:-)

Today the house is clean, the laundry is done, the baby is napping, and I feel like I'm finally starting to get the hang of this whole stay-at-home-mom thing. I've even had time to paint my toenails and have an extra cup of coffee! It's funny how freshly painted toenails can make you smile every time you look down :) Here are some more pics of little miss punky pants!

Abigail: One Month Old!

I'm a few days late on this, but Abby is now over a month old! Her one month stats at the pediatrician were:

Weight: 8 pounds 5 ounces
Length: 20.5 inches

Our little baby is definitely growing!! She's still a shorty and is in the 25th percentile for height and the 27th percentile for weight. Abby still fits into some of her newborn clothes, although she has outgrown a few Carter's footed pajamas. She is also now wearing size 1 diapers. I can't wait until she can fit into all of her 0-3 month clothes because right now she's at that in between stage where almost nothing fits! I'm sure she'll grow into her new wardrobe soon though.

At one month old Abby likes eating as often as possible, snuggling, being swaddled up nice and tight, naps in her swing, bath time, and her binky. She doesn't like being hungry, getting her diaper or her clothes changed, getting out of the bathtub, and tummy time!

Abby is definitely still in the peak fussy weeks, and she is not at all quiet when it comes to voicing her discomfort and general crankiness in the evenings. The last few days we have moved her bedtime from around 10pm to between 7:30-8pm and it's made a big difference. Last night she went down at 8pm and woke up at 2am and 5:30am for feedings. Not too shabby! It's been REALLY nice for Dave and I to have some baby free time for ourselves at night too, so I can safely say that for now we will be sticking with the earlier bedtime. Hopefully Abby continues to sleep well because of it!

Breastfeeding has been going a bit better lately. A few weeks ago we had her frenulum clipped again because the lactation consultant I was seeing noticed that there was still more that could be clipped. She is still occasionally making a loud clicking noise when nursing, but there has definitely been an improvement. We are also nursing in a more reclined position and that seems to help her get a deeper latch too. From here on out it's supposed to keep getting easier, so hopefully that will be the case. I'm still hesitant to give her a bottle again, but I may buy a different nipple type and give it another shot. We don't want to wait too long because then she might not take one at all, but I'm also afraid that it will cause breast feeding latch problems again!

I think those are all the one month updates about Abby! Here are some more recent photos of our little girl:

The Worst Day...

I've written a post similar to this one a few times now...and each time I've deleted it because it just didn't feel right.  I'm still not sure if I'll be able to explain things the way that I mean to, but for now, I'm going to try.

The truth of the matter is, being a parent, especially a stay-at-home exclusively breastfeeding mother, is HARD.  Like, a million times harder than I thought that it would be.  People tell you that it will be hard, and going into it I knew that it would be.  But I also had these ridiculously unrealistic expectations of snuggling with my sweet, sleeping newborn and getting all sorts of stuff done around the house and reading on my Kindle while breastfeeding.  We do snuggle a lot, but she also spends a LOT of time crying...and sometimes, so do I.  I've wondered if I'm suffering from postpartum depression (and I'm sure that my husband has wondered that too), and I know for sure that I had a bad case of the "baby blues" and probably still do to some degree.  More than anything, though, I think that even though I love our daughter with all my heart, I am struggling with the huge transition that comes when your life isn't just about you anymore.  Becoming a mother isn't a job that you can accept on a trial basis and then quit when the going gets tough.  Once you're a mother, you'll be one for the rest of your life.  Kind of a daunting thought.  Abby is over a month old now, and she's finally breastfeeding better and sleeping better, and I'm not always a milk soaked, sleep deprived zombie anymore. Yet, when she's screaming and fighting sleep for hours on end and I've done everything I can possibly think of to make her happy and none of it has worked, I feel like I am doing a really craptastic job as a mom.  Those days are really, really hard.  I'm still struggling with perspective, and trying to remind myself that it won't always be like this where the only means of communication she has is crying.  Someday, soon maybe, she will smile and coo and laugh, and I know those moments will make the really hard ones that much sweeter.  It's so hard to explain how I'm feeling these days, because after going through the process of making and then birthing an actual human being, I've experienced pretty much every emotion known to man.  Overwhelming love, but also a sense of loss because my life will never be the way that it was.  Fear, joy, anxiety, happiness.  The other day, after a few particularly rough nights, I told my sister that I felt like I was drowning, and that at the same time I felt so incredibly guilty for having those thoughts because I wanted a child so very badly and we tried for so long to conceive and I love her so, so much!  My sister told me this,

"It is the weight of a thousand pounds of love...it is so unbearably heavy some days. But I promise, I absolutely promise, that nothing about motherhood will ever be as hard as it is for you right now. This is the absolute darkest point in the tunnel, the place where you can't see either end and you wonder if you've made some terrible mistake and then you feel so guilty for wondering that at all. You WILL make it through, I promise. It's just going to take some tears and time first."

