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For Sonia’s third birthday (and Lindsey’s 34th) we decided to take the family to Disney Land for a couple days. Veo came along to help take care of the kids, and to help celebrate. In addition, some of our friends were able to join for Sunday, the first day of our two day trip. In general, it was a success and a lot of fun, with just a couple hiccups.

At 9 months, Dalton is 19 lbs (40%) and 29″ (80%), and starting to get around!

 This month, Dalton has started to army crawl.  He also really loves rubbing his head on things.  It’s adorable to see him enjoying the freedom his latest movement developments bring.  He really is still a very smiley and happy baby, in general.

In terms of vocalizations, Dalton definitely continues to experiment and progress.  It is very interesting though, that he prefers sounds made at the  back of the throat, whereas Sonia was all about lip noises at this age.  Toward the end of the month, Dalton added his first consonant – ‘d’ – for Dada, of course 🙂

Dalton got in some really fun experiences this month, including his first time in a pool, at our friends’ condo.

He also had his first professional modeling gig, for a friend’s baby blanket company! Befitting his personality, he was the most amazing and charming baby model, tempting me to try to get him representation to do more!  🙂

We are still waiting for Dalton to show any interest at all in feeding himself.  We often put food in front of him, and are amazed at how much he will play with food, without EVER taking it to his mouth, whereas every other toy goes straight there.  I’m sure he’ll get it at some point, but in the meantime, he still eats whatever we eat, just after being blended and served on a spoon.

At 8 months, Dalton is 18 lbs (30%) and 28.25″ (75%) and starting to speak up a little bit.

While he doesn’t have any real consonants to speak of yet, he is learning intonation and tempo, and starting to add to the conversation.

We’ve been impressed this month with how much Dalton can get around just by rolling!  He’s definitely testing the next step by getting up on his arm and stretching his back, but no attempts at crawling yet.

Dalton has been snively ever since his sister first went to school, but midway through this month we had our first scare with a real illness.  After an atypical outing to a place with a number of older kids, Dalton developed what we believe to be a minor case of Hand Foot Mouth disease.  It started with a mid-grade fever and then we noticed white sores in his mouth.  Unfortunately, the fever started the day before Mommy had to go on a work trip, so I was worried about Dalton (and Daddy) while unable to do anything about it.  Thankfully, it went away before we even had the chance to go see the pediatrician, and Dalton handled it with the cool and calm he does pretty much every situation.

Daddy did end up surviving my 5 day trip, but my milk supply did not. It dropped by 25%!  Unfortunately, while Dalton is eating a lot of solids (still from a spoon) his milk intake has not declined at all, so we will continue to rely on the generosity of our friend to keep him fed without supplementing with formula.

One final milestone to note is that at the end of the month Dalton dropped his 3rd nap, so unfortunately, now he and Sonia don’t sleep at the same time anymore 🙂

The first quarter of Sonia’s third year was full of more amazing leaps, including the huge milestone of potty training, and gaining a grasp on the use of pronouns.

Shortly after her second birthday, the toddler OCD streak I had heard about started to show through in Sonia.  Some of her favorite activities became laying coasters out on the table, and having herself and her stuffed friends pretend to sleep.  Interestingly enough, for all the play sleeping on pillows, she won’t allow us to put one in the crib with her when she sleeps.

In general, she started interacting more with her stuffed friends, especially Ribbit, and the clarity of her speech improved noticeably.  Other developments included some actual melody starting to come into her songs and words, and starting to draw shapes, and color closer to the lines.  She also learned to interact with the phone and started to pretend to call Grannie to ask for more wipies (I assume she picked this up at school), and even took her first selfie (accidentally of course).  For now, we don’t let her use the phone, though.

Some fun activities to start her third year included another trip to the Kidspace museum, the Natural History Museum, and the fun and sugar rush of several friends’ birthday parties!

We also took a weekend morning to go to the zoo, which elicited a “Sonia so excited!” comment or two.

After the first month of this period, we were starting to be concerned that we were in for a rough “terrible twos.” Lots and lots of crying for very small reasons, and comments like a tearful “Sonia say yes” whenever we would say no to something.  However, likely due to her advanced verbal skills, we were able to talk her through a lot of it, and mid-way through the quarter she started to be able to gain some control over her emotions.  Some of the things we talked about were how to “ask nicely,” and that we couldn’t understand her when she was crying or whining.  We also talked about taking deep breaths, and gave her choices whenever possible.  This is not to say that she doesn’t still cry at the drop of a hat, but at least she can work herself out of it most of the time.  We still feel like we are saying ‘no’ an awful lot, and not feeling excited to be around our whiny toddler sometimes, but I guess that is just part of parenting during this boundary-testing phase.

The big step that occurred mid-way through the quarter was potty training.  We’d been talking about the toilet, and she’d even been using it once in awhile for almost 6 months.  By around 26 months, though, she was often running to the potty herself when she had to pee.  After coming home from school with an awful rash one Friday, we decided it was time to ditch the diapers. We went and bought her some undies Saturday morning, and amazingly she had zero accidents all weekend long!  When she went back to school on Monday, she had three accidents in the span of 2 hours, so the teacher put her back in diapers and then sent her home with a note about their policy of no diapers once potty training had started – annoying.  After a talk with her that evening about having to go up to the teacher and tell them when she had to go so they could help her to the toilet, she went accident free the rest of the week, and really has had only a handful of accidents since!  She even figured out on her own she wasn’t supposed to pee during sleep either, even though we had decided we weren’t going to push that part yet since she was still in a crib.  Within a week, though, she was waking up dry from naps, and crying for us in the middle of the night to help her to the toilet, so we followed her lead and started putting her in undies, and she has not had a single night-time accident!  About a month into it, she’s even starting to be able to pull her own pants down and hold it all night without having to wake us up, yippee!  What was even better about the whole thing was that there were no rewards or punishments necessary other than teaching her that it was good and she should feel proud of herself for going on the big toilet.  We are so proud of our little ‘big girl!’

To go along with her big girl toilet training, and because both she and Dalton were growing out of their respective seats at the table, we got Sonia a booster seat and moved Dalton up to her seat.  We were surprised how quickly she took to it, and that she didn’t mind that Dalton had taken what once was hers.  Being potty trained also meant she could wear a big girl swim suit when it got warm enough to remind her how much she loves playing in the water.

As the quarter wrapped up, we noticed that our little girl is indeed growing up, and out.  She now no longer fits in her 2T clothes either in length or width. The other thing that is growing is her hair!  That mop of curls is in a difficult stage where it is long enough to make her wake up looking like a mad scientist, but too short to get all up.  Thankfully, she doesn’t seem to mind.

Also toward the end of the quarter Sonia got to move up to Ms Tammy’s 2-year old class at school and out of the toddler room.  She really seems to love Ms Tammy, and going to school in general.  Especially now that it’s ‘summer camp’ time at school, and they have water play days every Monday and a different enrichment ‘on-site fieldtrip’ every Wednesday, including a petting zoo, tide pool and cowboy show.  In the older classroom now, she no longer seems to be the most advanced one there, too which we expect should be good for her.

The last notable thing of this period has been her finally getting a grasp on the correct usage of I and you, instead of speaking in the third person. She just continues to amaze us every day, can’t wait to see what the next three months will bring.

In early July we took both kids on a flight to Cincinnati and then to Dayton to celebrate the bi-annual family reunion.

A special event this year was that Sonia and Dalton got to meet their first 2nd cousin 🙂

Both kids were really good on the flight.  Dalton was not yet too mobile to be annoying, and Sonia was well entertained in her own seat by colors, books, and her new Curious George magnets.  Newly potty trained, Sonia was amazing about going to the bathroom in all sorts of strange toilets – with the help of her Elmo travel seat.

One new thing that the kids handled surprisingly well was sleeping in the same room.  They are both very good sleepers, but we worried about what the time change and the noise of the other sleeping in the same room would do to them, but they both did way better than we expected, they handled it with ease.

At the reunion, there were lots of family members to entertain the little ones. Also, drone helicopters, elaborate coloring, corn hole, ladder golf, a nearby park, and lots of good food, kept everyone entertained.

Sonia was surprisingly good with the 4 & 6 year old girls. too.  She played with them in the kiddie pool, and followed them into the bathroom with their glow sticks to see what they had to show.  She definitely was nervous, but learning from the interaction.

Back in Cincinnati, we got the chance to visit the updated riverfront, and Sonia had wonderful time at the Splash Pad, to beat the heat.

At 7 months, Dalton is 17lb (25%) and 28″ (80%), and is rolling and sitting like a champ!

Within a week after turning 6 months, Dalton figured out the solids thing – from a spoon at least.  He has no interest in picking up food, but will open his mouth like a baby bird over and over again for spoonfuls of mashed up avocado, rice and greens or sweet potato.  So much for baby led weaning.

A couple weeks later, Dalton is now eating 3 solid meals a day (from a spoon), and has started to have the “veggie wedgie” poop indicating he’s getting some nutrition out of it.  However, his milk intake hasn’t declined much at all. My milk stash was drawn down pretty quickly this month.  Luckily, a friend who had a baby a month before me happened to have an oversupply that she was willing to share, so I haven’t had to introduce formula yet.

Mid-way through the month, those two bottom teeth cut through at the same time, so now our smiley baby is even cuter 🙂

In the last week or so, Dalton has finally achieved a couple key developmental milestones.  In the same weekend he decided he wanted to roll over both ways and also sit up unassisted. He also continues to occasionally skip his third nap of the day, and definitely prefers to sleep on his belly for longer naps, but isn’t fully ready to move to two naps. He does frequently wake up very early in the morning and “sings” and “squawks” until he falls back to sleep.

At 6 months Dalton is 16 lb (20%) and 27″ (75%), and sleeping through the night!

The sleeping through the night milestone actually happened shortly after 22 weeks, just as it did with Sonia.  However, unlike Sonia, there was no sleep training needed!  He figured out how to suck his thumb within a few days after we started swaddling him with arms out cold turkey at 5 months, and within a week was sleeping straight through from 7pm to 6:30am!  Now, just this last week, Dalton has gone without a 3rd nap a couple times.  I don’t think we’re ready for that just yet, though.

Even before he started sleeping through the night, however; Dalton’s growth had slowed down a lot, so of course I got worried that he wasn’t getting enough milk, even though he seemed happy with what he was getting.  At around 24 weeks we started him on bigger bottles with fast flow nipples, and lo and behold he started taking 8oz per feeding instead of 5oz!

As my freezer stash has been dwindling over the last week or so from the increased demand, we have tried to get Dalton to start on solids, but so far he is not having it.  Somehow everything else you put in front of him goes in his mouth, but food he won’t touch!  Even when we succeed in getting some in his mouth, he doesn’t seem to get the idea of swallowing just yet – it all comes right back out the front.  He loves the idea of chewing on the spoon, however; likely because both of his bottom front teeth are about ready to cut through.

Developmentally, Dalton’s ability to focus on and play with toys has increased dramatically this month, and he really likes to play in the Ocean Activity Center now. He also likes turning on and off the light on his puppy door Christmas gift, and moving the beads around on the Hape cube.  Mid-month, Dalton first found his way onto his tummy in the crib, but cannot (or will not) roll from his tummy to his back.  He likes to stand and sit up to play, but cannot do so without assistance.   

At 5 months Dalton is 15 lbs (20%) and 26 3/4″ (85%), and continues to be a very happy baby.

Dalton mostly kept a schedule of one night feeding around 4am and 3 daily naps throughout the month, but did have a few nights of “regression” in the form of the dreaded smiling, laughing baby in the middle of the night. Thankfully, not usually too many in a row.  Up until now, he has been swaddled for naps and night sleeps.  However, at his 4am feeding on his 5 mo birthday, he had flipped himself face down by the time I got up to get him for the feeding, so no more swaddle from here. Eek!

While he does have noticeably improved head and neck strength, he still has no desire to roll during the day while playing.  He would much rather lay on his back and look out the window, or smile at someone.  His drooling has been pretty intense, but still no sign of teeth.

A couple other important milestones this month were: Dalton’s first flights, and Mommy going back to work.  Dalton took both in stride.  The flights were to Charlotte over the Easter weekend.  While he was a bit young to help Sonia with the egg hunt, he still had lots of fun with Grannie and Grandad.

Sonia’s 24th month was marked by emotional and mental development, more than phyisical. She has been much more willing to play independently, she can better verbalize emotions, and often pauses to think before acting or speaking. She still has a long way to go with understanding and handling her emotions (a lot of meltdowns) but has definitely improved. A new favorite set of statements from Sonia are “Mommy happy”, “Mommy angry”, “Daddy happy”, or “Daddy angry”. Definitely not always the right emotion chosen, but she is trying! School may be helping push her further in these areas.

Although she continues to be very shy outside of the house, she has developed real friendships with Noah, Sebastian and Aaron. She knows who they are, asks to see them, and is much more open around them than others. She has combined these advancements to being receptive to her friends “wants” at times. When playing at Noah’s house one time, she brought his bear to him when his Mom said he could hit his bear but not his cousin.  She also gave him a different chalk piece when he wanted the one she was using.

In addition to playing by herself more often, she has tried to be more independent in other areas. She tries to undress herself for bath time, will grab a step stool if she needs to reach higher for a toy or her bubbles, and has figured out how to climb into her chair at the dinner table all by herself. Though it is nice to see her try and be more independent, it can lead to more instances of catching her in the act of relatively unsafe situations.

This month also took mommy back to work, which didn’t change Sonia’s day too much, but now she gets to ride to school every morning in the convertible (with the top up) and has daddy picking her up in the afternoon.

She also added to her flight count with another trip to see Grannie and Grandad, this time for Easter weekend.  She definitely seemed to get the egg hunt idea better than last year, and had a great time in general.  She also got her first taste of S’mores at Auntie Julia’s house 🙂

Last month we had the hives “scare”, but that passed with no sign of allergies. Sonia is back to bananas and nuts, with no side effects. However, she continues to roll from one cold to another, and also has started to get her 2 yr molars.

The month ended with Sonia’s second birthday party! Once again, it was at our house in the backyard with her friends, including some new ones. This time, the theme was “balls”, with a juggler as the entertainment. Most of the kids didn’t really understand what he was doing, but Sonia was definitely entranced and interested. However, she seemed to be just as happy watching daddy try to juggle in the backyard later that afternoon. 🙂

Sonia did a great job blowing out her candle, and managed to eat her entire cupcake.

  
 This birthday also coincided with another visit from Nona and Papa, with most of the time spent getting ready for the party and then having the party! They did get to surprise her at school on her birthday with ice cream bars for everyone.

Every week we think that Sonia seems so much older, and I’m sure that will continue as the months pass in her third year. It amazes us how much she has accomplished in 24 months and how quickly our little girl has grown.

At 4 months, Dalton is 14 lbs (20%) and 26″ (80%), and it has been another happy month.

Dalton continues to want to sit and stand a lot, so we brought out the BebePod chair again.  He still needs help of course, but he gets such a big smile on his face when he is up and about.

He also learned a new sound early in the month, and found his feet and his thumb around 17 weeks.

He has rolled over from back to front a few times, but not with any consistency yet, and has stayed steady in his tummy time ability and interest.

At 15 weeks Dalton dropped down to 3 naps – two 1.5 hr naps in the morning and a 30 minute nap in the late afternoon – all separated by ~2 hrs of awake time.  At night, he has consistently been sleeping from 7pm to between 3-5am, and taking only one feeding a night.  We have kept waiting for the dreaded 4 mo sleep regression to take hold, since it started at 14 wks for Sonia, and it may have just hit now at 17 weeks.  The past couple days he has had a harder time staying down past the first 30 minutes of his naps and his nighttime sleep, but still sleeps long stretches once/if he gets past that wake-up point.  He is still reliant on the swaddle and the Wubba for sleep cues, but since he has already been able to suck his thumb during the day, hopefully by the time he really rolls, he won’t need it.

I have been very thankful that Dalton was such a good baby this month, especially when Eric got a mysterious illness that put him out of commission, and made me a single parent, for a week.  That Dalton was able to spend a half hour plus happily in his pack n play, or bouncy chair while I tended to Sonia’s whims, was a huge help!

Now that I’m finally heading back to work next week we’ll see how things go.  The extra time off has been wonderful, and the extra weekday Cardio Barre classes mean I have only ~5lb to go to get back to pre-pregnancy weight, woo hoo!

Sonia’s seemingly exponential language development continued in her 23rd month, and she is picking up a lot from her first month in school as well. Now if only I could figure out how to tame those crazy curls she’s getting 🙂

Sonia continues to be a chatterbox, and for the most part it is now intelligible.  She talks mostly in the third person, but every once in awhile will say “I” and “you” in the right place.  She knows that saying “please” is “asking nicely,” but still mostly whines or cries when “Sonia want ___.”  One thing Sonia says all the time is “Where ___ go?” but she is learning to say “Where is ___?” and answer her own question.

