stop making me drive crazy!
A couple of months ago, Will decided to adopt my frequent “you’re making me crazy” or “stop driving me crazy” type outbursts as his own. Except he got confused and combined them into “you’re making me drive crazy” or “stop making me drive crazy.” It only took a few times of hearing this before Nic and I adopted this particular terminology. It’s something I encourage everyone else to adopt for themselves. There’s making you crazy, there’s driving you crazy…and then there’s a whole special level for “making me drive crazy.”
ellie at one month
– She’s so big. I can’t get over how much she’s grown. She is very very long. I’m anxious for her 2 month appointment so we can see how much she weighs and how tall she is!
– She’s a good sleeper. She wakes up 2 or 3 times a night and is always happy to eat then either fall asleep or just look around. She goes to sleep at night in her crib and I usually take her back to her crib after her first wakeup/feeding. After that I get too lazy to shuffle beds.
– She’s tolerating our kisses better. She’s always not minded Will’s, but in the beginning she made faces when Nic or I kissed her. She seems to accept them as her lot in life now.
– She doesn’t like the carrier that Will LOVED. I’m glad I had gotten a different carrier this time, because she loves that one but really doesn’t like the two that I used most with Will.
– She spits up a lot. Which is generating a ton of laundry!
– Her eyes were decidedly gray from weeks 2-4, but just in the last day or two they are shifting ever so slightly over to the blue gray side. They are definitely still gray, but they’re a little more blue than they were before. (And absolutely not brown, which means Nic was wrong–HA!) 
– She likes to be naked from the waist down. Sometimes after a diaper change we’ll let her just lay on a diaper and she is always so content to just air out her hoo-ha.
– She LOVES baths. This morning she was fussy and nothing seemed to help so we took her upstairs and gave her a long bath and she was blissfully content until we took her out!
– She likes to have a blanket rubbed over the top of her head.
– Her feet are ridiculously long.
– We got out the 2006 scrapbook today and she is still the spitting image of Will at that age. We kept trying to tell Will that they were pictures of baby WILL, but he kept shouting “NO! It’s BABY ELLIE!” Which was understandable because they look exactly like pictures of her!
mothering 2.0
So much is easier the second time around. There’s the bold confidence of knowing you’ll screw up in 8000 ways but it will still be okay. Of knowing that the weight will come off. Of knowing that you’ll eventually sleep again.
And then there’s the little stuff. Like how much faster nursing is. My milk came in within 30 hours, and thanks to an overactive letdown, her nursing sessions are always under 15 minutes, and usually only around 5! And this weekend (just two and a half weeks in) I got to ditch the nursing pads. (And tested out that bold new world with two date nights in a row, and managed to escape without any embarrassing mishaps!)
And the early start to good sleep habits has been incredible. Granted, she’s an easy baby, so I think it’s a combination of things, but I was careful in the beginning to never let her fall asleep nursing–I’d pop her off before she finished going to sleep…so now she REFUSES to fall asleep nursing. If she’s starting to doze off, she pops off the nipple before finishing falling asleep. Which is a whole new world for us–Will literally had to FALL OFF the breast deep deep deep in sleep. He was 5 months old and if I wanted to do something during his nap I’d have to nurse him to sleep in his crib and then try to make a ninja exit or he’d wake up and the whole thing would start again. At 10 months old he was waking up 9+ times a night!
This baby? She can put herself to sleep because we let her practice that! Last night we did stories with Will and then put her in her crib. She lay there happily sucking on her bear pacifier and then fell asleep…all on her own. This morning I lay her down on our bed to help Will with something, and 5 minutes later she had happily dozed off. She’s still there. Will even went in and kissed her (no shock there), and she opened her eyes…and went back to sleep without any help. It’s like watching some sort of Christmas miracle with my own eyes.
And the thing about mothering 2.0 is that I don’t feel like we have to be strict about that stuff. If she falls asleep on her own for a nap but needs to be held/rocked for the next one, that’s okay. If she wakes up twice one night but five times the next, that’s okay, too. Because as long as she’s doing these things SOMETIMES, I know we’re in for a much easier time of it!
a few of will’s sweet/funny lines
Will has been cranking out the adorableness at such a rate that I can’t possibly twitter it all fast enough. So here are some good ones:
– Today we went to a playdate with Brandon and Baby Chloe (who is now 7 months old). Will was so excited to show Brandon HIS baby sister. When we got there he announced to Brandon: “Come see my baby sister! This is Baby Ellie. Now give her a nice gentle kiss.”
– He came into the room and didn’t see her in her little chair and said “Where’s my boober baby?!” Which is adorable because we haven’t called her boober at all–it’s a pet name for him!!
– It’s virtually impossible for Ellie to get decent rest during the day because he needs to be kissing her or checking on her feet or petting her head pretty much constantly. He finds her amazing.
– Case in point: Yesterday he came into the kitchen with my iPhone on camera mode and said “Look at my baby Ellie!!” (Since it was in camera mode all I saw was my kitchen sink, since that’s where I was standing, but I said “oh–she’s so cute!” and moved on.) Today while looking for a picture on my phone I discovered 50 shots of Ellie that Will had taken.
– He is fiercely protective of her and her need for milk. He is always telling me to give her her milk, and yesterday during story time Nic was trying to comfort Ellie so I could read to Will, but Will did NOT like it. “You give her to mommy for her boobie milk!” he shouted in his angry voice. “Stop making her cry!”
– His new morning routine: he comes into our room, runs to the potty, and then runs to our bed to check on her, give her kisses, and stare at her.
– Ellie’s cord fell off this morning. Or, in Will Speak, her “gooey belly” fell off.
– Yesterday as I got ready to shower, Will kissed my belly and announced “it’s getting smaller.” I love that kid the best. (Nic came home yesterday and said “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?! You’re so little! Where’s your belly?!” So apparently yesterday was HUGE in belly shrinkage. [And it is sooo nice to see how quickly it has gone down this week. When I came home from the hospital looking 7 months pregnant I was ready to hop in the bath with a toaster.])
And turning to mommy news, after a few weepy baby bluesy days, I am feeling great. Yesterday it really felt like I turned the corner on the hormones, so hopefully that keeps up!
Ellie had her first drs appointment today. She weighed in 2oz over birth weight, and when Dr Dawson walked in the room she said “8 days old and already over her birth weight–that’s all I have to say!” She also raved over Ellie’s name and asked if she had all the books/dolls/etc (yes) and then kept gushing about her color. Saying that they see a lot of jaundiced newborns so it was so nice to see one with color as nice as Ellie’s. And that since she was doing so well (weight wise) we get to skip the 2 week appointment and don’t have to come back until she’s 2 months old. Which made me and my boobies very proud. After overcoming so much in the early days of nursing Will it is awesome to just have things roll along nicely this time! And I seem to be over the hump on the painful nursing stage, so that’s nice, too!
It was nice that the dr was so excited about the name Eloise, because the nurse who called us back to the examine room butchered the hell out of it. She stumbled all over pronouncing it. When I got home I told Nic (who was sick today and stayed home with Will while Ellie and I braved the 8:30AM appointment) and he said that she probably would have had an easier time of it if we’d just spelled it with more ‘y’s in place of other vowels. (A joke that is still cracking me up.)