It made me feel so much better, because she's been where I am and can assure me that it really does get better.  Not to say that all days are bad, because they're not at all and we've had some great moments.  We've had some really horrible ones too, though, which leads me to what happened a few nights ago.

I'm just going to come out and say it, because there's no way to sugar coat it.  My absolute worst nightmare came true and I dropped our daughter in the middle of the night.  I got up for a feeding when I heard her cry, and I turned the lamp on in her room and picked her up.  I started unswaddling her from her miracle blanket while walking towards the changing table, and in the blink of an eye she rolled right out of my arms and on to the floor.  Thankfully, she fell onto the area rug in her room and not directly onto the hardwood floor, but that didn't matter.  I started screaming and picked her up, and when I was calm enough to stand with her I ran to wake up Dave.  I've honestly never been so scared in my entire life.  We threw on clothes and I nursed her quickly and then we rushed her to the ER.  I had to explain over and over again what had happened, and while the nurses and doctors all reassured me that accidents happen all the time and not to beat myself up, I felt like the absolute worst mother on the planet.  I DROPPED our baby!!!  Those hours we spent in the ER waiting for her cat scan to come back while she was being monitored were the worst moments of my life so far.  In those hours, it didn't matter that motherhood so far hasn't been all that I dreamed it would be.  Nothing in the entire world mattered to me except if Abby was going to be ok.  Thankfully, her cat scan came back normal, and after a few hours of monitoring they sent us home.  She's been eating and sleeping fine so far, but I'm still so worried that what happened will cause damage down the road.  I keep trying to remind myself that this is something that she'll never remember, but for me it's burned into my memory and it's something I'll never forget.  It was also quite a wake up call.  I can't imagine what I would do if something happened to her!  I cannot imagine life without her.  So, even on the tough days, I need to remind myself that there will be great days in our future too.  She won't always be little for long, and I need to take time to savor these moments.  The dishes and the laundry and all of that can wait.  And I'm so thankful that I have an amazing support system, particularly my husband, sister, and mom.  Dave lets me cry on his shoulder when I'm feeling beyond frustrated, and my sister lets me vent to her about anything and everything, and my mom is there whenever I need to take a breather and just run to Target for an hour by myself.  I've never been good about asking for help.  I'm always wanted to be able to do it all on my own.  But what this past month of being a parent has taught me is that it's ok to ask for and accept help.  It's ok to not do things perfectly all the time.  There is no "perfect way" when raising a child.  I'm going to make mistakes...probably a lot of them.  Starting with what happened the other night.  Honestly, I was scared to pick her up in the middle of the night last night.  But I have to move forward and also be more careful.  I'll end the post with a quote, which I've always loved but didn't truly understand until I became a mom. How true this is!!

“Making the decision to have a child - it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ” ― Elizabeth Stone

Breastfeeding Woes

I mentioned in a previous post that once Abby and I were home from the hospital she and I got the hang of breastfeeding and all was going well. Unfortunately, things have sort of gone downhill since then :-( About a week and a half ago we started trying to give Abby a bottle of pumped breast milk in the evenings. It's important to both Dave and I that she be able to take a bottle, so that we can be away from her in the future at some point and also so that Dave can help feed her and bond with her too. The first bottle feeding was a disaster, so we waited a few days and then tried again with a different bottle type. She took that bottle pretty well, but literally ever since that day she has not been latching properly while breastfeeding! My nipples are sore now, and she and I both get so frustrated while nursing. What's worse is that I'm worried that she's not getting enough food, plus she makes this clicking sound and takes in air so she is super gassy and uncomfortable. The whole situation is so depressing. She's also been really, really fussy lately and I have to think that the nursing troubles are a big part of the problem. Poor girl screamed a good majority of the day today, which of course just made me frazzled on top of being exhausted. We have an appointment to see a lactation consultant tomorrow and hopefully she will be able to help!! I'm going crazy because my nipples are starting to scab over again and our poor daughter seems so darn miserable most of her waking moments. It's heartbreaking. Anyway, I'll update after the appointment tomorrow...fingers crossed that we can get back on a better path!