It took Sonia longer to adapt to school than it first seemed it would.  The second week she was having huge meltdowns at night and in the mornings, and I ended up keeping her home or picking her up early several days in the 3rd and 4th weeks.  The teachers said she seemed like she was having fun all day, but she was only napping about 1 hr, instead of her normal 2-2.5hrs.  In addition, there were a couple kids that were pushy, and got a lot of attention because of it, that may have been bothering her emotionally without her really being able to express it.  Just when I had reserved to have her nap at home twice a week, this week she started sleeping 2+hrs at school and being much happier in the evenings as well.  She is excited to go to school, but wants “Mommy carry you” until I count to 10 in the mornings when I drop her off.  I have one more week off work to see if it continues.  Hopefully today’s biting incident doesn’t negatively impact her.  Sonia was bitten on the arm, hard enough to leave a big mark hours later.  While this is a disturbing incident, I was very happy to hear that Sonia stood up for herself by telling the child “Don’t bite Sonia” and  “Sonia don’t like that” as well as going up to him several other times that day to say “No biting!”

School has helped Sonia despite the challenges.  Her repertoire of songs has dramatically increased, and she has even started extending the songs to other life situations.  For example, at dinner one night she started going into the welcome song they do during circle time at school, but substituting Mommy and Daddy for the kids names.  Another time she put her farmer sticker on top of a truck sticker and started to sing “Farmer in the truck” instead of “Farmer in the dell.”  She also is starting to learn a few letters, with the most memorable being “U for Umbrella” which was the letter they were learning her first week of school, and can sing her ABC’s – sort of. 🙂

Sonia’s spatial reasoning has improved dramatically this month as well, and I do wonder if watching the other kids at school has impacted that.  She is now able to unzip her mega bloks bag, and wants to build with the same color and in symmetrical patterns.  One of her favorite toys this month has been the animal puzzle blocks she has had since her first birthday.  She started with wanting Mommy to “make chicken”, to then being able to pick out all the chicken pieces but put them in the wrong place, to finally, at the end of the month, being able to put all of the pieces together correctly and know which animal would be on the other side when she flipped the puzzle over onto the table.  In addition, her coloring has turned into lots and lots of circles and spirals instead of the linear scribbling.

One thing school hasn’t really helped is Sonia’s eating habits.  I had hoped that since they emphasize eating time as sitting time and give them open cups to drink from, that she might be better at home.  However, she still kicks at the table, stands in her chair and plays with her food.  In addition, the food at school is more bland and carb-centric than what she would be getting at home, which has impacted what she will eat for dinner.  I still think she eats more veggies, both at home and at school, than most of the other kids, but its not what it once was.  Sonia did get a couple “special treats” (aka cupcakes) for her Nanny’s, Daddy’s and classmate’s birthdays this month, which probably didn’t help. 🙂

Another fun adventure this month was Sonia’s first trip to the LA zoo, with her friend Sebastian.  It is interesting how things stuck with her from that one short visit.  She now says “Elephant at the zoo” and then says “Elephant walking” or “Elephant standing up.”  She also knows that the “Giraffe looking at you” (it was very close to the fence where we were watching it) and that the big monkeys she saw are Gorilla’s and the small monkey was a Spider Monkey.

Sonia continues to fight toilet training, even though at the beginning of the month she did do a couple poops in the big toilet, getting our hopes up.  Her relationship with Dalton is improving, though.  She has learned to gently give him toys, asks about him, and plays alone while I feed him more often.  She has her limits though, and doesn’t want him to be on her chair, or takes away her toys if we start having him play with them, and still often defaults to “Mommy carry  you” the moment I say I have to feed or carry him.

One unfortunate surprise this month was an allergic reaction Sonia had out of the blue. She got hives all over her cheeks and hands, to the point where she was crying because her swollen hands hurt  her.  Oddly, there was nothing out of the ordinary that she ate or touched that morning.  The pediatrician thought it might have been an immune response that some children get a couple days after getting over a cold or flu, but we will be cutting out bananas and nuts for a few weeks, and then reintroducing them to see if she might have built up an allergy to those somehow.

All in all, while Sonia is really starting to try our patience with her terrible-two tantrums, she is becoming more and more interesting to be around at the same time.

At 3 months, Dalton is 13 lbs (25%) and 25″ (80%), and currently a very happy and vocal baby.

Mid-way through Dalton’s 10th week, he stopped the crying after feeding just as suddenly as he had started it 2 weeks earlier, leaving me to assume it was mainly developmental.  In his 11th week, Dalton definitely seemed to make another leap, focusing a lot more on grasping toys and getting his hands to his mouth, as well as finally making eye contact with regularity.  He even seemed to enjoy his first game of peek-a-boo 🙂   In his 12th and 13th weeks, Dalton started to do little crunches, and push off of us with his feet as if to stand.  He also found his voice, and greatly improved his head and neck strength.  Dalton is ready to be up and exploring, and now really likes to ride in the stroller while he is awake.   His favorite toys include his Winkel ball, and the blankets we put on him and over him while out for a walk, in addition to Bugaboo of course. 🙂

Dalton’s sleep has been generally good this month.  During his 11wk leap he extended his awake time from barely 1 hr to almost 2 hr, and started taking only one feeding at night most of the time.  In his 13th week, he reduced his long naps to 1.5-2hrs instead of 3-4hrs, and started to sleep straight from 7pm to 4am most nights!  He is also still easy to get to sleep with just a swaddle and a couple minutes of Wubba, although we did have to move him out of the high traffic area to keep him down for more than 30 mins at a time around 13 wks. He falls right back to sleep after night nursing sessions, and I probably don’t even need to hold him upright for 30 mins after those feedings, although I still have been just to be safe.

In general, Dalton’s major nursing, reflux, and even snoring issues seem to be behind us, and he is a lot more fun to be around; this is truly a happy phase!  However, I am so leery of what awaits us at the 4 month regression that I have decided to take a few more weeks off work.  I am very thankful to have that option, and excited to have the time to spend with our rapidly growing baby boy.

This month Sonia enjoyed a couple fun visits from family and improved on her language concepts from last month, leading to many new parenting and learning opportunities.

The month started out on a rough note, however, as Sonia developed the separation anxiety that is pretty common at this age.  After a couple days and nights of sitting in the rocking chair until she fell asleep, and sleeping on the floor when she woke up in the early morning hours crying, we found that if we left the door to her room open while she slept, she was totally fine.  We did spend some time explaining to her where Mommy & Daddy sleep and where she sleeps which might have helped too.  Now at night, she wants to chat through our lullaby, saying things like “big light off, night light on” and “Mommy leave door open.”

The first visitors were Grandpa Wes and Auntie Cindi. Sonia enjoyed lots of playtime and reading time while they were here, and got out to the park, to downtown to visit Daddy’s work, and to the LA Arboretum.

The next weekend, Auntie Julia came and we visited the California Science Center for the first time, and Sonia got her first pony ride and time in the petting zoo at the farmer’s market.  Sonia didn’t know what to make of the big airplane at the science center but loved to watch the fish at the kelp forest exhibit.  She even enjoyed the touch tank.

Throughout the month Sonia’s language development continued as she added more consonants to the end of her words, improved her grasp of the negative, and expanded her use of full sentences.  She can now say things like “Sonia don’t like cereal,” and answers with a long “Noooo” when we ask her if she was supposed to do something she isn’t for example.

I’ve also noticed for the first time that she is asking us to tell her how to say certain things.  She will point to something and say “this,” or be doing something and say “What Sonia doing?” until we tell her.  Then she will repeat what we say, and after a couple times of that will be able to answer with it when we ask her or will say it randomly.  This girl really narrates her life and will say things over and over and over until we say “Yes, Sonia” and repeat it back to her.  Of course I will not complain because it makes things so much easier that she is so verbal!

One of Sonia’s new sentences, “Sonia need that” has led us to a new parenting opportunity – sharing.  As expected at this age she doesn’t like it when someone else plays with her things, both at the park and with Dalton.  We’ve been slowly teaching her that we take turns, that she can have something she wants when someone else is done with it, and that she will eventually get back whatever is hers.  I have already seen improvements, unless the thing she “needs” is something of ours she’s not allowed to have, like a knife for example, then it often still ends in a melt down.

In general, Sonia has taken a more positive interest in Dalton, asking to “see Dalton” and even “Sonia hold Dalton” once in awhile.  She is becoming more gentle with him when she’s paying attention, but still often doesn’t think about him being there and almost hits him while she’s trying to get up on the couch next to us for example.

Since Sonia is now able to say “Sonia poop in toilet” and knows when she is pooping, we decided mid-month to make an attempt at toilet training.  She peed in little potty the first day and pooped in it the next, but after that began to fight it, so we decided to wait it out and not push her.

Physically, Sonia continues to get more stable, and has added hanging and jumping in one spot with her feet off the floor to her repertoire of skills.  She also likes to “do yoga” with Mommy and has a pretty good down dog.  She just makes me nervous though because she likes to  stand on her head, which I always envision ending in a broken neck.

At the end of the month Sonia took the big step of going to toddler school for the first time.

With all these developments under her belt, she of course did better than we ever would have expected.  I was planning on doing a whole week of half-days with me there at the school, but on Day 1 she was already asking to stay for nap time, on Day 2 she said goodbye to me half-way through the morning and napped there with ease, and on Day 3 she was totally fine that “Mommy say bye bye right away” and spent the whole day there happily. We’ll see if she still enjoys it once she realizes it is all day every day, but we are already noticing that she is singing more songs, and has memorized the names of her teachers and a couple kids in her class.  I almost feel like we’ve been holding her back by not starting her in school sooner.

Things are already getting to the pace that I am losing track of all the new developments each month since there are so many.  Now that Sonia is starting school, I expect that the developments and number of new parenting challenges to increase even more.  I hope we are ready for it, because she certainly is!

The second half of Dalton’s second month has been quite the roller-coaster ride.  He now weighs a little over 11 lb, and is over 23″ tall.

Week 7 was a bit of a dream.  Dalton really seemed to wake up and started smiling, laughing and playing much more.  He developed a decently regular nap cycle and began to work himself to sleep often. He also kept up his fast growth by happily taking up to 5 oz per nursing session.

Week 8 started off on the wrong foot, as a flan I had made seemed to correlate to a lot more screaming and gas after feedings, which convinced me to go dairy free for awhile.  Dalton also stopped eating as much, resulting in slower weight gain, and had a harder time staying asleep more than 25 mins at a time.  This caused me to more closely regulate my caffeine intake, but may also have been correlated to an upwards growth spurt.

Week 9 has been even worse, since, despite the adjustments to my diet, he has been screaming and arching back strongly after every feeding.  This makes it very difficult to get out the bubbles that are so obviously bothering him, and has caused no shortage of frustration on my part.  He no longer likes being held very much, even in the K’Tan or with the Wubba, and is happiest laying on his back in his pack n play swatting at Bugaboo and kicking freely – preferably without pants.  A few times, the only way to calm his screaming after feeding has been to lay him down and take off his diaper!  While it is great that we can leave him to play while we tend to Sonia or ourselves, I worry about him getting a flat head, and about the reduced amount of direct interaction with Mommy and Daddy 🙁

This pattern of ups and downs does coincide with the Wonder Weeks calendar very well, so hopefully we’ll be through it in another week or so.  At least he is still giving us one long 6+ hour stretch of sleep at night, and all that arching may have been improving his back and neck strength. With hands placed close together during tummy time he can even roll from front to back.

Right at 7 weeks we did give Dalton his first bottle, and he drinks from it about as well as he does the breast, which is slowly improving.

This did help relieve some of the stress of the ensuing 2 weeks by allowing me to get out of the house more, including to Cardio Barre 3x per week.  Slowly but surely the baby weight is coming off – only about 10 lbs to go.

In the last week of this month, Dalton got to meet his Grandpa Wes and Auntie Cindi.  While the fussiness kept the quality time to a minimum, he still got to enjoy a few reading sessions, and time out at the LA Arboretum.

Unfortunately, he was too fussy to come along to see Daddy at work, which is too bad, because he was all dressed up and ready to go 🙂

This month Sonia has picked up on a few important concepts that are making our interactions with her much fuller.  She is also working her way up the growth charts, weighing in at 24 lb 12 oz (60%) and reaching 34″ tall (80%).

The first and most important of the new concepts she has learned is the negative.  While she has been able to say “no” for awhile, it was more of a reaction to us trying to do something that she didn’t want.  Now, she definitely understands what it means when we ask her not to do something, or say “don’t,” and she is starting to be able to use it herself.  For example, when we say that Lovey is in the crib, she can say, “Lovey not here.”  Along with this, she is starting to answer yes or no questions more often with a “nope” when the answer is incorrect. For example if she thought she heard the garbage truck coming up the street but then runs over to the window and it’s not here yet, she’ll say, “nope.”

Unfortunately, even though she understands “don’t” and “stop,” she is already starting to pick and choose when to comply.  The biggest areas of challenge tend to be kicking her feet at the dinner table, standing/jumping on chairs and couches, and new boundaries that we have to set as she starts to do more. The last one is likely partly due to the complexity of the new requests.  For example, she can throw her balls outside, but inside she has to roll them, but she can’t roll them in the kitchen because of the hot stove.  It doesn’t help that each of her 3 primary caregivers set different boundaries for these new and nuanced things.  With the kicking at the table, though, it has gotten to the point of purposeful disobedience.  When she’s about to disobey, we can tell because she gets a bit of a glimmer in her eye and a smirk on her face and then says the thing that she is not supposed to do.  We try to use the positive as much as possible, such as getting her to say where we can kick (e.g. on the mat, in the air, etc), but small punishments have been initiated, such as holding her legs uncomfortably or picking her up from the table when she does it.

Another major concept Sonia is starting to understand is asking and responding to who, what and where questions.  It started with just saying “right there” to where questions, but now she can say things like “on bench” or “under table.”  She is now starting to ask these questions herself, too, such as by saying “Where Monkey go?” while searching for him. I have also been impressed with the variety of things she can talk about when I quiz her about what she did at My Gym, for example.  She can say what she played with as well as who was there with her.  If she doesn’t know the answer, or doesn’t have the words, she still replies “yeah” though – which is probably still about 75% of the time.

Sonia’s vocabulary of verbs has expanded greatly as well, and she is finally starting to add some consonants to the end of her words – especially “t”, “p”, “k” and “n”.  We can now tell the difference between “milk” and “mail” and “on” or “off” out of context.  This is helpful as she is starting to have and express very detailed preferences.  For example, her cheese stick needs to be pulled apart rather than whole and given to her in the orange cup instead of the pink cup with the lid on instead of off.

Also this month, Sonia finally got her colors!  She’s still a little iffy on purple vs. blue, purple vs. pink and yellow vs. orange, etc, but that is to be expected.  Now on to focusing on perfecting the alphabet and counting 🙂

Sonia has also now added Hide and Seek to her repertoire of favorite playtime activities, although she much prefers to be the one seeking – she doesn’t quite get hiding yet.  She still loves stickers and coloring, too, and is even getting a little better at keeping herself and her surroundings clean while doing it.

At her doctor’s appointment Sonia surprised us by being very calm while she was weighed and measured, being shy, but still saying “Hi Dr. A,” and not even flinching when she got her 2 shots!  What a difference from last visit!  She really is growing up.

At 6 weeks, Dalton is just under 10 lb.

He has dropped to 2 feedings most nights, and it is getting easier to burp him.  However, he still gulps rather than pumps while nursing, which may be contributing to his reflux, or that may just be normal for his age and development.  I have been holding him upright after feedings for up to 30 mins, and he still will have a reflux at 45 min or an hour after feeding.  Sometimes this wakes him up leading to disrupted nights, but more and more he is able to get himself back to sleep.  He still “snores” so noisily after those night time feedings that we barely get any sleep at all after the first one at midnight 🙁 This certainly wasn’t helped by him catching Sonia’s 2nd cold in 3 wks, either. The cold seemed to make him more congested in general, but the snoring is probably something he will just have to grow out of.  I recall we attempted to move Sonia into her own room at this age for the same reason.

This lack of sleep led to a very unexciting New Year’s Eve.  We watched the ball drop in NY on TV, and then went to bed 🙂

Dalton still has good days and bad days, but the number and length of the good awake times are increasing dramatically. He now likes to lay in his pack n play swinging his arms at the toys above him and looking in the mirror at himself.  So far, though, it doesn’t seem to be intentional when he actually connects with any of the toys.

Dalton’s smiles are also increasing in frequency, and he’s starting to make his first baby babbles, much to our delight.  Excited for this baby boy to keep growing and showing us who he really is.

We enjoyed a beautiful Christmas this year with Eric’s parents, sister and brother-in-law in town for a visit.

Sonia really loved having the family here so we could “all eat’gether” for the traditional pizza on Christmas Eve as well as many other meals over the long weekend.  She was also constantly calling for them by their couple names: NonaPapa and AysenKevin.

