "Proo." Although I find some of the illustrations (and the overall theme) somewhat disturbingly colonialist (publication date is 1950), it's a fun book to read and I've memorized enough key lines that I can recite it while she flips violently through the pages looking for her favorites. For a while there we were reading it easily more than 10x a day!

Homecoming

Today is also the day Terry comes home!

These pictures are from his last trip but I'll let them stand here emblematically (especially since that's not even the plane he left on last time). (But note the cool reflection captured in the glass. Artsy, no?)

Dave

Today is a day to remember my uncle, Dave Sparks. We miss you.

Sleep update

Soooo.... I'm almost nervous to jinx it, but I right now we're in a good place with the sleep thing. THANKFULLY. We're at the point where I now go to bed expecting V. to sleep through the night...!

In April, while T. was away, I held my breath and took the plunge of leaving the room before she was asleep... and it worked! I was astonished that she didn't cry at all, and at most I only need to go in maximum 2x before she goes to sleep on her own. This was... huge. I was so scared to try it, remembering how much it DIDN'T work last year - at least not well. Five months of CIO and she cried every. single. night. But I guess now she was ready!

Then almost by accident I discovered last month that she was able to sleep through the night when she was in the room alone by herself. After Terry left for Albania, before my parents got here, I had my sitter stay with us overnight to help with the night duty. The 2 nights Rachel slept in the next room, V. didn't wake up. The 3 nights Rachel slept in the room with her, she woke up. So ever since then we've let her sleep by herself... and the ratio of night waking to not reversed itself - instead of sleeping through the night 20% of the time, it flipped to 80% of the time - and as of today, she's gone a full week without night waking. WOW.....

We'll see how long it lasts; I'm kind of assuming that with Terry coming back, then the baby being born, my folks leaving, etc. etc., we still have a long road ahead of us. But for now it's an enormous blessing that she's sleeping well at night.

(Sadly, I still have insomnia from time to time - plus having to get up to pee every 2 hours - but it could be, and has been, so much worse.)

Growth Spurt?

I'm wondering if Valerie is going through a growth spurt? She was uncommonly clumsy yesterday evening - cut her lip on a water bottle, then fell off the lazy boy, and seemed to be tripping over her own feet with unusual frequency. She's been eating and sleeping a lot. And TALKING so much more - a lot of babbling, and a lot of echoing what we say, but generally using about 20-30 more words than she was a few weeks ago. Some big leaps there.

After supper last night I noticed a bunny sitting on the lawn across the street, so my mom and I went over with V. and I sat on the sidewalk while she (Valerie, not my mom) hop, hop, hopped while the bunnies (a second one showed up then) just stared at her :-) It was super-cute.

Friends

Valerie is not the most social of toddlers. It takes her a looooooong time to warm up to new people, and she mostly ignores other children her age. (Except, of course, when she's being required to share toys or Mommy with them.) There is a small handful of kids she tolerates and even at times acknowledges, sharing food and space with them, waving hello and goodbye. These are the kids she sees on a regular basis - usually weekly - and it's really nice to see her learning to play with others.
I wonder sometimes if her introversion is linked to her slowness in starting to talk? I mean she talks, but she's not really linking words into phrases yet, and there seem to be a lot of other kids much younger than she is who are talking much more. I know she'll talk when she's ready but sometimes I get impatient.

She did do something cute last night while I was singing "Old MacDonald" to her (the lullaby of choice) - she said, as she often does, "amamamamam" in a growly voice, which in her lexicon means the animals in the song are eating. And then she said, very clearly, "Fat!"

Pictures!

I've been getting pointed hints from certain members of the household currently abroad that there has been a dearth of recent updates in this space. Yesterday I finally got around to downloading some pictures, so here are some recent shots of the V.


Here she is in our neighbor's yard, looking for their dog (who coincidentally has the same name as our mayor - it's an unusual name, which in the northern Germanic languages means "keeper of the keys" and in Khmer means "dog." Anyway, I'm guessing by the look on her face that Kai the dog was not in sight.


Playing with water on a hot Sunday after church.


My dad ordered a whole bunch of vitamins and supplements - look at the pretty colored bottles! V. organized them in this symmetrical arrangement and spent maybe half an hour arranging and rearranging them in rows - until she got tired, knocked them all over, and ran off to do something else. (Yes, she was closely supervised, and all the bottle tops still had the manufacturer's seal on.)

She's really into arranging her toys in rows these days - stuffed animals, plastic animals, matchbox cars. Then she'll knock them all down.

check-up

I had another check-up today with the specialist at Martha Jefferson, and he said he's "amazed" at how well we are doing! My proteinuria levels are basically back to normal, and my blood pressure is under control with the bedrest and medication. I'm supposed to continue as I am with frequent monitoring until delivery. We are now at 34 weeks and the baby looks great - estimated to weigh in at 6 lbs. 6 oz. Yay!!!

no news is good news

We're holding steady here, nothing new to report, monitoring my blood pressure, taking my pills, resting. I'm beginning to get a wee bit bored but I think that's probably a good thing!

My folks got here last Wednesday and we are settling into a homey routine. I feel very loved and well cared for!

I am so thankful to be able to be at home with Valerie, even though I can't do as much with her, there are still a lot of little games we can play while I lie on the couch. One that always makes her grin: I show her a toy and say "You think this is yours?" When she reaches for it I say "It's mine!" and snatch it away. On the third reach I let her grab it but don't let go and we play tug-of-war for a minute or two. Then we do it again. For some reason she finds this hilarious.