Update

I feel so in touch with the blog world because I read blogs ALL THE TIME! Yet for some reason I never drum up the energy to do my own posts. :( Bad blogger.

Alexandra is now 9 1/2 months old. She is doing great. Getting really big and really active. She has been crawling for over a month now and she now cruises everywhere along furniture, climbs up steps, walks pushing her little walker-car-thing, and is generally into everything. This kid can not sit still. She is not a cuddly one at all. Sometimes I'm sad and wish she would just cuddle in my arms but she will not sit still for a second. She's also very tempermental. Either very happy and smiley or super pissed off. She's always been like that so I guess that's just her. She can go from a huge smile to a crying mess and back to giggles within a matter of seconds! I'm definitely anticipating an emotional teenager!!

She loves playing with other kids. She hates being home alone with just mom. BORING! We go out everyday for a play date, otherwise the whining would just kill me. Good thing I have a big network of mom friends to keep me company while the kids play. There are also a lot of awesome coffee shops nearby that cater to babies/kids and have big play areas with mats and toys and slides and swings etc. Very handy!

Alexandra has 2 teeth now and by the amount of snot and drool that is coming out of that kid I swear there are more on the way but I can't spot any. We don't go to the doctor this month but if I had to guess I would say she is 18 pounds. Getting heavy to carry (and unfortunately for me she still hates the stroller). My left bicep is huge.

In my last post I talked about weaning. Well, now is the time i'm going to get serious about it. I went back to the fertility doctor today and we are good to go with trying for a second as soon as I wean her! I had blood and baseline ultrasound done today and when I want to start my protocol (menopur injections and IUI) I just call and we begin! Crazy!

I am currently nursing Alexandra in the morning, before her afternoon nap and at night. I give her two bottles of formula a day. One with lunch and one with dinner. I'm thinking that I will next cut out the feeding before her afternoon nap. I don't think I will be ready to fully wean her for a while (a month...or 2? ) but maybe in November we will be ready to start the meds. It is exciting and scary to think about the possibility of a second baby! I really hope to give Alexandra a sibling (or 2 ...or 3!) but atleast I have her no matter what!

Anyways, my teething angel is waking from her nap and sounding miserable (wish me luck! ooooohhhh the whining!!!!! Argh!) , here's a pic of my girl on the go!


BEEP BEEP!!!

Weaning

I thought I wanted to nurse Alexandra for a year and then switch her directly to milk in a sippy cup, thus skipping the formula and bottle all together. Well, I'm having second thougths on that. I want to continue to give her some breast milk until atleast a year but I am feeling like such a prisoner and am ready for her to take a bottle. Until last week, my girl had NEVER taken a bottle. Utter refusal. And so, I have NEVER been away from her for longer than 3 hours when I went to get my hair done ONCE. Other than that it has been max 2 hours apart. In 9 months. That's a long time. Now, that she is crawling (yes...at 8.5 months that girl was off to the races!), sitting in my lap is SO. NOT. FUN! She is squirming and not interested in nursing. But the problem is that she is not interested in eating solid food either. Or bottles. In the past week I have been trying to get her to take breast milk or formula from a bottle once a day. I have some success when she is strapped in her carseat and I sit in the back with her. Or when she is really sleepy, but then she does this weird nursing/sipping the bottle thing. Probably not good. I should just put my boob away! I also decided to cut out night feedings completely since she was not eating during the day. That has been surprisingly successful and this weekend she actually slept from 8 pm to 8am without waking! (actually... not entirely true...when I cut out night feeds I introduced a dream feed around 1130pm so that if she wakes at night I can rest easy knowing that her tummy is full, she doesnt' wake for the dream feed though and I wish I had started that months ago!) So, this is major progress from the multiple wakings to nurse I was having just 2 weeks ago!

Most of this post is just my babbling, but I wan to know from others who have weaned, are weaning...how do you do it ? Did you cut out one feed and replace it with a bottle? Which feed is the best/easiest one to cut out? Cold turkey? Easier for you or dad to give bottle? How do you know how many ounces to give? She doesn't seem to ever want more than 2 or 3 ounces and I read about babies wanting 8 ounce bottles! Also, would love to hear how much solid food other babies are eating. she was eating a ton! but when she started crawling and got her first tooth all in the same week her appetite disappeared. Now we are lucky if we can get her to eat a couple cubes of squash and a butt ton of cheerios a day. She is obsessed with cheerios. That is one food she will always eat!

anyways, would love any advice! Hope you all had a great long weekend!