We had been getting Sonia prepared with books and she was more involved with our Christmas traditions this year.  She knew what Santa Claus and Rudolph looked like, and was really interested in the Christmas tree, but didn’t fully comprehend the whole story. She definitely was a more active participant in present opening this year vs. last year 🙂

But, as always seems to be the case with young kids, the boxes offered almost as much fascination as the toys – almost 🙂

In addition to the Christmas Eve/Day activities, we took a few of our first outings as a family of four to the Getty Center on Friday and Rose Float viewing on Saturday.  With a toddler and infant, these trips were stressful, and Mommy  really didn’t get to see much. However, it was still nice and empowering to get out of the house, and Sonia enjoyed herself.  She especially loved riding the “choo choo train” up to the Getty, and the little airplane and fire truck at the Rose Float Village.

Dalton but was mostly sleeping, nursing or fussing, but still had a few happy times to share with the family.

In the last week of his first month, Dalton is already stretching his long arms and legs out of his newborn clothes, and has surprisingly stable movements for his age.  He is still growing like crazy, too, now weighing right around 9 lb.

Unfortunately, Dalton seemed to catch Sonia’s cold at the beginning of the week, so we ended up tilting his bed and letting him nap in the bouncer to help with the congestion.  It didn’t get much worse than that, thankfully, and passed in a few days.

His general fussiness continues, however, although he’s starting to have some “good days” with decent stretches of happy awake time, including some of his first social smiles already!

I am also learning more how to deal with the “bad days”.  One sure fire way to calm him from screaming down to sleep is to put him in the K’Tan with a Wubba and go for a walk outside.  Unfortunately, one of his fussiest times seems to be a “witching hour” around 4am, where that isn’t really possible. 🙁

Despite all of that, Dalton still gets about 16 hrs of total sleep per day, including a 3hr midday nap and a 5hr stretch at the beginning of the night (from 7pm-midnight).  We also started him on probiotics this week to see if that might help the general fussiness.

Right around 4wks, Dalton’s acne worsened significantly and he started losing all of his hair and getting cradle cap – just like Sonia did. At least he still really likes his baths 🙂

It continues to amaze us how every month we think Sonia is so big and has made so many advancements, and then we are blown away by what she does in just one more month.

This month Sonia has been practicing and improving her short sentences, and it really feels like we can now understand each other for the most part.  Sometimes it takes a little guessing though, since she still has lots of work to do on the harder consonants. In those cases we try not to tell her we can’t understand her, we just say the things it might be until she says “yeah” after one of them.   Also, sometimes it seems like she doesn’t think through what she’s saying, and that it’s still more a memorized pattern.  For example, she almost always adds a “mama” when she’s asking or showing something even when she’s talking to Daddy or the nanny, and answers most questions with “yeah.”

By the end of the month she has learned to recite several nursery rhymes from start to finish (e.g. pat-a-cake, itsy bitsy spider, and row-row-row-your-boat), as well as sections of some of her books (e.g. Little Blue Truck). She will often start into these at random, so it must be for her like when we get a song stuck in our head. She is also getting better with colors and numbers.  She can pick out the right colors when asked to “find the green ball”, but can only produce the right word about 50% of the time, and usually guesses “blue” for any color.

In addition to language development, Sonia has been working on her fine motor skills, though the slow development of these have led to some serious frustrations throughout the month.  Her absolute favorite toy is her flashcards.  She is very good at reciting what the pictures are, but she also likes to take them one by one and stack them in her hands.  This led to several crying fits when she would drop them or couldn’t get them as straight as she wanted.  Another thing that still frustrates her is blankets.  She started to like to put the Aden & Anais swaddlers on her chair or spread out on the floor and then sit in it or have ribbit and monkey lay down on it. Inevitably, doing that would make it not straight, and her small wingspan and lack of fine motor skills made it impossible for her to make it do what she wanted, resulting in more crying fits. We continue to tell her that it takes work and practice and eventually she will get it, while also teaching her how we do it.  This seems to help, and she is already getting better about it.

Being able to be taught how to do things is something else new we’ve noticed. For example, as Sonia has started using utensils more and more to eat, she started to pick up some rather messy ways of handling them. However, with some physical and verbal direction she now can do it more correctly – though only when we pay attention and ask her to, of course.

As these skills, and her independence, start to develop, a few battlegrounds are popping up, such as at the dinner table.  Sonia always wants to eat what someone else has and give her food to whoever is at the table with her.  She kicks her legs which shakes the table, and makes a mess by putting her dirty hands and utensils in her seat, or drops them on the floor.  Perhaps in part because we see these skills developing, we are pushing her to the next level, but this does result in tested boundaries, with no real method of punishment available other than stopping her from doing what she was doing again and again.  This could get uglier as the months roll on, but we’ll have to see.  Thankfully, she still is good about eating a good and healthy variety of foods, although she definitely has a sweet tooth like Mommy.

Her gross motor skills are pretty strong as well. In My Gym, it is obvious that she is now one of the more advanced kids in the group (14-24mo).  She now can climb the ladders with ease, has improved her grip, and can run across the “hot dog” by herself.  She also is able to get her feet off the ground finally while jumping on the trampoline!  She also loves to play on the big swing, on the see-saw, and in the sand at the park.

Sonia’s social skills continue to develop as well, just in time for the arrival of her little brother (or maybe in part because of that event?).  From the first night, Sonia understood that he was another person, and wanted to share her milk and lovey with him.  She also likes to shake the rattles for him, although a little too violently for my liking.  At the park and at story time at the library Sonia has started engaging with other kids and sharing toys in the sand.  When Aaron and Sebastian came over to meet the new baby, she also engaged with them and their toys – although had to be asked to share.

At the same time, her ability to play independently has increased.  Some of her favorite playthings include the ages 4+ airplane puzzle, her mega blocks, and stackers.

However, she still would rather someone be there to play with her.  The only time I have noted any jealously of Dalton is in the mornings when it is just me with them.  Then, she comes crying to say “carry you” and “Dalton down” as soon as I go to tend to him.  If the Nanny or Daddy are there to play with her, though, she doesn’t care what Mommy and Dalton are doing most of the time.  This was made especially clear on the day the Nanny called in sick.  The morning was very rough because Dalton was sleepy, but wouldn’t go to sleep unless I was carrying him, and Sonia wanted Mommy to play with her.  Eventually, Sonia started to play by herself a little more, and I got Dalton to sleep on his tummy, but it certainly is draining being pulled in so many directions and wanting to please everyone.

Besides Dalton’s arrival, there were a number of other fun events this month.  At Thanksgiving we let Sonia watch a little bit of the Macy’s parade, and she really enjoyed the dancers and bands.  She even tried to kick along with the Rockettes! 🙂

Sonia had a much bigger hand in Christmas preparations this year and has picked up some of the traditions with glee.  She went with Daddy to pick out the Christmas tree, and even helped hang some ornaments.  She got to build a gingerbread house with the Nanny, and go to the Zoo Lights with Daddy.  Thanks to a couple books she received as gifts, she knows who Rudolph and Santa Claus are, though not necessarily what they mean yet.

One final new fun experience was getting to play in the rain!  It started with her asking to touch the “fountain” coming off our stuffed gutters after one downpour, and then Mommy made the mistake of letting her reach out at touch the rain during the next.  From there on out, all we heard was “touch it rain” and finally decided she should have the chance to experience it.  Just like she was with pools during the summer, the poor thing would have died of hypothermia if we’d have let her stay out there as long as she wanted.  Such a fish!

Physically, Sonia is filling in again (including her hair a bit), and may have gotten a little bit taller as well.  She is now around 24.5 lb and 33″ (60th %).  She certainly feels heavier, but maybe that is just in comparison to Dalton.  She also got a runny nose again during the last week of this month, but still no sign of her canine teeth.

Week 3 for Dalton was another week of strong growth and a few developmental changes.

Mid-week he seemed to have a growth spurt where he did nothing but ate and slept.  This was followed by a notable change in his sleeping habits.  He now has an increased startle reflex (and yet still hates to be swaddled) and a longer REM-like state at the beginning of his sleep, which makes it harder for him to stay down until about 25 minutes into his sleep cycle.  However, once he does get to sleep, he wants to stay asleep, and I end up waking him when he starts to make hungry faces, and to try not to have him be up all night.  I think his total amount of sleep time is still a lot more than Sonia’s.

Unfortunately, shortly after this new development the nanny called in sick one day, and I gained an even greater appreciation for the difficulties of being a stay-at-home-mom of two.  Without someone else there to keep her busy, Sonia came asking to be held every time I picked up Dalton.  In order to keep Dalton asleep I had to carry him a lot, and eventually put him down on his tummy, which allowed me to get a little more one-on-one time with Sonia.

By the end of Week 3, Dalton was just over 8lb, going up to 4 hrs between feedings (though only 2 hrs on average), and taking down ~3 oz at each feeding.  Unfortunately, he still hasn’t gotten the hang of nursing without inhaling a ton of air.  Even though the projectile spit-up seems to have stopped, he is much more bothered by bubbles in his tummy and dirty diapers than Sonia ever seemed to be.  This leads to a lot of stressful times trying to calm his crying fits while burping him, especially at night.  Still trial and error for now, but I’m hopeful we’ll find a routine soon, and we’ll get more happy and awake time to play together.

I am now down to only 15 lbs over my pre-pregnancy weight and have started going to Cardio Barre again to help tone up my tummy muscles that definitely feel looser this time around.  Unfortunately, I still have the sweet tooth I developed during pregnancy, and I’m sure will soon have to be more attentive to my eating habits if I hope to keep losing the baby weight. 🙂

Dalton has been eating and growing like crazy!  He put on 12 oz in the one week between doctor visits, and was about 1 lb over his birth weight by the end of Week 2.  He is definitely making up for the growth he didn’t do in utero.

Earlier in the week.

 Later in the week

One side effect of this hunger and growth has been a once-or-twice-daily bout of projectile spit up resulting from overeating, gulping too much air, and wanting to pacify at the breast while my body is still adjusting to his intake needs.  It is frightening to say the least when it happens, but apparently benign, and I’m already learning how to minimize the chances. Despite the troubles, I am happy with how efficient of a nurser Dalton is.  He can get down about 2.5 oz in only about 7 minutes, even if he’s sleepy. His latch has also improved and all of my nipple soreness has now gone.

Now that Eric is back to work, night times are a little rougher, but thankfully Dalton is very good about going back to sleep after each feeding, making the amount of sleep deprivation way more tolerable this time around.  In general, Dalton is down for the night around 7 pm and is up around 6am, with 3-4 feedings in between.  The only exception this week was when his 4pm nap morphed right into his 7pm bedtime, so he was wide awake after the 1am feeding.  Like Sonia did, he starts making grunting noises to tell me that he’s hungry, and I’m able to pick him up, change his diaper and get into bed to feed before he really starts crying.  Sometimes, Eric can even sleep through it, but not often since he is still such a noisy eater! The bedtime schedule is a little hectic since Sonia and Dalton are wanting to go down at the same time.  Daddy has ended up doing more of bath time on his own than before while I feed or put Dalton down, but I still make sure I’m there to sing to Sonia and put her down. The 7pm bedtime also allows us a little adult time before crashing ourselves around 8:30.

During the day, things are a little different.  Once Dalton is asleep, he isn’t bothered by anything, but getting him down is way harder than I remember it being with Sonia. He also seems to be fussy whenever he’s awake and not feeding.  Eric has even complained that he hasn’t seen him awake and not crying yet.  I don’t think it’s to the point of calling it colic, but it is very hard on me not knowing what he needs.  I know this part is trial and error, though, and eventually we’ll figure things out and get into somewhat of a routine.  At the end of the week, we did start to try the pacifier, but that doesn’t seem to be the cure-all it was with Sonia.

Not having a routing yet has made the mornings very stressful since, with Eric at work, I have to figure out how to take both kids and the dog for a walk, and get everybody fed before the nanny arrives.  It sure makes me thankful to have the help when she does get there.  I really don’t know how stay-at-home-mom’s of two do it!

Week 1 with Dalton has been a challenge, but way easier than it had been with Sonia, which has been wonderful, because we still have her to worry about too 🙂  The things that have pleasantly surprised me about Dalton include: his strong nursing skills, the relative stability of his hands, and his quick grasp of night vs day.  The things that have pleasantly surprised me about Sonia include: her immediate interest in Dalton and desire to share things with him, and her ability to tune out his crying both night and day!  For all the challenges that a newborn sibling brings to a family, we have really been very lucky to have it go as well as it has so far.

Once again, we only spent one night in the hospital. However, this time, that was plenty.  For the first 24 hrs, Dalton nursed every hour on average. Because of this, my milk came in right about that 24 hr mark, and he only lost ~3% of his birth weight.  After getting help from the nurse and a blessing from the lactation consultant before leaving, I was comfortable that nursing was going to continue to go well at home.  Also, since I didn’t have any stitches, I was feeling good enough physically to go home as well.

With all the tests and paperwork to do, we finally got out of there at 5pm, and so got home with just enough time for Sonia to meet Dalton before it was time to put her to bed.  She was very cute about it, enjoying the big sister stickers “he” brought her from the hospital, and offering him her lovey and her milk.  That night he continued to nurse every hour, but was good about sleeping the rest of the time and kept his crying to a minimum.  Even when he did cry, Sonia didn’t seem disturbed by it at all, which was a huge relief.

The rest of the week, Dalton has continued to nurse every 1.5hrs on average with clusters in the mornings and evenings.  He continued to sleep decently well through the night, with the exception of night 5, where he was up most of the night with what seemed to be tummy/digestive troubles, due either to his first bath at home being too late/too cold and/or me having brussel sprouts for the last 2 days.  Since Eric was off from work this week, he did diaper duty,which helped quite a bit.  Dalton still sleeps through any noise, and is much more content on his back and with arms unswaddled than Sonia ever was.

By day 6, Dalton was back over birth weight.  Still, his nursing habits are a bit worrisome for very different reasons from Sonia.  Whereas it was quite difficult to keep Sonia awake at the breast long enough to get a good meal, Dalton is so eager and quick that he tends to gulp down a ton of air, and yet overeat so it is difficult to burp him, which leads to a lot more fussiness.  This has also led to a less than stellar latch at times as he struggles to swallow quickly enough, which has resulted in more nipple soreness than I expected this time around.  I’m hopeful we will both learn the ropes, and he will grow quickly to resolve any concerns soon.

Grannie was also here through day 5 to help out, which was great as we have been learning how do deal with 2 at the same time.  We also got to spend Thanksgiving together as a family for the first time, which was fun.

Dalton’s birth story is also one of “be careful what you wish for,” and “the best laid plans.” In this case, I had told myself if I went into labor naturally, I would try to go unmedicated, but if I was induced, I would likely ask for the epidural at 6cm as I had done with Sonia.  After trying my best to get labor started naturally, unsuccessfully, I went in for an induction at 41wks+1day. Once I came to terms with the guilt of not letting Dalton pick his own birthday, I settled in for whatever was about to come.

My body was definitely more ready this time.  With a much lower dose of Pitocin than with Sonia, I went from 2-6cm in the first 3 hrs of labor.  Since the pain was still quite tolerable at that point, I decided to keep going without medication. One hour later, just as the pain was starting to get bad, they checked me again at 6cm, and I asked for the epidural. From there, the pain seemed to escalate exponentially with each contraction.  Turns out I had no time for the epidural, because less than 10 minutes later, at 12:03pm, Dalton was out!  My OB barely made it in time, and I could barely stop pushing long enough, to cut the cord from around his neck!

Since he came out blue, he was taken for observation before going to my chest.  I didn’t mind since I was in such a state of shock that things had gone so quickly, that I needed that time to clear my head. Thankfully, just a few minutes later, we were both cleaned up and he was there on my chest and nursing like a champ right away!

Once again, very little about labor went as I had planned, but I had a wonderfully uncomplicated delivery, without even needing stitches, and got to “experience” the full birth process without pain medication.  I still don’t think I felt the bonding hormone and endorphin rush that many mothers describe upon the delivery of their baby, but I certainly felt more aware this time without the epidural.  In the end we got our beautiful, healthy, eager eater, Dalton – and nothing is more important than that! He weighed in at 6 lb 4 oz and measured 19 3/4″ long.

Once again, this trimester proceeded very similarly to how it did with Sonia.  I didn’t have any heartburn or major complaints to speak of, and remained rather small.  It wasn’t until about 36wks that I had to slow down at Cardio Barre, and I continued going until 38wks.  I also worked up until 38wks.

The one major difference was that this time I was referred to the perinatologist for a sizing ultrasound at 37wks since I was measuring so far behind.  They found him to be small ~10%, but with adequate fluid and umbilical blood flow, which is what I suspect they would have found if they’d referred me with Sonia as well.  However, they still put me on additional monitoring of weekly ultrasounds and Non-Stress Tests for the duration of my pregnancy.  This felt very much like overkill, but it was good to see him continue to grow and know everything was okay.

The other major difference was that I was more cautious with my activity level since I didn’t want a repeat of my water breaking before labor started as it did with Sonia, especially since I was GBS positive this time, which put me and the baby at a higher risk of infection with pre-mature membrane rupture.

