Being Away From Your Baby

As we (my awesome Baby Center mommies group) approach or have reached the one year mark…  More and more of us are leaving our little ones for the first time over night.  Some taking a quick overnight visit for work, some a romantic weekend away…  Then there are the brave (or idiotic) few who decide to wait until they’re leaving the country for a week to be apart from their little bucket of sunshine for the first time.

Yes.  The latter was me.  No.  I do not know what I was thinking.  There were so many different ways that I could have approached this.  I could have known that 8 days away from my little girl was going to make me miserable.  I could have simply chosen to spend one or two nights away before taking my voyage to Europe.  Ooooh the things I could have done differently.

I will tell you that I made sure my house was as prepared as any home could be for the mommy to be gone for 8 whole days.  For starters I did the easy thing…  I recorded the song I sing to her at every nap and bed time on my husband’s phone as well as a few Dr. Seuss books to include “Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?” and a few other of my personal favorites.

But what were they going to do for food?  I thought about this long and hard and I have to warn you, after reading this…  you’re going to think I’m even more neurotic than you already do.  And that is something that I am okay with.

I prepped, cooked and froze every meal that my daughter would need while I was gone.  I even included enough for the person responsible for feeding her.  Wasn’t that sweet of me?  Now let’s touch briefly on the why.  For starters, the wonderful, charming 22 year old who was watching her during the day cannot brown ground beef.  Yes, I said it.  The one time I watched her do it (and eat it, no less) was probably one of the toughest experiences I have ever had with her.  She burnt it to a crisp.  It.  Was.  Gross.  And secondly well, if it were up to my husband?  They’d have eaten a rotation of McDonald’s, Hot Dogs & Frozen pizzas.

So I bit the bullet and cooked for 3 straight days.  I made everything from mini quiches and pancake bites (filled with sausage) to chicken parmesan, chicken and green bean casserole and spaghetti and meatballs.  The toughest thing I asked of them was to boil a pot of pasta.  Literally.  You can imagine my displeasure when after all of that I came home to an absolutely trashed home and a child with a giant scab on her knee from some glass that had somehow made it’s way from the back yard into our dining room.

My point?  I guess it’s just this…  We all have to do it at some point.  Based on the type of person that you are, you know how much prepping you need to do in advance (sure, I could have let her eat chicken nuggets, hot dogs & pizza for 8 days) and as much as it sucks, we all have to get it over with at some point.  I promise you that it’s harder on us than it is on them and while we may want to talk to them constantly, out of sight out of mind is definitely the right approach to this.

Good luck, ladies.

Daylight Savings, 6 Month Growth Spurt…

Will somebody please explain to me the point of daylight savings?  Yes, I get that it saves us money in the summer because it is light out longer.  But why the hell do we “fall back” to begin with?  What purpose does it getting dark at 5pm when we pay the most in utilities to heat our homes serve to begin with?

Twice a year the fine people of Arizona and Hawaii must look at us like we are absolute idiots.  And who can blame them?  Cheers to you Arizonians(?[my husband is telling me it should be Arizoners])!  You’ve got it figured out…

But I digress.  I read on Facebook a few days ago about a woman saying she had never experienced a “growth spurt” before 6 months.  I remember thinking “we hit it a few weeks early, it wasn’t terrible”.  Wrong.

I also remember thinking “daylight savings won’t affect us, I’ll just push her whole schedule back an hour”.  Wrong.  Maggie clearly had other plans…

Speaking of Maggie, naptime is over.  Have a great day!

Breastfeeding & Weight Loss… Double Edged Sword

So in the beginning, breastfeeding was absolutely fantastic for my weight loss.  By Halloween (Less than 2 months post partum) I was down to my pre-pregnancy weight of 162 lbs.  Very exciting stuff, right?  Absolutely.  Here’s the rub.  I really want to be somewhere between 145 & 150.

So what’s the problem?