LTB

Teeth and Germs

Hello hello! I can't believe the summer is almost OVER! And that means that the school year is starting, and that means I am getting WAY too close to having to go back to work! My maternity leave is over at the end of December so I will go back to teaching in January after the Christmas break. Now, I know some of you are shaking your heads and hating on me for getting a year at home with my girl and still complaining...such is one of the pleasures of living in Canada (and paying super huge amounts of taxes!!!) I think it would suck to leave your child weather they are 4 months or 4 years old!

Things have been good over here. We went on a great vacation to a resort in the Muskokas (cottage country in Ontario) and it was so fun to be there with Alexandra at 8 months old! She was loving swimming and the toys in the kids areas and it was fantastic! Soooo much better than our trip to Florida at 4.5 months! I am absolutely loving this 8 month stage. She sits, stands, moves but doesn't crawl yet. She loves toys and interacting but is not all over the place yet! Best stage so far!

One thing that is not so good about this stage is germs. She eats everything and since we go to a lot of play groups she eats toys that other kids eat. Gross. Germy. We got our first cold. It sucks to see your baby all snotty and congested. She was (and still is) congested and is having a hard time nursing. She is dripping from the nose and its gross. When she's sick I feel like I have to quarantine her from the play groups so that we don't infect everyone else. This means we are cranky and bored and stuck inside the condo. NOT FUN. Even more not fun, I got the cold. And even MORE not fun, Alexandra got her first tooth simultaneously with getting her first cold. She was MISERABLE. It was so sad! She now has one lower tooth. I was hoping for two (the whining was enough to make me dread the other 19 that still need to grow in!). With the teething/cold she started waking more often at night. Atleast 2 to 3 times a night instead of the glorious one time a night we had gotten down to! Of course when she was sick/teething I went to her and I nursed her each time she woke. Well, its been a week now. The tooth is in. The waking is continuing. Any advice on how to break this night feeding/waking habit she has gotten herself into? I am thinking that at almost 9 months old we are ready to cut out night feeds. Do most people cut them out by now? I think I'm the last one around (in my mom groups atleast!) that still nurses her baby in the middle of the night! I just don't know how to cut out the night feeds without an enormous amount of tears. She fall asleep instantly while nursing but won't fall asleep when I just comfort her in the middle of the night. I know she knows how to put herself to sleep since I always put her to bed awake for naps and at bedtime and she goes to sleep after just chatting to herself for a minute or two. I just don't get what is so different for her in the middle of the night! I know people reduce night feeds by watering down bottles/decreasing amount given but Alexandra will not take a bottle and never has.

Another thing to compound this is that I think she might be hungry since with the sick/teething she also started refusing to eat. She barely eats any solids (except for Cheerios! Which she LOVES!) and is even nursing less during the day. Such a conundrum! Do other babies lose their appetites with teething?

Anyways, that's all that's new at the LTB household! I leave you with a couple pics from our holiday!

Gotta love those thighs!!!



Daddy is so fun!!!

First Word?

I don't know how to post a video on here but here is a link to my baby girl's first word! She said it and then I repeated it and now she's been saying it on her own and whenever I say it! So proud of my girl!!!

First Word

Three Randoms...

1. After thinking my poor child would be swaddled for life we finally pulled the plug and let her loose. About 2 weeks ago when she was sick I didn't want her to overheat with the swaddle since she was already feverish, so I thought it a perfect time to get out of the swaddle for good. I also figured she wasn't sleeping well anyways because of being sick so it was going to make that any worse. I went out and bought an Aden and Anis thin sleep sack (they have winter ones too and I will definitely be picking one of those up in the fall!) I put her in the sack and she slept amazing! In fact, she is sleeping much better than she was with the swaddle! The wonderful thing is that now that she is hands free she can retrieve her own soother in the middle of the night. I toss her in the crib with 3 soothers and it is fantastic! She is also now a side-sleeper. So cute! It's so crazy how much she moves around in that crib now! I put her in with her head facing north and by morning she always has her head at the south end of the crib!?!

2. Baby girl loves swimming! I started taking her to "lessons" and also take her to the community pool almost everyday! It is so fun to watch her splash and kick around in the water. I am loving this age (where she can fully sit up on her own and not so fragile)! It is so fun to actually play with her!





3. I'm thinking of training to run a 5 or 10k. I do alot of cardio but almost never run. I stick to the elliptical or stairmaster usually. I decided to try running last week and I ran 3 miles (5k) on the treadmill in 25 minutes...i'm not sure if that is terrible or decent. Anyone with running experience want to tell me what a good time to strive for would be? I don't want to over-do it with the running since I'm worried about my milk supply (anyone have experience with this? does running lower your milk supply?) so I think I will just strive for running a good 5k now and then maybe a 10k when I am nursing less in the winter time. I would love any tips about running from other running mamas!