My reduced activity level seems to have worked, since here I am a week past my due date and still waiting on baby boy.  I got my first contractions shortly after taking Sonia to Travel Town at 2 days past my due date.  They then came on stronger the next morning, and were even coming 5 minutes apart for awhile.  I was about to call Eric home when they just stopped.  I got a few more on and off that afternoon and evening, and was hopeful that things would progress overnight, but instead they stopped cold again when I went to bed, and did not restart.

I went to the back-up OB at 5 days past due (since my OB was out of town attending a white house dinner), and she said I was 1-2cm dilated and “ready to go.”  Based on the perinatologist’s recommendation, she suggested I schedule an induction for 41 wks, and so I set the date for Monday morning (41w+1d, and when my OB would be back), and then tried everything short of castor oil to go into labor naturally this weekend, including acupuncture.  The acupuncture was interesting.  They placed needles in between my thumb and forefinger, and a little bit above my ankle, and then stimulated them with electric pulses for ~15 mins.  The hand was relatively uncomfortable because if it stimulated too hard it would cause my finger and thumb to seize together, but it wasn’t painful, and I did get contractions while I was on the table today!  I suspect they will die away again, like all the others tonight, but either way, we’re having this baby tomorrow!

This was a fun month with Sonia, exploring new places and continuing the escalation in her language development and physical growth.

One of the things Sonia has really latched onto is “choo choo trains.”  So for her 19 mo “photo shoot” we took her to Travel Town to see the real thing.

In addition to her fun trip to Cincinnati, Halloween also fell during this month. Sonia went trick-or-treating for the first time as a woodland fairy.  Of course, Mommy liked the costume a lot more than she did, and the extent of her trick-or-treating was getting to watch other kids at about 6 houses.  I did let her have one lollipop though.  She was a fan of that!

Sonia kept on escalating her language development this month, moving from phrases to full-on sentences.  Eric first noticed this at Nona and Papa’s house with “Elmo ride choo choo train” after playing with those toys for hours, but it continued to develop as Sonia learned to refer to herself when she wanted to do something, such as “Sonia wash bowl”, as she has become inclined to do when she’s all done with dinner.  This seems to be starting a bit of an independent streak that is maturing along with her now furtive “no” when she doesn’t want to do something.  She is even starting to give commands to Luna that she has learned from us.  One thing that does elude her, though, is pronouns. If she wants to be carried, it’s “Mama, carry you”, instead of Mama, carry me.  She’ll repeat it once correctly when you tell her to, but the next time, it’s still “carry you.”

Sonia continues to love to sing songs and has started to go through her full repertoire while she’s lying in bed in the morning between 5-something when she wakes up and 6:15am when I go in to get her.  It is hilarious to listen to her on the monitor, even if it does mean I don’t get to sleep.  Other things she newly loves are stickers – pulling them off the paper and sticking them to everything: body parts, stuffed animals, etc – pulling her choo choo trains around the house, doing puzzles, and playing with her toy horses.

At the end of October, Sonia got to travel half way across the country to Cincinnati with Daddy to visit with family and friends, and attend Alison and Kevin’s wedding. She had traveled a number of times with Mommy and Daddy, and twice with just Mommy, but this was the first time for flying solo with Daddy. After 25 total flights in her first 18 months of life, these were probably her last as a “lap baby”.

On the way out to Cincinnati, Sonia was still recovering from her immunization shots and didn’t get much sleep, but was very calm and relaxed the whole way. On the way home she was a lot more active, but was able to get in an hour long nap and was occupied by stickers, books, coloring and eating. Daddy (and all of her fellow passengers) were very happy with demeanor on both flights.

While in Cincinnati, Sonia got to meet a number of Daddy’s friends from high school and college, as well as some of their kids, and visit Nona’s office. Still relatively shy when first meeting new people, but she did warm up and start playing with Owen and Gloria at Eli’s BBQ and with John and Kathy at the Fall Festival.

Two of her favorite activities while at Nona and Papa’s house was playing with the toy zoo train, especially if Papa would make Elmo ride the train, and picking green beans and tomatoes from the garden. This play did result in one of her first real sentences, “Elmo, ride choo-choo train”. This was a small verbal step beyond less complex phrases and she definitely practiced saying it over, and over, and over!

The big event of the week was getting to visit the animals at the Cincinnati Zoo, ride on the zoo train, and attend Alison and Kevin’s wedding. Of course, the zoo and the train were big hits. However, putting on her dress and tights were not. She almost managed to make it through the ceremony, but starting saying loudly “more music” just as the vows started. Although the long day was a little overwhelming, she did enjoy getting to see the penguin, armadillo and owl up close.

While spending a day at Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa’s house, Sonia also demonstrated another level of development. She very quickly learned Kathy and Laura’s names, and used them appropriately to “talk” to either of them. She also would ask for GGpa to come play whenever he disappeared into the house, and always wanted to know where he was.

All in all, Sonia was spectacular for the whole trip. She was her usual fun and excited self, she managed to sleep very well in an unfamiliar bed, and put up with being dragged from place to place to meet new people and see new things. As a small reward, she did get to try ice cream, pizza and Skyline for the first time. Luckily, she didn’t seem to be TOO interested in any of them 🙂

Sonia’s development seems to be accelerating. She has picked up way more in this 18th month than even last month, which we had thought was a pretty big leap.

Sonia’s tummy troubles at the end of last month morphed into a runny nose, increased drooling, and increased sensitivity in her mouth, which made us think that she was teething.  However, those symptoms have come and gone a couple times over the month and still no canines.  Maybe coincidence, or perhaps it was tied to the growth spurt Sonia definitely experienced in the first half of the month.  For about 2 weeks, Sonia asked for more food than I could have ever imagined fitting into that little body!  One morning she and I even had the exact same breakfast – 2 pieces of toast with almond butter and jam – and she was still hungry 2 hrs later!  She needed it though, and she is now up to over 33″ and 23 lb, with a bit less of the baby belly than she had before.

She got the energy to go with all that eating, and the coordination that came with the growth.  This month she started to climb on everything, and it seems like we now spend half our time asking her to sit down or not jump on the bed or couches.  At My Gym, several people have commented at how coordinated she is for how young, but it sure seems like the falls and bumps some body part or another very often.

This begs the question of how we are going to start handling her disobedience.  For now we can tell it is still just testing her boundaries, not mischieviousness. We have been giving warnings/instruction which is often followed, at least momentarily, and then just removing her from the situation when she disobeys again or crosses a line.  Sometimes that results in tears (she’s a pretty dramatic girl in general), but they are usually short-lived and quickly forgotten.  I have also started to test out the idea that you are supposed to give toddlers choices when they get demanding or disobedient, but so far it seems like that is going over her head.

Sonia has been obsessed with books this month. In fact, there were a couple meltdowns at the beginning of the month when she didn’t want to stop reading when it was time for me to go get ready for work in the morning.

However, after a concerted effort at easing that transition, she quickly picked up “one more time” and “one more book,” which helped quite a bit.  She still over-uses it, but it was impressive to hear the full phrase, and cute to see her hold up her little hand like a one when she says it.  By the end of the month she was saying all her books by [a  shortened] title when she’d bring them to us, and started to show the first signs of “reading” on her own with a book we got her that has pictures in place of some of the words, and also with “Moo” and “Baa” in her Farmer Duck book.  When we point to them, she will say the word for us.

Phrases and songs have been Sonia’s key verbal development this month.  In addition to Baby Beluga, she can now ask for “Ee Bee Ba Ba” (Itsy Bitsy Spider), and does the “Oh No!” part of Slippery Fish.  She attempts to do the actions to those, plus the Wheels on the Bus, and can also do 5 Little Monkeys, including the finger wag of the doctor, which is adorable.  She also has started to sing along to a few parts of the ABC’s, especially the last part “Now ah now ah ABC.”

I have stopped counting how many words she knows, and she can repeat just about any phrase.  In fact, there are times when we are starting to wish she would stop talking 🙂 We have also already started having to spell things when speaking in front of her, such as “fig bar” and “crackers” to avoid her asking for them incessantly, and she very easily responds to multi-part sentence requests. For example, saying “eat your eggs and then you can get some of Mommy’s cereal” results in a very quick handful of eggs to the mouth.  The nanny also got her some flashcards which she apparently loves.  I think she’s picked up every word in the deck. One late breaking word of note, though, is her own name. It sounds a bit more like “Tota” than Sonia, but we can tell what it means. We have also been able to teach her to say “excuse me” instead of “move” when she wants someone out of her way.  Too bad Luna doesn’t understand.

Interestingly though, for as many words as she knows, she is still not getting colors or numbers.  She knows the right type of word to respond to the right question, but it’s still not the right number or color that she answers with.  It is interesting that her “one-two” of last month became “one-two-three” for the first part of this month and then even “one-two-three-four-five-six-seven” later in the month.  It’s like it’s all one word to her though.  And for some reason, everything is “blue” this month instead of “green.”

Some fun things from this month include going to the Kidspace Museum in Pasadena, teaching her to give “back massages”, her giddy joy while “walking” on our feet, and “posing” for pictures with her blanket and frog.  We also got her a Dr. Kit that she has started using on her stuffed animals.  Too bad it hasn’t helped her be less afraid of the actual Dr, yet.

She also has started to really like trains, and she even got to ride one at the pumpkin patch we went to on her 18 mo birthday.

As the time gets closer for the new baby to arrive, we have been trying to prepare Sonia in small ways.  We got her a couple big sister books, and she can now say “big sister” and “baby cry” when she hears another baby crying, but I still don’t think she has any idea what is coming.  We also started using toothpaste and brushing twice a day as part of her routine.  She has taken to it very well, but still doesn’t know how to spit.  Finally, we started to have her try to undress herself in preparation for potty training somewhere down the line, but for now she only goes through the motions and still needs help to actually get things off.

 It is sad to think of her not being my baby anymore. 🙁

Sonia’s 17th month was a big one!

Sonia’s communication skills exploded this month as she began to put multiple words together.  The first few we noticed were “big bite” and “move Luna,” but pretty soon she was mimicking any two word phrase we said.  She was also picking up new words/sounds even after hearing them only once or twice, such as Soccer “lala” Ball, Oil “oyo” and lotion “lolo.”

We’ve also been amazed at how she now understands what to do in certain situations when not explicitly asked.  For example, she spilled a little milk in her playroom and I said “Uh oh, we’ll have to clean it up,” at which point she ran to the kitchen, pulled the towel off the dishwasher and brought it back to wipe up the milk. Other examples include asking me to set up the chair we use to wash her hands at the sink so she could watch me put flowers in a vase, and coming to me in the kitchen and pushing my legs toward the bathroom so I could brush teeth with her and Dada.

Sonia’s interest in books continues to grow, as does her attention span.  She can now make it through the longest of her board books and even some shorter story books, but we still have to paraphrase the Serendipity books to keep her interest in those.

She is learning a few new “subjects” as well.  She can get in a few of the shapes on her shape sorter clock, says “ABC” and asks for us to sing her the song and read her Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom, and has begun counting to 2.  She can also say the names of many different colors, but everything is still “green” if you ask her “what color is this…?”   She still gets frustrated when she can’t figure something out right away.

Her pretend play is increasing in complexity.  For example, Daddy set up her toy food around the living room, and she ran around to get it all in her shopping cart, and then went to him to “check out”.  Some favorite new play activities now include laying on the ground and asking to be tickled, turning circles until she gets dizzy, and singing “Ba-by Goo-Ga” (Baby Beluga).

Sonia also got in some good interaction with others when her Nona & Papa came to visit and take care of her while Mama & Dada went to Tahoe for their anniversary weekend (finally!).  I was a little worried given how clingy she had been in Charlotte, but it seemed to make all the difference that she got to be in her own house. She also improved her fork and spoon skills while eating with them, and now really enjoys being able to eat from a bowl, rather than use her fingers. Though, sometimes she still just prefers to grab her food when she gets frustrated.

Sonia did have a  few set backs as she went through this latest leap.  About half-way through the month Sonia switched down to one nap, and then had a number of nights where she woke up between 10-11pm screaming for us and not wanting to be put back down.  We had to go in without saying anything, hold our hands on her back until she fell asleep and then sneak out of the room.  During the last week of the month, Sonia had some unexplained tummy troubles (she woke up one morning in a pool of vomit and had runny stools for the next couple days).  It was coupled with a week of extremely hot weather (e.g. 110 during the day and high 70’s at night), but oddly not with any fever or other issues.  In terms of growth, she does seem to be thinning out and lengthening a bit, but still has the baby belly.

We are really enjoying hearing Sonia open up, and becoming more and more entertained by her antics.

The second trimester with Baby Hovey #2 has passed without much notice.  It has gone largely the same as with Sonia in that it has been largely uneventful.  Looking back through the photos its pretty amazing how I popped in the 6th month – both in belly and in the thickness of my hair!  I am running a couple pounds ahead of last pregnancy which is likely attributable to the reduced exercise and lack of focus on my diet.  Thank goodness I have Eric getting veggies and greens into me at every opportunity 🙂

Sonia’s 16th month was one of exploration and expanding skills.

At the beginning of the month, Sonia started her first noticeable pretend play with feeding milk and snacks to her Baby, Monkey or Lovey.

Soon after, she started to show a lot more interest in “reading” books and being read to.  This seemed to accelerate when we got her her own little chair.  She now asks for “book” a lot (although it still sounds pretty similar to “food”, “spoon” and “pool”), and we have started a routine of going through a number of books first thing in the morning while she drinks her milk.

While she can sit for 20-30 minutes going through books on our lap or by herself in her chair, her attention span isn’t long enough to get through most of them individually.  More often, she is in and out of the chair with different books, spending time practicing turning pages. She has some favorites that she calls out by name like “Gecko” for The Goodnight Gecko and “Tiger” for Tiger is a Scaredy Cat and others that she just goes to over and over again, like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.  Toward the end of the month, she has started to be quite picky about which book she reads, and has learned to say “no” to ones she doesn’t want to read and “otro” when she wants you to read a different one.  She is also getting good at pointing out things she knows the word for when she sees them in pictures, and mimicking actions we do when we read certain pages.

Other play developments included a revived interest in playing “Boo,” and  in coloring with crayons and her window markers for the first time.  She can even say “color” now.  She also is able to understand full sentence suggestions like “go over there and smell the flower,” and continues to mimic both sounds and actions with surprising skill.

Sonia’s motor skills continue to develop as well.  She is getting a lot more confident at My Gym, and even starting to run a bit during our walks.  Merging her motor and play developments, she started playing a game of picking up sticks and poking all the trees on our walk with it.  She can say “stick,” “poke,” and “tree.”

The one development we aren’t that excited about is the increasing prevalence of “no” in her vocabulary, and the mini meltdowns that she has started when we take her away from something she is enjoying or don’t understand what she wants.  So far it has been manageable, only a few seconds of tears each time and still distractable.  However, we’re already realizing we need to be firm on certain boundaries, but let an awful lot go, and that we need to communicate a lot between ourselves so that we don’t approach the same situation differently.  I have a feeling this is going to get way harder before it gets easier.

In general, it has been a relatively happy and healthy month for Sonia.  She has given signs of being ready to transition down to one nap, especially when she’s out and about with Mommy and Daddy during the weekend.  Last weekend, we drove 2 hrs South to get Eric a new car and Sonia slept only 35 mins in the car, but was calm and happy entertaining herself for the rest of the drive and then didn’t take a second nap until we headed home 7hrs later!  Such a trooper!

In the last week of the month, though, Sonia’s healthy, happy attitude was put to the test when she had a couple traumatic events in a row.  On Tues night she accidentally knocked the carbon monoxide detector slightly out of it’s socket – man those things are loud!  On Wed afternoon she handled a cactus during our nightly walk and ended up with a ton of teeny tiny prickers all over her hands.  It took Eric and I an hour with tweezers, tape, etc to get enough of them out for her to stop bawling! Then from Friday to Monday I took Sonia alone to visit my mom & sister in Charlotte.  She had an awesome time playing in the lake, the pool and with the dogs, but was very clingy to Mommy.

There’s one more wonder weeks leap due to start this coming month, and I wonder if it’s starting already.  She is becoming such a little person!

Sonia’s 15th month included a lot of new experiences, some new skills, and a new car seat (moving up to a convertible car seat). In addition, it took her half of the month to get over whatever she picked up in Wisconsin, and the second pair of first molars came through while she was at it,  but she generally kept a smile on her face through it all.

At her 15 month appointment Sonia weighed in at 22lb 2 oz (60%), 30.75″ tall (60%), and a 46cm head (60%). She also got her MMR and Varivax vaccines, which were scheduled for 12 months and 2 weeks, but had been delayed due to travel and illness. She also had her first TB test, which of course was negative. All three of these shots were in the arms, instead of legs, which was also a new experience. Considering how afraid of nurses and Dr A she was, she did surprisingly well with the shots. She also warmed up to Dr A by the end of her appointment and showed off her “ears”, “nose”, and “eyes”.