Every time I get on the right track to eat “less” (more greens, less carbs) and get any sort of a work out schedule going, there’s a significant decrease in my milk supply – and I end up giving up because I want to be able to continue breastfeeding as long as possible…  Let’s be honest, it’s free – and I’m cheap!

So I’m dying to know – what’s worked for you?  How have you managed to curb the fat and keep up your supply?

I KNOW I’m not the only one asking, so let’s hear it ladies!

Sincerely,

~Nikki

Pushing Too Hard?

Eek!  So, I’d never really thought about it this way, and though it may be true – I was still insulted when somebody pointed it out.  And honestly for some things it had been in the back of my mind, but not for milestone things…  So here it goes…

When Maggie was about 4 months old, I Googled how to “teach her” to roll over.  You know, an instructional video on what to do to get the ball rolling…  And it definitely helped.  By the time she was five months old she could roll front to back, back to front, right to left, left to right…  well, you get the idea.

Recently it was time to start working on sitting up…  but she wasn’t having it.  So once again I turned to Google and I had been approaching it wrong so I started following instructions and bam!  In the last two weeks she’s gone from 100% supported to over 60 seconds at a time of sitting up on her own.  Fantastic!

Now that we’ve got the hang of that, why not get started on crawling?  There are a few babies out there her age that already have it down pat, so why not get the ball rolling on that as well?  So over the course of the next few weeks we’ll spend 10-20 minutes a day working on crawling.  She has the concept down with her legs already…  It’s the arms that she’s struggling with.

So my question/concern is…  Isn’t this my job as a parent?  To aid in her learning new skills and earning some independence, if you will?  Am I being too “pushy”?

I’d love to know your opinion!  And don’t worry, I don’t get offended when I ask for it.  Haha.

Sincerely,

~Nikki

The Cutest Baby Alive

I know, I know.  I’m biased.  Every mom believes that their baby is the cutest baby alive.  But SERIOUSLY, why does she have to be so stinking cute?  Her daddy & I … And every boy that crosses her path for that matter are in serious trouble.

I can’t help but pray that she holds on to her general disposition that everything is funny and that she is indestructible.  She is my miracle and the glue that holds me together no matter what is going on in the rest of my world.

I still have a TON to learn about photography, but I thought I’d share a few shots from our “6 month photo shoot”.  Enjoy!

Stuck on a Loop

What is it about the way I was raised that I continually find myself in the same exact patterns year after year whether it is with my marriage, any relationship, my career, or a number of any other variations of where I am in my life?

I failed my real estate license exam.  I have never failed anything in my life.  But I’m a mom now.  I don’t get to get a good night of sleep to prepare for something I have stopped studying for if it isn’t in the cards.  Instead, when my beautiful baby girl (she truly is amazing, what I live for these days) decides that she’ll wake up 5 times in one night and then only sleep once I have to get up to shower for said exam…  Well, I just have to suck it up and deal, don’t I?

The stupid thing about it is that I have no excuse for this failure.  I had four hours to complete the exam and I did it in two.  Out of 145 questions I marked 28 for review.  That in itself is a passing grade.  Until you take into account the fact that not all of the questions are graded equally.  100 on a national level, which I passed of course, 40 on the state (where I failed) and 5 that aren’t graded at all.  So after being confident with about 10 of the 28 I had marked and at least coming up with answers (a 25% chance to get them right) on the other 18, I submitted the test with the “hey, I got a 90” mentality and anxiously awaited getting the hell out of that stuffy, over heated H&R Block testing center…  To fail the state exam by 3 questions.

Had I spent an extra 20 minutes going “okay, now which ones have to do with license law?” and actually making an effort…  I wouldn’t be waiting another 10 days and paying another $100 to take a test I should have completed successfully the first time.  But I didn’t.  Because I was tired.  The end.

But this is the rut I seem to be stuck in again.

Going to make an effort to start writing more diligently again.

Sincerely,

~Nikki