Okay so I am a few days early but essentially my little kiddo is 9 months old and more and more like a little human every moment. There is a lot going on… Since last week:
1. We met the “other parent” She is very nice. I feel blessed that she is like us in almost every way. We have no plans to get together again but I am sure we will, because we genuinely liked her. We agreed to work together as two families to manage the information. We also agreed that the “sister” word was not one we embraced. It was 4 hours of nice conversation. The girls are only 10 months apart and were infatuated with each other.
2. LJ busted through 3 teeth…and ran a fever..that kept going. Yep, another UTI. Landed us in the emergency room on Sunday. It was a miserable horrible yucky experience. I cried, Amber cried. Lily got bruises from feeble attempt to take blood. It really was horrendous and disappointing because we are so so close to surgery now… there is virtually no way around it… just have to continue to keep her healthy until she hits 1 year.
3. Just today she started feeling better… and resumed cruising around the living room… thats right she is an awkward jumbly crawler but she pulls up like a champ and cruises around her crib, the furniture – basically anywhere. She busts out this fantastic smile while standing and can stand for 30-45 minutes before she sits herself down.
So, somewhere along the way my smidge became a 20 lb toddler like human with wants and needs and the growing ability to communicate them. I barely know what to do with her and I just can’t wait for the surprises that tomorrow will bring.
I was right on the edge of closing down this blog. I am still an avid reader and when LJ cooperates I can comment but in the list of things to be done I never can find time for blogging. I have been finding time for sewing, working, nursing, cooking, and scrambling to keep up with a cute 8 month old who doesn’t crawl but pulls herself around with her arms. In fact I think she may skip over completely the crawling …she just loves standing. You get her standing and she giggles and smilies and laughs. She has 100% mastered pulling up and will do it on anything including ottomans, her crib, the couch, and even in the pool during her first swim. Much as I love her she is not what is making me on edge.
The Edge For those who you who know us in real life… we don’t want this spread around and we aren’t too keen to talk about it yet. It is not bad news but it is completely shocking to us and frankly I haven’t had the time to process it.
So the story goes…we were showing our sperm bank and Donor.sibling. Reg to close friends who are getting ready to start TTC. We have chosen at this point not to register with that site, but I have looked at it a few times. We knew that Charlie (our affectionate name for our donor) had offspring…But there was a new one listed. The sign-on name was eerily familiar. Looked up and told everyone in the room that I thought LJ had a biological sibling in our same city. You see I am part of a natural and attachment parents group in our city. We mainly chat online about all things cloth, boob, gentle, crunchy. I recognized the sign-in from that board. I recorded her child’s birthdate and went straight to the board when in seconds I confirmed it was the same child.
So now I’m like f*ck. I talk to this woman at least once a week. I start freaking out. I know some of you choose to have relationships with the biological siblings but to this point we had decided not to but that new information kinda threw a wrench into things… So I emailed her and basically said – We have something in common, gave her the donor number, told her I didn’t feel right having the information and not sharing it and left it open. She wrote back about shock and awe and needing time to process.
Fast forward 12 hours… we are part of a CSA in the area and every year they have a farm party… it was yesterday.. I had posted on the board that we were going and said, “we are two moms and a baby – should be easy to spot” I noticed that she was also a member of the CSA. I have to say I spent much of the party scouring for a little girl about 18 months.. I found her easily. I won’t say he looks like LJ – but they don’t look dissimilar. They have similar skin tones and her hair is how I imagine LJs will be as little tiny curls have begun to peek out of the sides… This kid had a mess of curls. I decided that if she wanted to approach the ball was in her court… we were sitting just blankets away. As we got up to leave she came over… introduced herself and her daughter (who has a very similar name as LJ) I spent out brief conversation on the verge of throwing up and tears. It was just so earth shattering.. I was so thankful that she didn’t rush up and want to be BFFs. She seemed as taken aback as we were… We left it open with no plans to get back together at a specific date just a general recognition that we would chat again. So let me recap:
Charlie has an offspring, raised by a lesbian single mother by choice, being raised less than 2 miles away, with a similar first AND middle name even though we used a donor from several states away.
So yeah… I guess you could say I am on edge. Oh and the kicker… our donor’s supply is out.