Play time has been more independent now that she is through the latest Wonder Week leap, with a lot of time spent outside and exploring her world. Sonia can now ask for “shoes” which she knows mean she gets to go outside. Typically, Luna is along for the fun and the two of them continue to develop a good relationship, though Sonia has learned to be cautious when Luna gets riled up and rambunctious. We think “Luna” is the word Sonia can say most clearly and definitively.

Another new part of her play schedule is going to My Gym on Saturday mornings with daddy and Thursday evenings with mommy. My Gym is an hour long session of kids between the ages of 14 months and 24 months running all over in a room full of balls, ladders, slides and other gym equipment. It’s a great opportunity for Sonia to get out some energy and interact with other kids and adults. They also have directed activities to focus on developing strength and agility.

Part of the developing agility is improving her walking. Our evening walk with Luna now includes Sonia covering about a quarter of it on her own, but she still needs the stroller to make the whole 1.5 mile trek. This has also opened up new exploration as she stops to check out flowers, flags, nuts, rocks, dirt, etc. as we go.

This month also brought another holiday. We spent The Fourth with friends for a cook out, and Sonia got to wear a festive romper made by mommy. She also enjoyed more time in the kiddie pool, a favorite weekend activity.

Though Sonia always has a good time in her kiddie pool, she REALLY likes getting into a full size pool. Even if her teeth are chattering from the cold water, she will repeatedly say “pool pool” and “again” if you take her out. She’s especially excited when there is water shallow enough for her to stand. She doesn’t mind getting her face in the water too much, but hasn’t fully grasped the idea of closing her mouth. Daddy is hoping she will be as much of a fish as him!

Sonia has always been interested in her surroundings, but this month has brought more spatial awareness and interest in the interactions between objects with each other, and with herself. Trying to put on her own shoes, banging a drum with a stick, stirring an imaginary pot of food with a spoon, putting rocks and seeds into her bubble container, or putting the thermometer into her ear. She also will walk around the house and slowly back herself up until she hits a wall, chair, or box. She will still often forget to watch where her feet are going, and ends up tripping relatively frequently, but it is all improving rapidly.

Food hasn’t changed much, but she has started to understand that she has a choice in what to eat. She will still usually devour broccoli, zucchini, or carrots, but fruit remains her favorite (including a new summer favorite – watermelon on the rind).

Occasionally she will go through multiple foods saying “all done” and then “more” (meaning she wants more food, just something else) before she finds what she really wants to eat.  We indulge this to a point, but still set boundaries on how many options she has to hopefully avoid her getting too picky. So far it seems to be working out well.  Sonia has also had more eating out experiences this month, going to brunch and lunch with friends or family. We are very happy with how feeding has gone so far and are happy to have chosen the baby led weaning method.

Finally, Sonia also added another new word to her vocabulary this month that she has started to use with regularity, but not overuse (yet…) “no.”  Can’t wait to see what fun lies ahead 🙂

Had our anatomy scan yesterday and found out we’re expecting a healthy baby boy! Still feeling great and starting to feel him move a bit already. So exciting!

It’s hard to believe that just a month ago Sonia took her first stumbling steps. She has never looked back.  Within a week, she was getting up to standing without assistance, then picking up and carrying objects much heavier/bigger than would seem possible (or at least sensible), and playing in a crouched position.

Toward the end of the month she’s started to explore her physical boundaries even more.  Some of her favorite games have been going up and down the few small stairs to the patio (learning to go down right, finally!), balancing on objects such as the bathroom scale or a pillow she’s pulled from the couch, climbing onto or into objects such as an Amazon box or her ducky tub, and standing on her head/attempting to do somersaults.  Needless to say, there have been a lot of moments like this: clomp clomp clomp, bump!, waaaah, okay?, clomp clomp clomp, giggle giggle. 🙂

Along with all the motor skills, Sonia’s vocabulary continues to balloon!  Some of the new words we have noticed this month are: help, please, thank you, baby, food, cheese, blueberry, berry, oatmeal, bread, broccoli, egg, hot, diaper, ribbit (meaning frog), ear, teeth, cheek, walk, outside and again.  And this month something new as well; signing!  It came on all of a sudden, like I was told it might, and seemed to take her no time to pick up a few key signs: food, more, again, all done, bath, but surprisingly not milk.  With the added quantity, though, some of her quality has suffered: ball lost the “ll”, avocado went from “Avo” to “agda”, and out of context a lot of the words do sound alike.  Still, it’s pretty amazing how many words she can understand and at least attempt to say in the correct context.  This became especially apparent when we sat her down with her Rocket’s Mighty Words book open to a page with a bunch of chalked pictures on a blackboard and started asking “Where is the..?”  We were astounded at how many of them she could pick out! Guess we’d better start watching what we say around her 🙂

Sonia’s play continues to mature as well. She has gotten better at her legos and stackadoos, will go get toys like what she sees in a book, and has even started to want to “help” Mommy with tasks such as sweeping the floor.  Little by little she’s becoming less of a baby.

All of these developments came despite it not being a very healthy/happy month for Sonia.  After we got back from Wisconsin, Sonia’s nose continued to run for another week.  She then got a low grade fever for about 12 hrs, and after some investigation we realized she had just cut the 2nd of her 1st molars!  After that, she got quite a bit better, but has still not completely gotten over her stuffy nose.  There are 2 more molars to go in this batch, so unfortunately this might go on for awhile. We’re not sure, though, if it’s really just the teething, or if there still is a cold and/or allergies at work as well.  Poor thing.

A final, and quite major, change this month is that we have stopped nursing.  The decision to end it came a week after getting back from Wisconsin.  Over that week, Sonia had asked for milk every day just after we had finished nursing in the morning.  Having read that supply tends to drop toward the 4th or 5th month of pregnancy, I assumed that process was starting for me.  It also began to hurt a bit more, either due to the drop in supply, Sonia’s new teeth, or perhaps a change in her nursing style to get around the stuffy nose.  The whole process was pretty quick, 2 days to cut out the morning feed, and another week mostly for me to come to terms with cutting out the evening feed completely.  Sonia didn’t seem to mind.  A couple times she pulled my shirt out to look for milk there, but went right back to the straw cup.  There was not much discomfort for me either, so I was glad we could reach this mutually agreeable conclusion.  Another step toward her no longer being a baby anymore.  Unfortunately, now I can’t eat whatever I want anymore,either. 🙂 

At the end of May we took a week to head back to Wisconsin to see family and to get some fresh air.

For 3 days we rented a house on Vance Lake in Manitowish Waters.  It was nice house, they had kayaks to explore the lake and river, and it was within walking distance to the small town.  The weather was wonderful, highs close to 80 and lows in the high 50’s.  Unfortunately, the mosquitoes were vicious, so we didn’t get outside as much as we would have liked!

Sonia enjoyed toddling around the house, working on mastering her new two-legged mobility.  We were quickly reminded how nice it is to not have to worry about her with stairs at home.  She really loves to tackle them, and right now she’s pretty good at getting up stairs, but horrible at getting down!  She also picked up a new favorite “word”, fish, which she “says” by mimicking a goldfish mouth movement. :-O.  I was impressed how quickly she learned that it applied to goldfish in a tank, as well as trophies mounted to the wall, and drawings in a book.  It was also pretty adorable that she even started making the face when I would say a word like efficient, just because it had the right sound in it.

While Up North, we took a number of fun excursions, including:

• Hiking at the North Lakeland Discovery Center – quickly, so as to try to outrun the mosquitoes,
• Lunch  at Lazy Aces Saloon in Manitowish – delightfully amazing in-house slow-cooked pulled turkey BBQ, cheese curds, and pinball 🙂
• A short stop at the Little Bohemia lodge to see the remnants of the infamous gun battle between the FBI and John Dillinger (also the set of the 2009 movie Public Enemies)
• A trip to Minocqua and the Wildwood Wildlife Park – Sonia’s first zoo experience. She seemed a little overwhelmed by it all.

Eric and I also got a night out at one of the few nice restaurants in the area – Aurora Borealis.

Back at Grandpa’s house, Sonia had fun playing in the garden and toddling around the park.

While it was a fun time, it was still a bit of a rough week for Sonia, and for us.  It started off on the wrong foot when Eric and I both got food poisoning from dinner the night before we left, and so were miserable on the plane, while Sonia was more rambunctious and restless than any trip before.  Thank goodness we had gotten her her own seat at least.  Sonia also got a very runny nose on the second day there which continued the rest of the  trip – allergies?  Between that, all the new stimulation, and not getting to sleep in her own bed, Sonia was on a hair trigger all week.  She started to want her lovey more and more often, and even found a name for it “yaya.”

In the end though Sonia walked away with a lot of great new experiences – literally – up and down the aisles of the plane 🙂

The first trimester with Baby Hovey #2 has gone by quickly with so much else to focus on.

This pregnancy has been much the same as the previous one so far.  I only had minor queasiness again, although rather than lasting for a week, it did last for about 4wks this time. A couple external factors were very different though, which might have contributed to that minor change.  First is that I was still nursing Sonia a couple times a day and noticed that when I would get a let down I would get a little queasiness.  Second, for weeks 3-8 of the pregnancy, Eric and I were wheat-free for lent, which I did not enjoy, but which did keep me from getting too bloated or gaining any weight during that time.  I definitely have gained more than my share in the 3rd month, though, ugh.

All of the tests look good so far, and this baby is especially “photogenic” per the sonographer 🙂  No gender prediction yet, but my skin does seem to be clearer and I’m craving more salty snacks than last time, so maybe…

In one month, Sonia’s first drunken-sailor steps holding onto Daddy’s hand turned into relatively stable walking across the room without any help (with a few bumps and bruises along the way of course).  What a transformation!  In the video below she’s using it to her advantage to do one of her favorite things, try to get Luna to play with her. Can’t wait to see where she goes from here!

Sonia Playing with Luna

Shortly after a year, we switched Sonia to cow’s milk.  At first she took to it well, so I decided to stop pumping at work.  However, we quickly learned that she was fine taking it from the nanny, but wanted nothing to do with it when Mommy & Daddy were home. The pediatrician had said that with the right diet she didn’t need any milk at all, so we tracked her food intake for a week and then decided that we didn’t need to force the milk on her after all. I still nurse first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, we offer her cow’s milk with meals, and we introduced a daily Calcium + D gummy vitamin.  Between that and the yogurt, cheese, and other variety of good foods she eats, she seems to be doing great.

Sonia’s vocabulary is getting ridiculous!  Below is a list of all the recognizable words (to us at least) that she can say/repeat in context.  Mama, Dada, Luna, Bye Bye, No, Book, Bubbles, Box, Block, Ball, Bear, Balloon, Bath, Night Night, Nose, Banana, More, Milk, Water (still just clicking), Avocado, Up, Down, Door, Mailbox, Go, Garbage.

Sonia’s play is also getting more advanced.  This month, bubbles were her favorite thing, so much so that she often would wake up in the morning or from naps saying “bubbles.” Oddly, though, she doesn’t care about the bubbles themselves, just putting the wand in and out of the container and holding it up to Mommy or Daddy’s mouth.  Another new toy Sonia is fond of is her watering can.  She clicks when she sees it and asks to be taken around to all the plant so she can “water” them.  This was also the first month she actually stacked blocks into a tower herself, and she found out the joy of being pushed around in a laundry basket.  In fact, she was in heaven when the nanny brought her a bunch of balls so she could have her own mini ball pit in the laundry basket.

Sonia Stacking Blocks

She has definitely come through the latest leap, and is sweeter again.  So lucky and happy to have such an interesting and adorable baby girl!

Sonia’s Birthday weekend fell on Easter weekend this year, and we had a great time of it with family and friends.

Her actual birthday was on Good Friday. We both took the day off from work and Nonna & Papa were in town to hang out with the birthday girl and prepare for her party on Saturday. We took advantage of the nice day to open her presents from family outside in the yard.

She was very excited about all of it!  She even kept the headband on for most of the afternoon – a first for her 🙂

In the afternoon we took a walk to the park. It was busy, but she got a few minutes of fun on the swings.

Saturday morning we finished prepping for the party, which included having her special balloons delivered. These soon became Sonia’s favorite things, and she quickly picked up the word we would hear most from her for the next week – “bah-woo” 🙂 It was so fun to see the delight in her eyes as she batted at them.

We had also ordered lunch from Lemonade and set up a shaded play area using Sonia’s play mat in the back yard.  Sonia, ever the charmer, greeted guests in a pretty silk dress that was a gift from a friend at Eric’s work, ball in hand 🙂

But when it came time to play in the grass and eat her ceremonial cupcake, she changed to a new (washable) dress her Nonna had just made for her. It fit her and the day perfectly.  The carrot cupcake, however; was no match for Sonia’s advanced eating skills.  She barely even got dirty, and loved every bite!

After lunch and dessert it was time for Sonia’s first Easter Egg Hunt. She wasn’t as speedy as the 2 year olds, but a bit to my surprise, she figured it out quickly, holding our hands as we directed her to an egg, and then bending down to pick it up and put it in the basket. It was fun for all.

Sonia was so excited to hang out with her friends (and maybe a bit wired from the cupcake) that she stayed up an extra hour past her normal nap time, hanging out, playing peek-a-boo with her friend Sebastian, laughing, smiling, and being an all around happy baby. It was more than we could have asked for. Such a wonderful party!

Later that evening, Sonia enjoyed opening all her gifts – especially enjoying the cards 🙂

Easter morning she woke up interested to play with her new toys (as well as what remained of her balloons).

Such a spectacular weekend for such a wonderful birthday girl. We feel blessed to have such a fun and interested daughter, and grateful to have made it through the first year. Excited to see all the craziness this next year brings.

In the last month of her first year, Sonia’s emotions and expressions became much more recognizable, which made for a lot of delighting together in her achievements, and commiserating on her frustrations.

Sonia practiced walking with her walker and with Daddy and Mommy a bit, but she definitely still has some drunken-sailor legs.  She can let go and stand for a few more seconds at a time than she could before, but she rarely does, and hasn’t taken any steps on her own yet.  I wonder how much of it is a confidence issue, or just that she’s become such a speedy crawler that its easier.  The pediatrician wasn’t concerned.

Sonia did have some other fun firsts, such as finally learning to clap her hands, and starting to instigate hide-and-seek games.  She also had her first “swim lessons.”  She went with Daddy to a place that has a salt water pool they keep at 92 degrees.  She got dunked, and Daddy started to teach her to kick.  Sonia really likes the water now, including her bath.

Some of Sonia’s favorite playthings are also some of her best words – ball, bubbles, box, block, and Luna. 🙂  She really loves going to get Luna’s toys and then trying to get her to take it from her.  Luckily Luna is usually a pretty good sport about it.  Sonia has also started to hand us things to play with, especially if she wants us to do something again that we just did, such as making her stuffed monkey dance, galloping her unicorn around her and making horse noises, or spinning something on the floor.

As for books, Sonia loves to pull all of her books off the shelf, and tries to turn the pages, although her fine motor skills aren’t there yet to turn them one by one.  She is now able to keep attention on one of her favorite books for a few minutes at a time.  Her favorites still include the Global Babies and Look Look books, but also the I Love You Because You’re You, I Love You Baby From Head to Toe, Rocket’s Might Words, and Little Bunny.  It is interesting that her attention wavers at almost the exact same place in each book every time.

It’s not all fun and games for Mommy and Daddy though, since Sonia is definitely going through another fussy phase, which includes both testing her boundaries and getting very upset and crying when we set her down when she  wants to be held, or take things away that she wants to play with.  We are constantly having to keep her away from the fireplace in her play room, and out of Luna’s crate or water bowl in the living room.  Sometimes she looks back at us as she’s moving toward these objects as if she knows she’s not supposed to, but wants to see how close she can get before we react.

Earlier in the month, Sonia had a very different sleep regression than she’d had in the past.  About 2 nights per week, she would wake up 2-4 hrs after bedtime in a screaming fit and standing up in her crib.  The moment she was picked up she would be quiet, lay her head on our shoulder and seem to almost be back to sleep again.  However, the instant we moved to put her down, she would start screaming.  She didn’t seem to want to nurse or drink water either.  Eventually we would put her down and let her CIO for a few minutes and she would go back to sleep.  We weren’t sure if it was nightmares, growing pains, or maybe she was cold (although we kept it above 68 in her room all night), but we got a light sleep sack for her that seemed to help.  Her daytime sleep has been great, still on 2 x 1.5 hr naps per day on average, although she sleeps longer for the nanny than with us it seems.

Sonia’s new adventures in eating this month included going out to brunch almost every weekend, starting some spoon practice, and learning to use her teeth a bit more on new textures, such as tortilla chips.  I am down to nursing only 3x per day and supplementing with 4-6 oz of formula, but she seems to be getting enough.

Mid-way through the month, Sonia got her second fever of her short life.  It was high, but not over 102 degrees axillary, and she didn’t have any other symptoms with it.  On day 4, before we’d even had a chance to take her to the pediatrician, it broke, and on day 5 she got a faint rash on her torso making me pretty positive it was Roseola.  It’s interesting she would get it because only kids 6 mo – 3 years are affected, and she’s not around other kids.  I guess I have to assume she got it at the park.

At her 12 mo Dr visit, Sonia weighed in at 20lb 2 oz (50%) and was 29″ tall (50%).  She did not get her MMR and ChickenPox vaccines because apparently the new guideline is to wait until 2wks after the 1st birthday, and because she was within 0.1 degree of a fever and the last time she got a vaccination with a trending high temp (at 6 mo), she got very sick.  I wonder whether her high temp had anything to do with the fact that she gets very upset at the Dr. office, poor thing.  Hopefully not getting shots there for once will help.

Sonia’s world continues to expand in front of our eyes and she’s laying some strong groundwork for walking and talking.

Sonia’s 11th month started off with a week-long trip to Charlotte.  As part of the trip, Mommy & Daddy took a couple days to themselves, leaving Sonia with Grannie and Granddad.  Surprise surprise she did just fine!  And we enjoyed the time away.

While in Charlotte, Sonia worked on a couple key developments: such as pointing to what she was interested in, and starting to find words for things.  In fact, she learned one of her strongest word associations yet – “quack” – from spending so much time watching the ducks on the lake 🙂  By the end of the month she had added a variant, “Caw”, for birds other than ducks.  She also started to expand the use of “nana” to mean banana – I’m hungry, night night – I’m sleepy, Mama – Please hold me, and Luna.  Hopefully soon I’ll be able to tell the difference better.

The other thing Sonia was working on while in Charlotte was her top teeth – and oh my gosh the drool!  For the first time we really had to keep bibs on her at all times so she didn’t soak her shirts to the skin with drool!  By the end of the month Sonia had a “full” smile of four top and four bottom teeth, and kept showing them off to everyone. She continues to be a very happy baby.

After coming back from our nice break, we got back into our routine quickly.  One of the things I soon noticed on our morning walks was that Sonia is very interested in airplanes.  Maybe the 20 flights she has been on has something to do with it. The planes start taking off from BUR right at 7am while we’re walking, and the path they take goes right over our route.  Sonia notices the sound immediately, gets excited and “jumps” in the K’tan, and follows the plane as it passes overhead.  Sometimes she’ll even wave “bye bye” as it flies away.  Birds and planes, hmm, destined to be an aerospace engineer?? 🙂

It was also Daddy’s birthday the day we got back from Charlotte. We celebrated with our first art project!  Yogurt and food coloring, yum.

Toward the end of her 11th month Sonia became a full blown cruiser, and even started to “dance” (bounce up and down at the knees), so we introduced a walker and she immediately took off across the living room!

Sonia’s 11th month ended with a “bang.”  Specifically, the bang from the house being shook by a 4.4 earthquake only 5 miles away at 6:25am.  Sonia wasn’t disturbed by the earthquake but woke up when Luna started barking because a painting fell off the wall and a bunch of spices fell out of the cabinet.

Sonia’s 10th month seemed like a pause to reflect and observe her surrounding from the new perspectives the whirlwind of motor developments she achieved in her 9th month provided her.

First of all, Sonia loves to stand! This month she fine tuned that skill by practicing squatting from standing to pick up items she’d dropped.  She also experimented with letting go a few times, and has gone a few seconds on her own before realizing what’s happening and plopping down on her butt.  Sonia especially loves playing with her  “Having a Ball” Activity Table. Since first using it to stand, she now is very fond of putting the balls into and out of the alligators mouth, and putting them in the center and then looking for them to roll out on the legs.

The major development of this month, however, was the change from destroyer to constructor.  Right around 42 wks we noticed this amazing development.  Instead of just pulling her buckets apart, she now wanted to put them back together.  She also was able to bang two objects together,and actually lift the flaps of peek-a-boo books!

In her vocalizations, this month has been a strong push.  She started to “roar” like the animals in her book.  Imitate “good girl” during our walks with Luna, and say “book” when it’s time to read before bed – among many others.  It’s amazing to hear her open up!

A couple fun events happened this month including the Super Bowl, which isn’t a national holiday, but should be.  I sewed two of Sonia’s onesies together for the occasion and it won us  a decent bit of money in Super Bowl squares betting 🙂

There was also our first trip back to wine country since being parents.  We rented a house with 2 other couples with babies.  They had a great time playing together and the adults enjoyed the time after they all went to bed 🙂

At her 10 mo doctor visit, Sonia weighed 18lb 13 oz (50%), was 28.5″ (60%), and had a 45.5cm head circumference (80%!).  Such an amazing jump in the past 2 months!  Unfortunately, she also had to have her first blood draw and urinalysis, making for a very anguishing visit (maybe even more for Mommy than Sonia)

The Christmas Wonder Week turned into a ridiculous wonder month!

By the weekend after New Years, Sonia was already crawling on hands and knees and pulling herself up to standing. Our Sonia is now truly mobile, and she LOVES to practice!  She often squirms out of our arms to be set down, then immediately crawls to the nearest piece of furniture to stand up.  Once she’s there, she often looks back at us with a triumphant grin and starts banging her hands and laughing.  It’s adorable!  Thankfully, toward the end of the month, she’d gotten pretty good at getting herself down safely as well 🙂

Sonia also cut her 3rd tooth this month, surprisingly without much fuss at all.  Not sure if the teeth are helping her eat, but she does now have a number of more “adventurous” foods under her belt, such as toast, pasta, egg yolks, salmon and yogurt.  She still can’t get enough fruit,though, especially grapes and bananas.  We’re not willing to try it, but she makes it seem like if we put a whole bag of grapes in front of her (quartered of course) she’d eat them all!

We can tell Sonia is starting to work more on her language skills as well.  She added ‘b’ to her repertoire of ‘m’, ‘n’, and ‘d’, and every once in awhile she gets the right syllables in the right place.  Perhaps it’s just by chance for now, but I swear she does ‘mmm’ for more, ‘mama’, ‘dada’, and ‘nna’ (Luna) and even ‘nana’ for banana.  One day when I was leaving for work, she even did an amazingly clear ‘bye bye’ out of nowhere.  That made my day!

As part of his Christmas gift from Sonia, Eric started taking her to sign language classes.  He seems to be a natural at it – jury’s still out on whether Sonia is interested or not.

In addition to the language skills, Sonia’s been working on fine motor skills and mimicking.  One of her favorites is the ‘finger lip trill.  It’s quite precious, that is until you get sick of her batting at your mouth all the time. 🙂

In the 3rd week of her 9th month, Sonia hit the expected growth spurt, complete with sleep disturbances (i.e. waking up in the middle of the night screaming, pulling herself up to standing, and then wanting to play), and an increased appetite.  Finally, toward the end of the month, she came out of it as quickly as she went in and started ‘sleeping it off’ with 2 x 2hr naps during the day and going back to sleeping 11 hrs at night.   We didn’t have a doctor’s visit this month, although we did take her in to get her booster flu shot, but I measured her at home at 17lb 9 oz (40%), 27 3/4″ (60%) and 44cm head circumference (50%).  That means she grew 1.5″ and put on half a pound in the last month.  Crazy!

Sonia reached 37 weeks during our Christmas travels, a leap week on the Wonder Weeks calendar.  Her development has been following that guide nearly to the day since she was born, and this leap was no exception.  It is just unbelievable how much progress she made in this one crazy week!

The first stop in our travels was Cincinnati.  After a long day flying, we set Sonia on the floor to stretch out, and within minutes she was trying to push herself up to sitting for the first time.  A couple minutes later she succeeded, with her grandparents and I looking on.  We let out such a cheer and started clapping for her, I think it scared her 🙂

We had a great time with the rest of our time in Cincinnati.  Sonia opened a lot of presents, saw a lot of extended family, and got a big kick out of the holiday train displays at the Krohn Conservatory and the Cincinnati History Museum.

Not surprisingly, Sonia did not continue sleeping through the night, but her regression was nowhere near as bad as Hawaii. Unfortuantely, she also started to show some stranger danger with all the new people.

On Christmas Day, we traveled from Cincinnati to Charlotte.  By that time, Sonia had already decided that she’d rather walk than crawl, and her clinginess was getting worse.  She spent hours and hours trying to stand against the back of the sofa.  If I’d put her down to play on the floor, she would crawl over to me and try to stand up.  She would complain loudly until I picked her up and held her by her hands to work on stepping, at which point she would start grinning uncontrollably.  It was a bit tiresome at times, especially since she didn’t even want to go to Daddy as much, but well worth it to see her so proud of herself!

Aside from trying to walk, we had a great time visiting family, playing with new toys, and learning to wave “Hi” and “bye bye”

I guess we’d better start baby-proofing, because this little girl is about to get on the move!

At her 8 month check-up Sonia weighed in at 17 lbs (40%), was 26.25″ tall (20%), and had a 43cm head circumference (40%). She’s such a big baby girl now that it’s hard to remember her as a 1 month old infant anymore!

Aside from growing, Sonia spent a lot of her 8th month working on her army crawl and vocalizations, and trying new foods.

Unlike many of her other gross motor developments that have come on fully and suddenly, crawling seems to be a bit more work for Sonia. Every week, though, we can tell that her muscles are getting stronger, and she gets a little closer to true crawling and sitting up on her own.

Her vocalization development is interesting as well, in that she seems to try out different things for awhile and keep refining her oral motor skills. She started off the month with puffing, then discovered her screech, and finally moved onto relatively advanced lip trills and a lot of na-na, ma-ma, and da-da.

Sonia’s 8th month also included the Thanksgiving Holiday, which came with her first taste of turkey and first glimpse of snow during a visit to see Grandpa Raddatz. Unfortunately, flying with Sonia continues to get more difficult as she gets more mobile!

Sonia’s 8th month also included the start of the Christmas holiday season. It’s wonderful to start new family traditions, such as trimming the tree, and going to see Santa Claus!

Finally, Sonia’s 8th month came with some nice developments in her sleep patterns. We reduced her naps from 3 to 2 since she can sleep longer (1-2hrs) at each nap, and were able to drop the last dream feed just before 8 months. Here’s hoping it holds through the Christmas travels and the 9 month growth spurt – but I’m not holding my breath 🙂

Miss Sonia is 7 months!  And her personality is really starting to blossom!

Some of her favorite things are: playing in front of the mirror, rolling around everywhere, knocking over stacked objects, and  getting her tummy nuzzled by mommy & daddy.

This past month gave us plenty reason to worry, but also, plenty of new developments to get excited about.  First, the developments 🙂

Sonia cut her second tooth a little over a week after her first, and they are now really starting to show – especially since she is such a smiley little girl!  Luckily, it doesn’t appear that any more are imminent, so she (and we) might get a little respite from the pain.

Sonia has also been working really hard on her gross motor skills.  Just recently she has started to get forward motion using a full body army crawl (using head, legs and arms) when she’s really motivated. However, she hasn’t figured out how to get into a sitting position by herself yet.  She lays on her side and pushes up from her elbow, but hasn’t figure out how to get up onto her palm even.  I’m sure it won’t be long though before she’ll be tearing around the house!

One other odd development is in her vocalizations.  Last month she was really into blowing raspberries.  This month, she seems to have graduated to a slightly finer movement which is like a puffing sound, which neither Eric nor I can appropriately replicate.  She is our little beat box. 🙂

Now for the worries 🙁

Sonia’s sleep has not been the same since we left for Hawaii.  Even after she adjusted back to Pacific time, she kept waking up crying and taking 3 feedings a night. This just wasn’t sustainable, so we decided we’d have to sleep train again.  Given the lessons learned the first time around, we decided to take it a bit slower this time.  At first, if I didn’t go to her right away, the cries would escalate in intensity.  However, I kept giving her a few minutes, and then in early November she gave signs that she would go back to sleep rather than escalate the crying, so we let her CIO at the 1am feeding.  After a few days of success with that, I started weaning her from the 4am feeding until we were left with only the 10pm dream feed remaining.  I experimented with omitting that as well, but she woke up cranky and early when I did, so I went back to it after a couple days.

Luckily nap times are still going very well.  It helps that we have a lullaby that we sing to her every time.  She can be active or fussy, but when we head back to the nursery and start singing the song, her thumb immediately goes in her mouth and her head goes to my chest, ready to go to sleep.  It is so precious!

One of the things I thought might be contributing to her night troubles was the fact that we started a more frequent regimen of solids after she turned  6 months.  Sonia has seemed to have a sensitive digestive system when it has come to solids from the start, and this ramp up was no different.  However, this time, within about a week of her being offered solids 3x per day, her poop changed dramatically. At first I thought it was constipation, but an internet search brought me to a blog that called what we were seeing the “veggie wedgie”, “the best baby poop to ever walk the earth”, and a sure sign that her digestive flora has matured to the point of starting to get nutrition out of solid foods.  🙂 I’m not so sure I fully believe it, since Sonia still wakes up crying at night a lot more than I would think necessary and often passes gas during night feedings, but it makes me feel a little better at least.

One thing is for sure, all this solids eating has really helped her hand eye coordination.  She already is getting close to a pincer grasp, and really, there hasn’t been anything yet she didn’t like.  I think it helps that she has a Chef Daddy excited to make her nice, healthy meals.

Unfortunately, just as Sonia’s night situation started to get better due to the sleep re-training, she experienced her first real illness and fever. 🙁  Eric had Veteran’s Day off, so he took Sonia to get her flu shot.  That same day, the nanny happened to have some remnants of a cold, which I then got.  Between all of that, poor Sonia had a high fever for 3 nights and a stuffy nose that caused her to “snore” all the time for another week. The saline and snot sucker weren’t able to clear her nose, plus she made it clear we were torturing her every time we tried to use it.  I wished I could teach her to clear her nose, but unfortunately, we just have to wait it out.

Even as she’s getting better from the illness, though, we are noticing her clinginess is increasing, and a little bit of stranger danger creeping in.  She still loves to smile at people from out of the K’Tan, but is not so comfortable being held by them.  Perhaps that is contributing to why she continues to cry and wake us up a  lot at night. 🙁

So, lots to worry about, especially being the worry-wort that I am, but lots to be thankful for and happy about as well!  As always, the joy of seeing her grow outweighs any worry when it comes down to it.

Finally, a personal milestone – I’m back to Pre-Preg weight!  Now pre-preg muscle tone, that’s another story.  Maybe I’ll get to work out more once she’s sleeping through the night again. 😉

We couldn’t let Sonia’s first Halloween pass without an adorable costume. 🙂

The weekend before Halloween we headed to Tapia Bros pumpkin patch to take lots of cute pictures.  Then, on Halloween night we help greet trick-or-treaters at a friend’s place. I can’t say Halloween seemed to be Sonia’s favorite holiday, yet, but she was a better sport about it than I thought she might be.

Sonia made it to a happy healthy six months – despite the teething and the sleep regression over vacation!

She is now 15 lb 7 oz (45%), 25 1/2″ (45%) and 42.5cm head circumference (60%). Her weight percentile finally caught up with her height, but she still has a ways to go to catch up to that head 🙂

Alert and watchful as ever, we can tell she is on the verge of making a lot of cool new discoveries.

Sonia cut her first tooth – the front bottom left one – just a few days shy of her 6 mo birthday during our trip to Kauai’s North Shore.

The trip itself was wonderful.  There were waterfalls in the mountains and rainbows over the ocean to greet us as we arrived at our rental house west of Hanalei, and absolutely gorgeous weather during the rest of our stay.

Sonia’s extreme dislike of being tied down into her car seat did restrict us to some degree, but thanks to having some of her grandparents there with us, we didn’t have to give up on most of the things we wanted to do, and she got to explore quite a bit as well.  She didn’t get to see the gorgeous Na Pali coast with us on any of our hiking, boating or helicopter trips to the area, but she did get to see a couple botanical gardens, and experience the beautiful beaches and scenery first hand.

Unfortunately, Sonia experienced quite the sleep regression while we were there, that she still hasn’t recovered from.  Whether it was the teething, the time change, the amount of new stimulation, a growth spurt, a Wonder Weeks stormy period, the warm humid weather, the unfamiliar sleeping conditions, being back to breast feeding on demand all day, or all of the above – I can’t say I blame her.  Toward the end of the trip, she did wake up from one of her naps with a suddenly drastically improved vocabulary (oo, ee and d plus multi-sylable strings added to her typical rah and meh), so I know something was going on in there.

While she was fussier than we are used to, and obviously distressed by the teething at times, she really did very well, and I would do it all over again.

Sonia had a couple key developments in her 25th week.

At the beginning of this week Sonia first began to twirl things around in her hands to look at them from all angles.  This led to a dramatic improvement in her ability to get food into her mouth.

Sonia with Zucchini

By the end of the week she had lost the wobble, and was sitting pretty on her new farm mat all by herself 🙂

After our plans to visit Tahoe fell through again at the last minute, we decided to keep the flights and visit friends in the Bay Area instead, stopping at Napa (briefly) on the way.  It was a little difficult with the drive, given that Sonia still dislikes the car seat, but it was fun to give Sonia her first glimpse of vineyards, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and to hang out with great friends.

Sonia also gave her first inkling of being able to sit up unassisted (still wobbly even with a slope to help) while there, and had her first swing and trip down the slide – very important milestones indeed 🙂

Since Sonia hit 22 weeks, she has been a different baby. A good napper, good eater, and true delight to be with baby! And she’s sleeping through the night – waking up happy after going 11-12 hours from bedtime and 8-9 hours from her last feeding!

This development coincided with a couple things:

• Crossing 14 lbs
• Learning to suck her thumb intentionally
• Eating more than 5 oz / feeding during the day
• Re-instating the 10pm dream feed
• A supposed happy time in the Wonder Weeks calendar
• A week of cooler weather

The clarity that only a good night’s sleep can bring has made me think back on what went right, and wrong, over the last 2 months of sleep regression and training. Here’s what I would tell my 2-month-ago-self if I could go back in time (not that I would listen :)):

• This too shall pass: While in the middle of it, it feels like every decision is going to make or break her sleeping habits for life.  However, the developments come, seemingly in spite of, not because of, whatever you try to do to “help.”  Sonia learning to roll over to sleep on her tummy, then find her fingers, then suck her thumb consistently all were critical in reaching the sleep-through-the-night milestone.
• Trial by Error:  Sometimes I feel like we tortured poor Sonia over the last couple months by being inconsistent, but every day/night was different, and no one solution seemed to fit every scenario. We just had to feel it out.  That being said, it is good to make sure that other caregivers are completely aligned with your strategy before starting anything – delaying that conversation may have delayed Sonia’s progress as well.
• Crying it Out:  In some ways, I do feel like letting her cry it out was a useful tool to help her along, but in general, it may have been more detrimental than beneficial in our case.  Sonia’s training was less about going to sleep on her own and more about weaning from the pacifier and night feeds, since she never had trouble going to sleep without rocking/etc.  While her duration of crying at each instance was never more than 20 mins, we did not have the experience of others where after 3-4 days of successively less crying she was sleeping like a champ.  It was pretty much a month of not knowing whether she’d be completely happy when we set her down or she woke up early, or whether she’d be screaming for 5-20 mins.  Poor thing also started to cry every time we’d take her back to her nursery for a nap and during her bedtime routine, shortly after sleep training began.  This makes me think she was in some small way traumatized by the CIO method.  I feel like if we tried to help her with her self-soothing developments while she was awake and happy, and just waited it out with the sleep training, we might have had better success.
• Feeding: I really think the dream feed is critical to sleep training.  There was a big difference in the rest of her night between when I was able to preempt her waking with a dream feed and when she’d wake up and cry for a meal.  If anything, solids were detrimental to her sleeping at the 4-5 month stage, not helpful.
• Naps: SO much harder than nighttime sleep, especially during the 4 month sleep regression!

Another wonderful month has passed with our dear, sweet Sonia Lynn!

This month has been a rollercoaster of new milestones, relatively unsuccessful sleep training, and lots of fun adventures. At her 5 month check-up Sonia cracked the 30th percentile on height and weight at 14 lb 3 oz and 24 3/4″ – and she’s cuter than ever! 🙂

We were very excited to go to Lake Tahoe for our 3rd Wedding Anniversary, and had a wonderful long weekend planned. However, the day before we left, we checked the weather and noticed a severe smoke alert due to the massive Rim Fire burning 150 miles away near Yosemite.

Being sensitive to smoke ourselves, we decided it would be a bad idea to subject little Sonia to it, so we cancelled our plans. Oh well, life’s a beach sometimes 🙂

Armed with the good camera for once, we instead got these fun pics of Sonia experiencing her first feel of ocean waves and beach sand between her toes, and just having a general good time with Mommy and Daddy on a day off, all within the protective shade of the Manhattan Beach Pier.

Sonia has been attempting to roll from back to tummy in earnest since about 3.5 months (and would get really frustrated that she couldn’t). Initially she would succeed in getting most of her body over, but her left arm would remain pinned at her side. The morning after her 4 mo birthday, though, I found her completely on her tummy with both arms in front of her for the first time, and she has been a tummy sleeper ever since (although often prefers to sleep with her arm pinned anyway)!

Interestingly, once she could roll from back to tummy, she forgot how to roll from tummy to back! She had been doing that since before 3 months by putting her arm out straight in front of her and letting her head weight carry her over, but now she has been trying to push with her legs to get her body over her arm that gets pinned like a T-Rex at her side. A few times I tried to help her do it the old way, but she would have none of that!

Right at 20 weeks, she figured out how to get onto her back via her new method, and now no corner of the crib goes unexplored as she tosses and turns her way to sleep. We are so proud of our little roller! Of course it’s right on to the next milestone as she’s already making the motions to try to scoot and crawl 🙂

Sonia gets more photogenic every month 🙂

At 4 months, Sonia is now right at 13 lb (25%), 24 1/4″ tall (50%) and has a head circumference of 40.5cm (50%). The pediatrician continues to be amazed at how advanced she is in both social and motor skills, and gave us the green light to start solids and sleep train if we so desired, although neither is necessary just yet.

Sonia seems to be following the wonder weeks calendar almost to the day, and we are now right in the middle of the fussy period leading up to the 4th leap at 19 weeks. That means her sleep regression is still ongoing, she’s fussier, and she seems to pick up a new “trick” every week. First there was finding her mouth, then trying to do crunches and roll, and now – feet! 🙂 It’s pretty crazy how one day she’s not doing something, and the next day, she’s doing it all the time. It’s no wonder she’s not sleeping well with all this new stuff to explore. I hope the wonder weeks calendar is right, though, in that we should get our happy, independent baby back in another 2 weeks.

We did try some avocado and sweet potato this week, but she really didn’t eat very much of it, or seem to like it. We’ll keep having her try new things, but don’t hold out much hope that it is going to solve our sleep problems. Right now we’re researching sleep training methods and considering whether we should hold out a couple more weeks before trying anything or not.

This weekend we definitely noticed that we have reached that point where Sonia wants everything in her mouth. The bug toy she used to smile and bat at happily in her carseat now is frustrating unless its down and in her mouth.

The rattle is too big to fit, but she’ll try hard anyway, and perhaps hit herself in the head in the process.

Sonia with Rattle

The spinning toy in the tray of the foam chair, she’ll pull it out of its holder, or pull her mouth down to it. And if she can’t get it into her mouth (which she isn’t quite coordinated to do all the time yet), then watch out because the wails are quick to follow!

After blessing us with 6-8 hr sleep stretches and only a single night feeding pretty regularly for the past month and a half, the 3 month sleep regression that I had been warned about hit right at 14 weeks when Sonia started consistently adding back in her midnight feeding. Then, the last two nights, she added back in even a 3rd night feeding! Between this and Luna barking at the neighbors in the late evening hours, I feel like I’ve been waking up at least once an hour all night long! Now that I’m back at work, this is extra brutal.

Other Mommies have told me that this could be just a week long developmental burst and/or growth spurt, or it could be the start of a couple rough months where breast milk isn’t enough to fill her up all night, but she is not yet ready for solids, or where her sense of being in the world outpaces her ability to self-soothe.

Sonia has been making a lot of progress on developmental milestones such as tummy time, self-soothing with her fingers, laughing, mimicking sounds, and sitting up in the past couple weeks. She also crossed 12 lbs recently, and the Nanny could swear she looked and felt bigger on Monday morning than she did on Friday afternoon!

So here’s hoping this is just a temporary setback and we get our good sleeper back soon. Either way, though, I’m truly loving seeing Sonia slowly become Sonia – it’s a beautiful thing!

Wow, 3 months went by so quickly, and it really does seem like she’s figuring out that she’s her own person in this world, as well as getting to be a little soft around the middle :).

At least I’ve been taking off while she’s been putting on, and I am down to only 6lb above pre-pregnancy weight and was able to fit into my pre-pregnancy work pants by the time I started back in the office this week.

We are starting to get into a really cool phase of development in Sonia. She’s starting to get a sense of self-awareness.

She’s also getting better and better at putting her fingers and other objects in her mouth. Whereas 2 weeks ago it seemed like her hands were fighting each other to try to get into her mouth, with neither one succeeding, now she is putting whole fists in and keeping them there.

Sonia has now nearly mastered head control and is on to working on sitting up. I first started getting her to try to sit up in her boppy, which she had fun with.

And now, she is doing little crunches every time we put her down in her car seat or bouncy chair. We decided we’d get her a Bumbo-type seat earlier than the ped recommended (5 mo), so that will be here on Monday.

She doesn’t even like to sit in her bouncy chair very much anymore during dinner, and much prefers sitting on Daddy’s lap, eyeing his food.

This month, the pediatrician was amazed at how alert she is, as well as how advanced she is in both social and motor skills (usually babies are only good at one or the other by now). Also, when she rolled from her tummy to her back on the exam table, he mentioned he’d only seen maybe 4-5 other babies do that this early in his entire career. Her measurements were 11 lb 5 oz, 23″ and 39cm head circumference.

I can tell that she can see across the room now, and see a variety of colors because when I prop her up to burp her after her morning feeding she smiles at the barnyard quilt on the opposite wall of the nursery. It’s such a cool thing to see such obvious new developments!

In terms of sleep, she hadn’t been making much improvement since the trip, until the night of her 3 mo birthday when she surprised us and slept for 9.5 hrs straight! We’ll see soon if that was a fluke or the start of a new habit. Here’s hoping it’s the latter, since Mommy has been going into the office as of Wednesday and could use the extra sleep.

We survived our whirlwind 16 day, 3 stop tour to visit family and friends. Sonia was excellent on all 8 flights, enjoyed meeting 40+ new people, and put on a full pound in the process. Here are just a few of the highlights of the wonderful trip.

Sonia’s first flight- It’s nice to be first on the plane:

Meeting Auntie J, Granddad Wayne and great-grandpa Wally in North Carolina – not to mention their big Great Danes:

Boating on Lake Norman – We learned she really likes the wind in her hair, but not so much the humidity! And don’t worry, she was only in the sun for the 10 seconds it took to take this picture and still had 60 sunblock on.

Four generations of Raddatz’ together in Oshkosh, WI:

Bay Beach Amusement Park and Wildlife Sanctuary in Green Bay, WI – She was too short to ride on the Zippin’ Pippin’ (Elvis’ favorite roller coaster that has been transplanted to Green Bay from Memphis) with Daddy and Mommy, but she did enjoy getting hands on with some critters like this bear skin rug – and then of course hands on with the sanitizer :):

Four generations of Whelan’s together in in Dayton, OH

Developmentally, Sonia continues to make leaps and bounds. Some of her new “tricks” over the 2 week trip included: sucking/licking her knuckles with vigor (and the resulting drool), holding onto her Wubba and occasionally being able to put it back in her mouth when it falls out, appearing to be slightly ticklish, continued stability in chest lifting during tummy time, and general head stability as well.

From 6 weeks to 2 months we have seen a truly astounding amount of development in Sonia!

Physical growth: Call me a crazy data fiend, but I bought a baby scale that I keep by the chair I feed Sonia in so I can weigh her before and after each feeding to know how much she’s getting, and to track her day-to-day growth more closely. We did sort of experience the infamous 6 week growth spurt, in that she fed much closer together for a couple days, and afterwards both my supply and her demand were greater, but she still has been gaining at a steady 0.5 lb / week. What that growth spurt did seem to do is lengthen her out and fill her in more such that now at 2 months, 9.5lb (15th percentile) and 21″ (5th percentile), with a 15″ head circumference (50th percentile), she looks and feels more like a baby, rather than a scrunched up fetus.

Schedule: Along with the growth spurt came another change in her daytime routine, or more exactly, the development of one. After the first couple days of feeding every 1.5-2hrs, I almost missed the cue that she wasn’t always hungry at the times she was fussing, sometimes she was just tired. After reading a few articles online, I realized my mistake, and around 7 weeks we got ourselves in an “eat-play-sleep” routine that made Sonia more alert when she was awake, and me more sane in general. Now she wakes up, feeds, is active for about an hour, and then sleeps for an hour to an hour and a half in a reasonably predictable 3 hr cycle. We also started to swaddle her for nap times, which kept her down much better as well. This development has really done wonders for me, in that I can plan my day much better, and its easier to give her my full attention during her alert times because I know there’s an end in sight when she will go to sleep and I will be able to do what I need to do (like work out, shower and clean the house).

Sleep: Over the course of the last 2 weeks, Sonia went from sleeping for a 4-5 hr stretch every once in awhile, to sleeping for a ~6hr stretch almost every night. Once she started doing this regularly at around 7.5 wks, we moved her into her own room, which I think has helped us sleep even though I still have the monitor on, and she seemed to take to it fine as well. When she goes down for her long stretch around 8pm, she doesn’t need any help, but sometimes after her 1-2am or 4am feedings she needs her Wubba and/or some white noise to get to sleep. So far, she hasn’t needed the Wubba replaced when she becomes semi-aroused during her light sleep, but I could see it getting annoying if she does. Now I’m looking forward to the time when she is able to skip her second nighttime feeding with regularity (she has done it a few times), and I am toying with trying the “dream feed” until she gets there so I don’t have to wake up so many times in the early morning hours. However, I don’t really want to ruin a good thing either, so we will see how she progresses.

Body Control: Sonia really has made a lot of progress in getting control over her arms and legs. She now bats at toys with regularity, and has started to grasp objects. Every once in awhile she will even bring them to her mouth. Soon, I’m sure, I’ll be wishing she wouldn’t 🙂 She also really enjoys kicking now, and we recently brought out her Kick-and-Play piano gym for some self-discovery time. Also, even though she hasn’t been able to tolerate much tummy time, she can lift her head and some of her chest off the table when her arms are positioned right, and she has stabilized a lot when we hold her upright to play and look around – which she loves! She even feels like she can stand sometimes! She’s still a bit of a bobble head, with not much fine movement, but the progress is pretty impressive.

Smiles! Of course, who doesn’t love baby smiles, but as a Mom, it really does melt your heart to see them from your baby. Thankfully, Sonia’s are pretty regular now, and a few of them are even given to me instead of just Daddy!

Cooing: Sonia has really amped up the pre-language baby noises in the past week or so, and I *swear* I can hear real words in there! One of her common ones sounds a whole lot like “green,” and the first time she did it was right after I showed her a green diaper I was going to put on her. She also has one that sounds a bit like “Daddy” and is getting a strong “Hi” as well, which is a word we both say to her often (and a pretty easy one for a baby to emulate).

Dr. Visit: At 8 wks, Sonia had her 2 month check-up with Dr. Abramyan. Everything looked really good. This was her first round of immunizations and she got 3 shots and an oral vaccine. It was nice of Dr. A to let us know that the first shot would only really annoy her but the second 2 would be painful, because I have never heard her cry as hard as she did after those shots. They were also smart to give the sweet oral vaccine last to help soothe, and I nursed her right away afterwards which helped as well. After the pain of the initial shot, she didn’t sleep really any more than usual and didn’t spike any fevers. She did complain a little bit in her sleep about 5-6 hrs after the shots, but it didn’t wake her up, so we didn’t end up giving her any Tylenol. Our strong little girl was such a champ!

Other fun Outings: Like usual, Sonia’s gotten around these past couple weeks, going to Praveen’s graduation party, yoga with Mommy and lunches with friends, and it is like a switch flipped right around 7 weeks. I used to not be able to keep her awake during outings, and now she doesn’t seem to want to miss any of the action.

We’re looking forward to the time with family (although not necessarily all the traveling) as well as to all of the new developments the next couple weeks will bring!

Sonia keeps growing, and the milestones and exciting times keep coming.

Over the last 2 weeks, Sonia put on a full pound to reach 8.5 lbs, and her legs seem to have finally relaxed from their fetal position. We have now had to put away her <7 lb clothes since they are too short in the legs, and she's fitting into more of her 0-3 month stuff. We also had to move up a size in diapers. Her cradle cap and hair loss seemed to reach a plateau around 5.5 weeks, and new hair is already starting to grow in its place.

A few nights, Sonia has given us one wonderful 5 hr stretch between feedings, but not every night yet, and she is still really noisy for the first 30-45 minutes after going down from each nighttime feeding. We experimented with her in her own room for a couple nights around 5.5 weeks, which did have the expected benefit of not keeping us up before and after feedings, but made the feedings, and going back to sleep, more difficult since she was more worked up. We’ll probably try again in the next couple weeks.