"Everything Has Changed"

The last month or so of my pregnancy, I listened to the latest Taylor Swift album pretty much exclusively (don't judge me!), singing along at the top of my lungs in the car to a few songs in particular. This morning after doing some tummy time Abby was extra fussy, so I decided to play one of those songs and sing along to see if it would help. It was like magic! She calmed down immediately and just laid on my chest with wide eyes while I sang along with the music to her. It made my heart melt and I totally had what I can only describe as a "mom moment", crying through the words while feeling so incredibly overwhelmed with emotion and love for our daughter. I still just can't help but stop and stare at her sometimes, knowing that we made something so beautiful and tiny and perfect. I can't wait to know the little girl that she becomes and the woman that she turns into. My own mother and I have developed a really special relationship in the past few years, and I can only hope that I have something like that with Abby when she grows up. Having our daughter has changed our whole lives and Dave and I are both trying to soak up all of the baby cuddles and snuggles while she's so little and brand new. The lyrics to the song I was singing seemed to fit so perfectly (even though since it's a Taylor Swift song it's obviously about a guy, not a baby!):

"I just wanna know you better, know you better, know you better now
I just wanna know you, know you, know you

'Cause all I know is we said "Hello"
And your eyes look like coming home
All I know is a simple name
Everything has changed"


It's so true, everything has changed! Even though life is different now, and it's certainly not always easy, I feel so lucky that my dream of becoming a mom finally came true. Here are a few pictures of our little sweetie, who is getting bigger and changing every day:

One of those days...

Today we are having one of "those days". The kind parents don't tell expectant parents about very often. The kind of day where I am writing this post from my phone with one hand while holding a fussy baby who has nursed every hour and refused to sleep for the last three and half hours with the other hand. It's 11:30am and I'm still unshowered, in a milk soaked nightgown, wondering if I can set Fussy Pants down long enough to use the bathroom, let alone change my clothes, brush my teeth, and make some coffee. Granted, she's not always like this! She must be going through a growth spurt. And I know that this, too, shall pass. I love her so much that words honestly can't describe it, but days like today make it all the more "real" too, if that makes any sense. I know there will be many, many more days like today in our future, but I know there will be tons of really great days too. Today I miss having my husband home. It's much easier taking care of a baby with another person around to help! But we'll manage, and I'll cross my fingers that Abby will take a good nap this afternoon so I can hopefully shower, get a load of laundry in, and prep dinner. Until then, I've got her binky, the remote control, and my milk makers to get us through. Up next, Top Chef and more nursing...

More Sleep!! Plus Family Visitors :)

We had a weight recheck last Friday and Miss Piggy Pants was up to 7 lbs 4 ounces. The doctor said she likes to see a gain of half an ounce to an ounce a day, and Abby fell right within those constraints. Because she is gaining appropriately we don't have to wake her every three hours at night to feed her anymore! Yay! The first night she woke up on her own every three to three and a half hours anyway. We had let her sleep from 7-10pm so she didn't get in her needed cluster feeding, oops! Last night we did much better because we were over at my parents' house all day. She cluster fed at night and then slept from 10pm-2:30am and then again from 3:30am-6:30am. I'd call that a pretty great night! I'm even up before she is just because I feel rested enough :)

We spent the day yesterday with my twin sister and her family. What a nice visit!! It was so great to see them all and it melted my heart to see how much everyone loves Abby already. My niece especially just wanted to hold her over and over again. What a little mother she is! My niece and nephew were also quite interested in how I breastfeed Abby. My nephew asked if Abby had made the bump on my body because she was sucking on me. I told him that it was my nipple and boys have them too but don't use theirs to feed babies. I was feeding Abby in the cradle hold position and I think that confused him, because he started looking around for his "bump" on his arm! I told him to lift up his shirt and then he knew what I was talking about. Later he asked my sister why I couldn't just feed the baby regular milk because then she could stop biting me! Too funny :) Quite logical though! Here are some pictures from yesterday: