Carsen tells his life story
Carsen is growing like a champ! Since we started him on solids last month, and formula nearly exclusively, he's really bulked up.
Fav foods so far that we can tell: prunes, sweet potatoes, green beans, squash, carrots
Also tried: rice cereal, oat cereal, bananas, potatoes, chicken, peas, peaches, avocado, cherries, blueberries, lemon, lime, pears
Geez, when I list it out, we've tried a lot. We're supposed to only try one new food every 3 days to check for reactions. And our guidelines from our pediatrician's office seem lax to me; start with cereal, start veggies when tolerating cereal, start fruit when tolerating veggies, start meat when tolerating fruit, wait for awhile for eggs (like til 8mo), wait for dairy. He eyeballs our food now. He makes a real mess. It seems to be agreeing with him well enough for the most part. We tried some ground chicken with rice cereal and he was kinda crazy at bedtime; not sure if that's a correlation. Also he had some crazy poop after bananas so we haven't revisited. I'm trying to just puree some parts of our dinner, like our potatoes last night, but I've bought the store-prepared stuff too. We just tried a sippy cup but he didn't catch on yet.
He is incredibly drooly but no teeth yet.
Sleep is better-ish most nights. He goes to sleep around 8pm and sometimes wakes at 1am and/or 3-4am and/or 5-6am. Lately he's been ready to go for the day at 6am - UGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!!! If he wakes up at 4am, I've gotten in the habit of taking him into our bed to cuddle, hoping he'll just go back to sleep for awhile. It mostly works but I'm thinking he's gotten used to this and might be waking at that time for that reason- not sure if it works that way. He gets very squirmy though so it's actually not all that restful.
Carsen is now rolling over like a pro. He can lift his whole upper torso off the ground. He's getting close to lunging at things. Right now he just spins until he gets closer. He hasn't figured out getting his knees under him yet to be able to put weight on them; instead he just swims on the floor.
But this week, I caught him sleeping on his stomach with his knees tucked under and his butt in the air; Matt said his brother Michael used to sleep that way. I carefully moved him back onto his back (which is recommended because of SIDS), went to the bathroom, checked on him again and he was back in the same position. Oh well. And Carsen loves his jumperoo; he bounces and bounces like crazy. He's just starting to sit up a little on his own.
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| Sitting up unassisted |
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| First baseball game- slept through most of it |
He laughs more.
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| Look how blonde he's getting! |
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| Carsen and Matt brought me flowers |
He was going through a weird week of growling, not like cute bear or dinosaur growling, but like demon growling ;) Haha it creeped Matt out.
Matt had a weird paranormal incident one night when I wasn't home. He put Carsen in his crib, walked into our room and turned on the video monitor, and saw an arm reaching into the crib to touch Carsen's legs, just for a moment. He thought at first it was me but I'd left 15 mins before. I'm hoping it was just one of our deceased grandparents visiting and soothing him.
Being a mom, now, is everything I hoped it would feel like. I am absolutely helplessly in love with him. I suspected and hoped that I would feel as deeply and all-consumingly as I do for my son, and it is so sweet but I love him so much it almost hurts. I would never be okay if I ever lost him; I honestly don't know how parents in those situations go on living and I feel for them with so much grief in my heart that I never knew I'd feel. It's true for me that as a parent, I can't watch the news or even movies in the same way anymore because if it's anything about children, I automatically think of Carsen. I get teary thinking of him growing up, that one day he might be heartbroken. I really do feel this animalistic protection over him; I would do anything to protect him, which I realized when someone's little dog (though on a leash) lunged toward his stroller; I suddenly knew that if the dog had been hostile at all and Carsen hadn't been high up in his stroller, I would probably have kicked and beat the dog right in front of the owner; it was this strange surge of... animal crazy. He's just so beautiful. He has the softest skin and hair and sweetest cheeks and he smells so good to me. I could kiss him 1000x a day and it wouldn't be enough. It is the most wonderful feeling. I hope Matt feels the same intensity but I'm not sure how it is for fathers.
The toughest part now is just finding the time and energy and intention to feel connected in our marriage. I'm sure it's even harder the more children are around. Date nights really help when we get those, but with all the house selling and house hunting hub bub, it's been a challenging month to manage stress and get things done and make time for each other. But seeing Matt with Carsen just makes me love them both even more.
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| I love this man! |
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| Petting Ellie for the first time |
Speaking of, I'm having a really rough time feeling sad and guilty about breastfeeding. It only went well/smoothly for us for about 2-3 wks. Then he started what I thought was a nursing strike and it's turned into a near total refusal to nurse. He's just NOT into it. And I suppose if I wanted to keep offering to him every 45 mins, he'd get enough. He's just so distracted and uncooperative. And I know breastmilk is better for him but I'm just so tired of fighting him and struggling and feeling bad about it. It's been this constant sore subject so far. I really wanted to nurse for at least a year, but we're already down to 1-2x/day and I doubt he's even getting much then because IF I can get him to stay on one side for 5mins, that's a huge accomplishment. So I've pretty much decided to just let it go and bottlefeed formula. I feel guilty that I don't want to just pump but that's awful in its own way and so inconvenient and makes me feel stressed too. So I think because of this, and moving, I'm having crazy mood swings. It just sucks. I'm battling not feeling like a failure; breastfeeding has always made me feel that way so I don't know why I still want to cling to trying to make it work when it obviously isn't. I think we had our last time nursing though. I was super engorged and really uncomfortable after a good full day of no nursing, and moody. Weaning is not cool, even though it's actually been a rather gradual decline for us in the last month and a half.
The big action this month is that we moved!! Our new house is beautiful and we're excited. We have SO much more space. Despite that, it took us 3 loads of the biggest available Uhaul truck quoted as being for a 4-bdrm home. Uh huh. We had two shifts of some amazing friends to help us and we couldn't have done it without them! It only took us 24hrs to be out. It was pretty bittersweet to leave our first home- my first house where I did so many projects (a lot with my wonderful mom's help), where we woke up on our wedding morning, where we made our baby and where we took him home, where we first created our family and home together. But it's good to be moved on. And our new home is on Hope Drive; I love the street name. The weirdest part though is just living in a house that's so new. We're the first owners and although we found the house late in its building stages (too late to be able to choose anything), we saw it get finished and that was exciting. Now we have lots of space to grow!
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| Helping Mommy move |
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| Goodbye Sonata |
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| Left the bathroom door where we'd measured my stomach getting larger- the 2nd line on the right is Sept 15 (15 wks); Oct 15 (19 wks); Oct 30; Nov 17; Dec 14 (also Feb 27, 2 days after); Dec 30; Jan 29 (34 wks); Feb 14 (36 wks); Feb 22 is the last one; then I shrunk back down to the farthest right by Mar 9 |