In terms of development milestones, Sonia made her first attempts at reaching for objects in Week 5

and her first few social smiles in Week 6 – which unfortunately for me seem to be reserved almost exclusively for Daddy right now 🙁

At 4.5 weeks I started a Mommy & Me class where Sonia and I get to interact with other mommies with babies of the same age, talk about developmental topics with the psychologist group leader, and learn some fun songs and activities to do together. I’ve been to two sessions already, and learned a lot each time, including that Sonia seems to be a relatively good baby (so far). One thing I do now know is that her sleeping through many outings (like Adriana’s baby shower) and with guests is a common defense mechanism at this age, and it will go away. Unfortunately, that means that many people still haven’t gotten to see her pretty eyes in person 🙂

This past week, Sonia got to meet her Grandma & Grandpa Hovey, and I got some much appreciated baby sitters so that I actually got to work out 3 days this week, got a facial, and Eric and I got out for dinner and a movie on Friday night. It was wonderful, and so great to see them!

We even got out to the Getty Center while they were here to see the LA Overdrive exhibit and show Sonia around some more gardens 🙂

As we’re starting week 7, Sonia has gotten a bit more fussy and thrown her previous feeding schedule out the window, so we may be in for a growth spurt. We shall see what the next couple weeks bring.

We made it through the first month, and our little Sonia is filling in well!

At Sonia’s 1 month check-up everything looked really good. She weighed 7 lb 7 oz and was 19 3/4″ long (5-10th percentile), and had a head circumference of 14 1/4″ (25-50th percentile). She’s still gaining weight at over 1 oz / day (the high end of what the lactation specialist says is normal), but the pediatrician said she should be growing faster to catch up to her feet, head and overall strength – which was again very impressive. Luckily my pump came earlier this week and I started drinking Mother’s Milk tea to try to increase my supply.

This was a busy week for Sonia and she took it all in stride. She got her first bottle feeding from Daddy,

and she met her Grandpa Raddatz for the first time.

She also went on several fun outings including to downtown LA to be shown around Eric’s office, and to two of her friends’ First Birthday parties.

Even though she developed acne, dry scalp and rapid onset male pattern baldness this week, it was still a very good week for Sonia 🙂

Unfortunately this was not a very good week for Luna. She had several bouts of GI issues, and didn’t take to Dad & Cindi being around very well. We also noticed a bump on her leg that the vet said was a growth (hopefully benign, we’ll find out in 2 weeks) that he removed on Saturday – although I was pretty sure it was just an injury from being hit by the stroller on one of our walks. The vet also diagnosed her GI issues and increased barking as stress anxiety due to the new baby and the change in her routine, and suggested we put her on Prozac. However, we think we’ll try to train and love it out of her first, and find another vet.

Looking forward to whatever adventures the next month will bring.

We are quickly learning that every week is a new challenge and a new adventure with a new baby.

This week Sonia gained another 7oz, bringing her up to 6lb 12oz and making me a happy EBF mommy. She’s also filling her diapers as she’s supposed to, which thankfully fit her a bit better now that she’s grown a bit and we started with the gDiapers hybrid cloth/disposable system, which we have been happy with so far. It’s a little odd, but one of the places I can tell that she’s grown is her ears. Because I spend more than 3 hrs a day staring at her ears while I breastfeed, I have really noticed that what used to be not much more than flaps of skin are now well-formed, cartilage-stiffened, cute-as-a-bug’s-ear ears. 🙂

Along with the physical growth, this week has seemed to be an in-limbo week in some developmental growth as well. She seemed to be more interested in getting her hands to her mouth, and has been finding her thumb with a bit more regularity.

However, since she still can’t control her arm movements or override her grasp reflex, this proved to be quite frustrating for her and so we introduced the pacifier to calm the ensuing fussiness. I was really hoping to avoid this step for another couple weeks, or maybe altogether, but she seems to like it, and I’d rather have a calm, happy baby. Still, we are trying to use this tool sparingly, and now she just needs to learn how to keep it in her mouth.

Her schedule spontaneously shifted this week as well so that she is now often awake from 6-8ish when Eric is home. This means Daddy has gotten to spend more quality time with her, such as by reading books together after bath time.

She is doing quite well at night too, going about 3.5 hrs between feedings on most nights. However, we’re still a far cry from having a solid routine, leading to nights like Tuesday where she decided to be wide awake from 10:30pm-1am for no apparent reason.

All this change was a bit hard for me to keep up with, and early in the week I got a bit of the baby blues. For a couple days I dreaded feeding her, and found myself crying at the drop of a hat and not eating very healthily, culminating in a mini meltdown when she decided to be awake on Tuesday night when I was already so physically and mentally exhausted. Thankfully Eric helped me through that night and Sonia helped me get back on track by being all smiles the next morning. The rest of the week I felt much better adjusted and happy, and by now I should be ramping down on the postpartum hormonal roller-coaster, so hopefully that was the extent of that. Physically, I feel like I am back to nearly 100% and plan to start back up on a more intense exercise regimen again this coming week.

A couple videos of Sonia

At 2 weeks Sonia is eating and growing well, and even giving inklings of settling into a routine.

She still falls asleep during feedings, but somehow still manages to chug down almost 3 oz during a 20-25 min session. She gained 8.5 ounces in the last week bringing her back up over her birth weight by our Tues pediatrician visit, yippee! That means we are able to feed her on demand, which is supposed to mean fewer feedings at night, but so far that has not been the case – too much growing to do I guess. Looking back at pictures, I already notice her face and limbs look fuller than they used to, and her eyes seem more alert, which I love.

Earlier in the week:

Later in the week:

Sonia also lost her cord stub at 9 days, which means we get to dress her in the rest of her cute 2-piece clothing – once she grows into it that is!

We have found that if we can keep her up a decent amount during the day, she does pretty well at night, going down somewhere between 8-10pm and waking up between 6-7am with 2-3 feedings in between. She tends to start to “squawk” and make sucking noises in REM sleep to let Mommy know she’s getting hungry – saving her loud shrieks for when she’s getting her diaper changed in the nursery, dampening the noise for sleepy Daddy. She also “squawks” as she self-soothes back to sleep after feedings, but it usually only lasts a few minutes. However, on days like Wed where she slept from 9am almost straight to 2pm in her car seat while running errands with Mommy, then the eyes pop open and alert after the 3am feeding and no one is very rested the next day. We won’t be letting that happen again!

During the day, Mommy gets lots of quality time with Sonia in the morning and afternoon when we walk Luna and explore her world together. Sonia usually takes one shorter nap in the late morning, allowing Mommy to take a shower, and another longer stretch in the early afternoon giving Mommy time to eat and take care of other things. So far, those other things have consisted mostly of planning a baby tour to see family in June, and a Hawaii vacation for later in the year. Hopefully we’re not completely crazy for thinking we can travel so much with an infant.

Walking Luna:

Playing piano together:

Unfortunately for Eric, Sonia’s alert time tends to end right around 4-4:30pm, and she has seemed to go to sleep just a few minutes before he gets home from work every day. 🙁 He is looking forward to the weekend so he can spend more quality time with her. Mommy is looking forward to the help so she can get more rest.

Weekday Daddy time:

Weekend Daddy time (last week’s lesson was Fruits and Vegetables – what will this weekend bring?):

After spending 8 days home with Lindsey, Sonia and Luna, last Friday was my first day back at work. However, it was a quick one day followed by another two days home for the weekend. But now the real “test” begins with a full work week. Sitting at my desk Monday morning I am already missing the family!

We spent the first 24 hrs with Sonia in the hospital. It was a rough night with her waking up to feed often and both mommy and daddy being very tired from the marathon of the past couple days, but both mommy and baby passed all her tests and we decided it would be best to get out of there quick. As soon as the testing was complete, the family left the hospital at 8PM on Friday night, 25 hours after birth. In hindsight, it might have been better if we’d stayed one more night. The first night at home was so rough, and we were so tired, that after she fussed and cried from 10pm to 1am straight, despite our best attempts to feed and console her, we succumbed to using a pacifier to get her, and us, a little rest.

By our pediatrician visit the next morning she had already pooped 6 times in the first 36 hrs, which is pretty uncommon, bringing her weight down 9% to 5 lb 11 oz. Dr Abramyan mentioned that since I went so long with ruptured membranes, Sonia may have swallowed a lot of the amniotic fluid, making her birth weight artificially high, but he wanted to monitor her anyway and suggested we supplement with formula until my milk came in – which we weren’t too excited about. On the bright side, he did mention how strong Sonia appeared, as she gripped his fingers and lifted herself off the exam table.

My milk came in on the 3rd night, but she still wasn’t latching correctly and didn’t seem to ever be satiated, nor was she pooping or peeing anymore. We did end up giving her 1 ounce of formula to make sure dehydration wasn’t going to be a problem, but had another terrible night since we vowed not to give her the pacifier again until we figured out breastfeeding. I was a wreck that 3rd day, knowing that something was wrong, but not knowing how to make it right. Thankfully, on the 3rd night, at 12:30am, after another marathon couple hours of crying, trying every breastfeeding position I knew of, and with the looming threat of needing to give her another ounce of formula, she miraculously figured out the latch and we were instantly started on a much better path.

The next morning was our 2nd pediatrician visit, and after 4 good feedings since figuring out the latch earlier that morning, she was only down one more ounce to 5 lb 10 oz. Two days later, at the 3rd ped visit, she was up to 5 lb 14 oz and was back to peeing and pooping like she’s supposed to. Mom and Dad were both excited and resenting the increased dirty diaper production. She was also sleeping a bit better, although more so in the daytime than at night, unfortunately. Since the last visit, I’ve seen the lactation consultant and Sonia and I are slowly learning the ropes of breastfeeding properly, even though I still can’t keep her awake and feeding efficiently for more than 5 minutes at a time.

My recovery has been very easy. Already by the end of week one I am down to only 12 lbs over my pre-pregnancy weight and most of the swelling from delivery is gone. I do still get winded and tired from a 2 mile walk, but that could be as much from the sleep deprivation as anything. Eric has managed to get just enough sleep at night to not be overly tired, but is still struggling a little with the stress of midnight “soothing sessions” with Sonia.

Thanks to Grannie being here and Eric being home, we made it through the first week. However, that luxury is now past, and we’ll have to see how next week goes.

Here’s a couple notable firsts

Day 2 – First morning at home – everyone is very tired.

Day 3 – First sponge bath – not her favorite thing.

Day 4 – First outing in the stroller – Mommy was so nervous about the bumpy sidewalks.

Day 5 – First tummy time – she is so strong that she can already turn her head side to side and roll to her back, but mostly she’s content to sleep.

Sonia’s birth story is one of “be careful what you wish for,” and “the best laid plans.” I really wanted her not to be late, but also really wanted an active, unmedicated birth.

My water broke on my due date – perhaps in part due to the 5 miles I walked that day and all the supposed labor-inducing activities and foods we’d been trying since the previous weekend – but my body still wasn’t fully ready for labor I guess. Sonia was born 27.5 hrs later on April 18 at 6:59pm. However, that time consisted of: 12 hrs of waiting futilely for my body to start labor on it’s own, 13 hrs of active labor with a very high dose of Pitocin (and luckily a great coach in Daddy Eric), 2 hours of labor and transition in bed with an epidural, and a little over 30 mins of mostly numb pushing in a recumbent position as the epidural wore off slowly.

Although very little about labor went as I had planned, I had a wonderfully uncomplicated delivery – even though the cord was loosely around her neck and she came out in the oblique posterior position – with no perineal tears and only a minor laceration requiring just one stitch.

I don’t know if I felt the bonding hormone and endorphin rush that many mothers describe upon the delivery of their baby, but I certainly felt a crazy feeling of relief that it was over, and yet disbelief that the little human on my chest had really just come out of my body. In the end we got our beautiful, healthy, strong, albeit small, baby Sonia – and nothing is more important than that! She weighed in at 6 lb 4 oz and measured 19″ long.

Dates: Jan – Apr 2013
Weight: 150 – 160 lbs

By the beginning of the 3rd trimester I was really starting to feel our little girl move! One night during our trip to Memphis right at 28 wks, Eric and I marveled at my belly as it looked like an alien was trying to get out, and it felt like she was doing complete flips in there. As things started to get cramped in there over the weeks, her movements weren’t as violent, but definitely as forceful. I do now think I will miss that feeling once she’s out that was so foreign to me just a few months ago.

At 32 wks my friends Allison and Adriana threw me a wonderful baby shower and my mom and sister surprised me by flying out from Charlotte to be there. I was definitely surprised, and enjoyed the time with them and having Julia see the house and meet Luna.

I really haven’t had any new complaints in the 3rd trimester, no swelling or heartburn really to speak of, and I kept up my elliptical and Cardio Barre routine all the way through 37 weeks. I think the nearly nightly massages Eric has provided have helped quite a bit – that has been wonderful!

From 31-35 wks I was a little bit more out of breath than usual, but in general it didn’t stop me from doing anything I normally would. I think my abdomen must have been completely hollow before the baby, because I don’t know where its all going. Right around 35 wks I had one weird sciatica event, and I think she must have started down a bit then because I didn’t have any more breathing concerns after that and other symptoms started to creep in, like leaking colostrum and my cervix starting to soften.

Eric and I have put together the nursery and been doing our best to get out of the house as often as possible since our capacity to do so once the baby arrives will be quite reduced. We have also gotten in all of our pre-natal classes and read a number of books and forums, and are feeling ready for our little girl’s arrival – as much as we can be as first time parents, I suppose. Now that I’m off work and less than a week from my due date, the waiting game is getting intense. Can’t wait to meet our little girl!

Dates: Oct 2012 – Jan 2013
Weight: 139 – 150 lbs

The “honeymoon trimester” was filled with a lot of great times, including sharing the pregnancy with the wider families and friends at the Budde Wedding in St. Louis, Thanksgiving in Charlotte, and New Years in Ohio, and a lot of great milestones, including feeling the first flutter of movement at around 15 wks (while listening to NPR talk about the fiscal cliff on the way into work), getting asked if I was pregnant by someone at work for the first time and finally switching to maternity clothes at 18 wks, and finding out we were having a Baby Girl at the 20 wk anatomy scan. I think she looks a little bit like my mom from the front, and Eric from the side.

I went through a couple phases of cravings at the beginning of the 2nd trimester – first candy, then cookies, then chocolate, then ice cream – definitely in keeping with the old wives tale that if you crave sweets you’re having a girl, and salty means its a boy. I also started craving alcohol again and was happy in my decision to request that Eric continue drinking as he had before the pregnancy, because it made me feel better to know that both of us didn’t have to give it up, and usually after a sip of whatever he was having, my craving was curbed.

Once it got too dark in the mornings to run outside I started putting in 30 mins on the elliptical at the gym 4 days a week, running on Saturday morning, and continued going to Cardio Barre on Sunday mornings. I even continued to do the ab floor exercises with my Dr’s blessing – perhaps that has something to do with why I’ve been so small throughout. Toward the end of the 2nd trimester, it started to be easier to sleep on my side, but mostly my belly wasn’t in the way and I barely felt it most of the time. For some reason, I expected pregnancy to feel like I did when I had excess fat – gross and big – but really it felt like my body was the same size, just stretched out a little bit.

I managed to pick up the head cold that everyone at work brought back from Thanksgiving travels. It lasted 3 weeks, but wasn’t much more than annoying, and coupled with the flu shot I got probably helped save me from getting the bug Eric’s family all had over the holidays.

In November, we also welcomed our furry daughter, Luna, into the family. I think she has been a great help in preparing us to have a real child – definitely tries our patience and restricts our schedule, but makes us laugh at all the silly/cute things she does 🙂

Dates: Jul – Oct 2012
Weight: 133 – 139 lb

After returning from a wonderful 3 week trip to France in June, we decided that we were finally ready to take the leap into parenthood. We “pulled the goalie” in early July thinking it would take a couple months to get pregnant, but to our pleasant surprise it happened much quicker than we thought. I guess our little one wanted to be just like Mommy since our first trimester ultrasounds indicated baby was due exactly on my birthday – April 17.

The first 6 wks were spent looking for and moving into the house we rented on Rhodes Ave in Studio City – thankfully without any symptoms, except that the last evening before the movers came I felt some implantation pains, and just after settling into the new house I started to get tender breasts. I guess we timed that move just right, and it was wonderful to have Mom & Wayne here to help!

At 7 wks, just before our 2 yr anniversary weekend in Portland, we had our first visit with Dr. Pearson, and our first ultrasound. It is amazing that the little sack of fluid with a line in it had a heartbeat of 144bpm, and in 8 months time would grow into a baby.

I continued to run about 2.5 mi 6 days a week throughout the first trimester, and didn’t get as tired as I thought I would – although I did note that it was more difficult to stay motivated at work and I was a bit more moody than usual. I also was having very vivid dreams – though none about the baby oddly enough. I believe I was able to keep the digestive and fluid retention challenges of pregnancy to a minimum by staying active and having a mug of caffeinated black tea or coffee with breakfast every morning. I did have a few days of general queasiness around 6-7wks, but that was it for the infamous 1st trimester morning sickness. I consider myself very lucky!

By 13 wks when I had the neuchal-translucency ultrasound with the perinatologist, I was almost afraid that something had gone wrong because I didn’t feel pregnant at all, but there was the little baby bean bouncing around on the screen and looking almost human. The transformation was amazing, and now we felt comfortable enough to let everyone know our happy news.