CD 1 – I knew this day would come but I have very odd feelings about it. After all of our BFNs – my memory of AF is one of displeasure, so it feels odd to not have a bad emotion attached to it.. It is amazing that it has been 17 months since my last one… I’m not exactly sure where time goes.
Frankly, I am a little glad that I started because I have been perfectly miserable and sad for a few days now and I just couldn’t figure out why. I never had much PMS – I wonder if these are the hormones being flushed out. I just figured it was lack of sleep since darling LJ is sick again. We had about a week of her sleeping through the night again before she came down with this thing… (uti, then tooth 1, then cold 1, then tooth 2, then cold 2) Today, we are waiting on some tests to see if it is viral or another UTI. If it is a UTI – then surgery becomes a sooner and more real thing. I’m holding my breath that a random virus is causing her fever to spike up and down.
So the past few weeks have been jammed up with firsts… This past weekend LJ went on vacation for the first time. We headed up to Delaware to Rehob.eth Beach for a long weekend before the height of the season. We usually stay in a B&B – but who wants a 7 month old next door to them? So, we rented a house with our BFFs and loved every minute. Lj was a champ on sleeping, the car rides, the walks – the only big snaffu was we switched to disposable diapers for the 4 day trip and every number 2 leaked and she got diaper rash. Back in yummy soft cloth and all of our problems are gone. So even if we wanted we can’t switch from cloth now. The big debut of the trip was the er.go. I had been putting off buying it because of the cost but with the prospect for a long weekend walking on the beach, board walk, and around town – with a 17lb babe – we decided to go for it.. It was scrumptious.
In other news as Lj becomes more and more busy and more and more mobile my daytime breaks become shorter and shorter… Such is the life. I love it and I am glad that it is beginning slowly. It makes it easier this way.
I’ll spare you the usual, “sorry its been so long…its been busy…im still reading, but don’t have time to comment intro” just know I mean it.
I dont know what part of me believed it but i really imagined that becoming a mother would help me feel more sympathy for my own mother. I really thought I would be able to understand what drove her to drink and what made her so sad. I thought that as sleepless nights piled onto sleepless nights that some shred of light would illuminate our relationship. But, no if anything I understand much less about that woman. This weekend was the 3 year anniversary of her passing. I’ve been pretty down in the weeks leading up to this. It wasn’t until this morning that I figured out that becoming a mother has made me lose faith in my own mother. It makes me understand her choices, behaviors, and quirks even less. It makes me mourn the loss of LJ’s grandmother – but not specifically my own mother.
This realization (made even worse by the memoir I just finished reading) has made me very sad. The narrator of the book reminded me so much of my mother, it was painful to read. I am now reading a new memoir (I get a little addicted to them when I am down) called Middle Place. It is about the middle place between being someone’s child and someone’s parent. It is a sad book – but I don’t identify at all. Which may just be the whole point. I yearn for the safe arms of a parent, for a shoulder to sob on, for housing advice, and for a safety net. I know that I am stronger having lived the last 13 years without that – but it doesn’t take the want away.
Smidge
I would rather update everyone on the smidge in a seperate post – but who knows when the computer would be charged, I’ll have something to say and nap time will all coordinate again so here goes.
She eats – a lot. Just about anything you give her. Favorites? avocado, squash
I caught her pulling up in her crib on Friday. She might just be the freaky baby that walks before crawling since she still can’t stand tummy time.
She is a busy busy girl and a confident sitter and as much as she likes to have someone to play with – she is perfectly content to play by herself.
She has a temper.
She now cries when she doesn’t get her way, not just when she needs something. I’m not sure what to do about this yet.
She bites… because she has two teeth… first one appeared at 5.5 months. She is working on 3 and 4 now… But yes she bites – everything – including my nipple. We are slowly learning to not bite… Nursing is just a little tense right now.
She has a very adorable whole-body-giggle.
She likes to feed herself watermelon (a net-like self-feeder object helps her)
She loves to be outside and likes to face the wind and open her mouth and yell.
The amount of snot that can come out of her nose is really alarming. Between a 3 week old cold and the runny-ness of teething she has been producing snot for almost a month straight. She has to sleep in a chair sitting up …
i love her so much sometimes i squeeze her, sometimes I cry, and most days I just can’t believe it.