Well, those are my 3 randoms for the day! I'll leave you with a quick pic of my baby working hard:

Baby Food

We started Alexandra on solids around 5.5 months. At first it was nothing more than an exercise in body painting. She would literally purse her mouth shut and grab at the spoon full of rice cereal and smear it all over her body. Cute, but nerve wracking! I made multiple attempts to feed her oatmeal or rice cereal. I was always unsuccessful. My husband found a bit more success so he became the feeder. Alexandra became comfortable eating cereal after about 3 weeks of trying it. However, she rejected any new flavours I would introduce. Hated bananas (what baby hates bananas!), hated pear sauce, hated sweet potato. I was starting to get devastated that I wouldn't get to put my Baby Bullet to good use! Then i started to realize that what Alexandra seemed to hate the most was eating off the spoon. I started giving her chunks of watermelon or apricots and she seemed to do a bit better sucking/gnawing on those than eating them in pureed form. I just wasn't really all that comfortable with giving her "chunks" of food. I contemplated maybe just doing baby-led weaning but I was a bit nervous about it. Then I saw some other bloggers talking about Baby Gourmet organic baby food pouches. I bought a couple and Alexandra would suck the food right out of the pouch. Suddenly, without the spoon in the way, my baby girl was loving these new flavours! I was so happy, but very disappointed that maybe I wouldn't get to make all of my daughters food because I would have to resort to buying these "pouches" in order to get her to eat! Then I was struck by some mommy-genius (ok...not really but I am proud of my "invention"!) I put some pureed sweet potato in a ziploc bag, snipped off on corner and squeezed the food into baby A's mouth. She loved it just as much as the Baby Gourmet! I have now found a wonderful (non-messy! very portable!) way to feed my baby without the spoon that she for some strange reason hates! So far some homemade combo favorites include:

Mango Chicken
Banana, blueberry, avocado
Squash and green bean
Chicken and pear
Chicken, blueberry, apple

And let me tell you...my child loves to eat! At 7 months she finally "gets it!" and she loves it! And I love it...because ever since she really started eating she is SLEEPING much better! And we all know that is what really counts! She is sleeping pretty regularily from 7:30 or 8pm until 4 am, up for a quick 5 min feed and down again until 8 am. Of course there are still some terrible days but she has officially weaned herself down from 2 night feeds to one. I'm sure I could pop the soother in her mouth at 4 am and she would go a few more hours without a feed, but right now (since I don't have to get up for work) I would rather feed her at 4am, and then get another good stretch out of her until 8 than not feeding her and have her wake up for the day at 6:30 or 7.

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend! We are going to a friend's pool tomorrow and I can't wait to get A into the pool in her new floatation device (its like an inner tube that she sits in)!

:)LTB

Bad Weekend :(

This weekend promised to be glorious! 3 days long, a trip to visit my parents and siblings, BBQ with friends and gorgeous weather.

This all went out the window on Friday when Alexandra started acting funny. I could tell she wasn't feeling good. The cries weren't the normal fussy/pick-me-up-Mommy! cries, but serious achy cries. I thought she seemed constipated since she was straining but not pooping. We gave her some baby Tylenol and hoped for the best. She woke up every single hour (or less) that night. We were at my parents so I know she was in unusual surroundings but this was just god awful! I was exhausted. Saturday morning she had a fever. So, we gave her tylenol again and went to our friends for a BBQ. She seemed to cheer up and we thought she was on the mend. Unfortunately on Sunday morning she woke up and was BURNING up. She was soooo hot and sad and it was breaking my heart! We took her to Sick Kids hospital here in Toronto (amazing place!!!) and they checked her ears (fine) and then decided to check her urine...by giving her a catheter! That had to be the worst thing ever to witness. Poor little thing! Urine came back fine. So, we were left with a fever and no known cause. Went home and took it easy (she was soooo sleepy!) and Monday she seemed a bit better, but still sleepy. By nighttime her fever was back. I was starting to panic and my mind was going to terrible places thinking that she was seriously ill with some freak virus or worse..like cancer. I of course resorted to Dr. Google and that only freaked me out more. I know it had only been 3 days with a fever but to me that was a looooonnng time to have a fever for no known reason! Well, today she finally seemed better. No fever. Still a bit sleepy but hopefully on the mend! phew! oh...and to make this weekend even more crappy....my husband punched me in the face on Friday night! Now before you get crazy thinking i'm a battered wife, here's the story: Hubs was trying to cheer up sick Alexandra by doing a funny "dance" that involved flailing of the arms. I happened to approach as he flung his fist out to the right...and right into my eye. I am now sporting my first "shiner"! We definitely were a sad pair all weekend:




Here's to a happy and healthy week ahead!

LTB