The night Lily learned to jump and spit (see video below)
First foods (today!!) – avocado – LJ loved it.
Cloth Diapers and cloth wipes
LJ’s appetite, she is now in 9-12 month clothes…
The way “Its a hard knock life” from the Annie Soundtrack can quiet any cries.
The bad
The way “Its a hard knock life” from the Annie Soundtrack can quiet any cries. – Did you know that song is only 2:29 seconds long. After 15 minutes on repeat – I have begun to hate the sound of that child singing.
It was only the first tooth that caused all that ruckus.
Okay…so this is longer than a bullet point – but LJ had all her tests yesterday and the results are not very good. The prognosis is probably okay. Basically she has two conditions -
1. Kidney reflux – this means that once urine flows into her bladder that it flows back up into her kidneys. They rate this condition on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the greatest problem. LJ is a 4 on both kidneys. This puts her at a greater risk of more UTIs and left untreated can lead to kidney damage.
2. Duplicated Collection System – Each kidney has a ureter that passes urine into the bladder. One of LJs kidneys has two. We dont know what this means yet. We have been referred to a pediatric urologist and we will go from there. The good news is that we caught it early and it is not life threatening. In the short term we will continue on antibiotics. In the long term we may be facing surgery. As always we will hang on and see what happens. Yesterday we were scared. Today we are more calm and will just wait for the urologist to understand her condition fully.
Without further ado – the night Lily learned to jump and spit at the same time.
So we’ve done it. Yesterday we switched to cloth for what i like to call the experiment. I say experiment because if my wife doesn’t like it or if her mom doesn’t buy into it – if i cant make it easy for everyone, i dont think it will work. We haven’t transitioned to cloth wipes yet which i am realizing probably wont hold out too much longer because carrying around a plastic bag to throw away the disposable wipes doesn’t really make sense.
My thoughts so far
I don’t have enough diapers.
Mainly because, I don’t like the prefolds ( i got a variety of options to try out)
LJ looks damn cute in them (see pic below)
It isn’t as messy as i thought.
No blowouts, only two leaks which I think is because we didnt put them on right.
Heinous Diaper rash which LJ has had for almost 2 weeks (from the antibiotic-induced yucky poop) was gone within two diapers.
Our collection
In an effort to figure out what works best on her body and for us we have a collection of items i started with some used and some new in a variety of types.
Prefolds with covers – which are just huge, poor thing cant close her legs… I’m not certain we are doing it right we are going to experiment a bit more.
AIO and Pockets – Blue.berry, Swaddle.bee, Bum.Genius, Happy Hei.ny.
and A bumbleebee homemade diaper - thats right folks I made a diaper… There is a fabulous fabric store in town and she offers a cloth diaper class as well as sells all of the materials. So over the past two weeks I took it and made a diaper and the darn thing worked!
I am sitting down in a few minutes to work on the second one by myself…See it is what I call a Richmond Blizzard outside. We have about 6 or 7 inches of snow which shuts down the city. I love snow – I just don’t like playing in it so I volunteered to stay home with LJ while my wife and our friends go sledding. Everyone is happy. Happy snow day east coast.
We knew eventually the little darling would get sick. Some babies are born with a sickness so in all respects we are quite lucky that LJ didnt get sick until a week before 5 months. If I can say one thing about her – its that she likes to start things out with a bang. So here we are 4 days into a sickness – she is on the mend and we still lack some answers. During the process of the sickness we did learn that we really like our pediatrician. She seems to get us even confessing today that we were inches away from a hospital visit when we went in on Wednesday. I’m glad she told us that today, not Wednesday.
So here’s what happened. LJ woke up to nurse Tuesday night at 1am and she was hot – but damn this child is always hot so we nursed then I thought she was hotter even though we lost clothes to nurse so I took her temp – 102.2. I woke up Amber and we decided to give her ty.lenol and hold her tight for an hour then check to make sure it was going down. At the recheck it was 101.1 so we figured we were doing the right thing. At 5 we gave her 1/2 a dose of ty.lenol and she spit it up. At 6 her fever spiked up to 103. I put on my clothes to go to the hospital. Instead we called the doc who told us to hold tight and bring her in at 8:30. So I ran out to get more tylenol (of course we would run out.)
So we took her in and they took blood and ran some fast tests – her white blood cell count was alarmingly high – so more tests ensued including a throat, urinary, and blood cultures. The blood culture was perhaps the WORST… she is a chubby baby so it took many many minutes of digging to get a vein. I cried. She whaled. The doc just kept apologizing. She got a shot of antibiotics and with 4 bandaids we are sent home with instructions to come back Thursday. Thursday same sick kid, although white blood cell count was better. More sticks. Friday morning her white blood cell count is back to normal but her urine culture is not.
So basically the kid has a urinary tract infection… which is suspicious in a smidge as young as she so we are bracing for more testing. There is a 50/50 chance that it was a fluke or that it is a bigger problem of the anatomical nature. So we have 8 days of antibiotics, a new urine culture, then off to a pediatric urologist for an ultrasound and more tests.
I am staying away from Doc. Goog.le until we know more. It has been a scary few days but we are all on the mend now. Here is a picture from earlier this week. I hope we get more smiles like this in the coming days.
I did it again.. I stayed away too long and then the prospect of visiting and writing the catch up post kept me from posting for fear of being interrupted many times. So I am going to write until I am interrupted and then just post.
Not such a smidge
So my petite small daughter who was 5lbs and 12oz at her smallest is not so small any longer. She is 13lbs13oz which is right in the middle at the 50th percentile… height jumped from 25th to 75th percentile in two months… Now that helps explain the past three weeks lack of sleep. She was waking to nurse every night which she had not done in two months – but for the past two nights we are back to napping and sleeping through the night.
Teething
Another cause of the fussiness over the past few weeks is that LJ is trying really hard to make teeth – which i know can take months to come in the first time. Nothing yet but I did learn her preferences for teething toys at least for these first two teeth… no plastic, cotton, ice ( in a pacifier), or wood. Lj likes one toy – made of natural rubber… Its cute to boot. Here is a link to Sophie the giraffe. Once food is introduced I have a recipe for teething biscuits that I will try out, but until then its all about Sophie well that and my knuckles.
Cloth diapers
i said i would do it if i stayed home….so im gonna try. I found some used AIO’s and I need a few more and we are off and running… So for you cloth diaperers… what is your brand of choice and what advice do you have?
Developments
LJ prefers standing to sitting; playing to being held; her exersaucer to her swing; sitting up (almost) to rolling over (not yet). She laughs and mimics our faces and she kicks in her crib while listening to music. She loves music and anyone who will sing to her. She smiles when I take off my shirt and she grins hen her mom gets home.
She is almost 5 months and that is exciting and scary wrapped up in the cardigan i wear to catch the spit up. The one i learned, not to wear outside the house because undeniably it has spit up on it. Sometimes I cry because this parent thing is very hard, but more times i swell with love.
I was right on the edge of closing down this blog. I am still an avid reader and when LJ cooperates I can comment but in the list of things to be done I never can find time for blogging. I have been finding time for sewing, working, nursing, cooking, and scrambling to keep up with a cute 8 month old who doesn’t crawl but pulls herself around with her arms. In fact I think she may skip over completely the crawling …she just loves standing. You get her standing and she giggles and smilies and laughs. She has 100% mastered pulling up and will do it on anything including ottomans, her crib, the couch, and even in the pool during her first swim. Much as I love her she is not what is making me on edge.
For those who you who know us in real life… we don’t want this spread around and we aren’t too keen to talk about it yet. It is not bad news but it is completely shocking to us and frankly I haven’t had the time to process it.
So the past few weeks have been jammed up with firsts… This past weekend LJ went on vacation for the first time. We headed up to Delaware to Rehob.eth Beach for a long weekend before the height of the season. We usually stay in a B&B – but who wants a 7 month old next door to them? So, we rented a house with our BFFs and loved every minute. Lj was a champ on sleeping, the car rides, the walks – the only big snaffu was we switched to disposable diapers for the 4 day trip and every number 2 leaked and she got diaper rash. Back in yummy soft cloth and all of our problems are gone. So even if we wanted we can’t switch from cloth now. The big debut of the trip was the er.go. I had been putting off buying it because of the cost but with the prospect for a long weekend walking on the beach, board walk, and around town – with a 17lb babe – we decided to go for it.. It was scrumptious.
