Thursday, May 29, 2008

One Month! Again! (Was Supposed to Be One Week, Then Two Weeks, Then Three Weeks…)

It’s amazing that Colin just turned one month old. I haven’t totally forgotten how fast time flies with newborns, but it’s really been underscored by the fact that it’s been this long since we went to the hospital to have him. I don’t remember what it was like with Danica, but that’s probably because it was just like this – fast and furious. I’ll write more later (possibly), but I wanted to catch everybody (including myself) up on the happenings with our two little ones.

Colin had his first doctor’s appointment on Thursday, May 8. He weighed in at 7 pounds, 7 ounces, which is about a pound more than he left the hospital at the week before. No other stats, presumably since he was little more than a week old. We’ll have another doctor’s appointment on Tuesday, June 3 where he’ll get his first shot, a hep B vaccination.

He’s not really a newborn anymore, as he’s really filled out. His newborn onesies are getting a bit small and his cheeks are puffing up. I’m guessing he’ll be about 9 pounds, 10-12 ounces when he gets weighed again, and he was born at 19 ¾ inches, so he’ll probably add about an inch-and-a-half.

His weight gain isn’t surprising, since he downs milk like a vaccum. When Danica was a month old, she was taking probably 1-2 ounces of milk (granted, she was born two weeks early – but still just a week earlier than Colin). Colin can wolf down four ounces and still be hungry. We’re breastfeeding him, but we have an idea about the amount since we’ve given him enough bottles to see what he’s taking. Oh, and when he wants to eat, he wants to eat now. Pacifiers don’t do the trick with him when he’s hungry, though he seems to have some aversion to eating on Kindra’s right side. He doesn’t eat on that side nearly as well as the left, and he acts as though he’s uncomfortable when she does try to feed him on the right.

He also has a little issue with falling asleep when he eats. I know all newborns do this, but we have the darnedest time waking him up. We used to strip Danica to get her to eat so we could stuff her, but not much seems to faze this kid when he’s asleep (which is great, since Danica is such a light sleeper). Colin usually eats on one side, then falls asleep, then wakes up half-an-hour later annoyed that he’s still hungry.

Despite the eating issue, he burps like a champ. Danica was always a tough burp when she was young. Sometimes it took ten or fifteen minutes to make sure we got a good burp out of her. Colin takes about ten or fifteen seconds. Of course, we may just be hitting him harder since he’s our second and all…

Speaking of second children, Kindra and I both agree that having the second kid is, in some respects, easier than having the first. Now, there are challenges to juggling playing, eating, changing, and sleeping with two, but there is definitely a great deal LESS anxiety, which I’m sure most of you would probably agree with. It was all we could do to take care of Danica and make sure she got fed every three hours when we first had her. Now, Kindra can pretty much handle the insane feeding schedule on her own, while I try to juggle the rest and figure out how to get things done (not that Kindra doesn’t help – a lot).

I would say that our biggest challenge has been finding our own rhythm again. Don’t get me wrong – it’s been great with all the help that we’ve had around – but every family’s life falls into a cadence that works for them, and we haven’t found ours yet. It’s nice that we’ve got some time over the summer to develop it, and my work schedule has been flexible enough to allow us to make things work, but we’re still going minute-by-minute, day-by-day. Since Colin’s arrival, we’ve had a family member in our home pretty much every day, so we really don’t know what it’s like with just the four of us.

Kindra’s cousin Nicole arrived on Wednesday and will be that last of our visitors for a little while. Going backwards, we’ve had Kindra’s sister, Krista, who just left on Tuesday, my sister Steph left a day before Krista arrived, my mom was here for a while before my sister came to town, and Kindra’s mom was here prior to that. Even before we had Colin, my parents came to town the Saturday before we had Colin to make sure we had everything ready. So, to say the least, we’ve had a high traffic flow.

Nicole will be here through next Thursday, and she’ll help out as I head to Philly for the weekend for Steph’s graduation from medical school. Hopefully, Danica and Colin will be alright and Kindra can juggle between the two adequately. I’ll only be gone from Thursday morning to Sunday at noon, but that’s a lot of juggling.

Getting back to the kids, everybody says that Colin looks like Danica when she was his age, and judging by some old pictures of Danica that I’ve looked through, it might be necessary to label some of them. He doesn’t squeak as much as Danica did, but he does do his fair share of grunting. He seems to be uncomfortable a lot of the time, and I can’t seem to remember what Danica was like. It probably comes from getting used to all of his bodily functions.

As far as his bodily functions go, the boy just can’t get his pee and his poop together. He pees, we change his diaper, then he poops, then he pees, then he poops. We had a “five-minute rule” with Danica where we would wait for five minutes after we thought she needed to be changed, since she had a habit of peeing right after she had a new diaper. With Colin, it’s almost a twenty-five-minute rule. Our former daycare provider, Danielle, said that you go through twice as many diapers with a boy as with a girl, and I believe her.

Oh, and there’s another slight change. Danielle has been taking care of Danica since Danica was six months old on a three-times-a-week basis. Unfortunately, Danielle had to take a job with her dad to help him out, so she had been having a friend, Jessie, help her out with the daycare duties since early this spring. Danielle then decided that she had to quit the daycare business to help her father full-time, which then led to Jessie wanting to take a few of the kids that Danielle had been watching. So, long story short, Jessie is our new daycare provider. We’re still taking Danica MWF so that she can play with other kids (Jessie has two girls, Ella and Leila, who are 3 and 4) and also so Kindra can have some relief while I’m at work. Jessie will also take Colin in the fall when Kindra has to go back to work.

The downsides are that Jessie’s house is just far enough that Kindra probably won’t be able to go visit on her lunch break and that I won’t get to spend the extra three months with Colin like I did with Danica. I’ll have both of them on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the fall. I’ll require your prayers, please. Thanks.

Okay, that’s a lot more than I wanted to write originally, but that’s what I can remember regarding Colin. Briefly, about Danica:

She’s sleeping a little better. We do our same routine with books and such, but we start a little later (around 6:30 – 7:00 p.m.) and we still have to go in and lie down with her, which Kindra does now. She’s graciously accepted the chore, since I usually fall asleep and get pissed when I wake up at 11:00 p.m. and still have work to do. I know I’m probably jinxing us, but the past couple of nights, Danica’s gone to bed and not come out until 11:00 or 11:30 and then gone straight into our room. We’ve got a comforter laid out on the floor next to the bed which she happily flops down on to sleep. She hasn’t woken up early (before 6:00 a.m.) in the past few days. Now all we have to do is get her to go to sleep by herself.

We’ve also been taking the easy way out with her afternoon nap, driving her around to get her to go to sleep, since she’ll fall asleep in the car seat if it’s the right time. It stinks, because at Jessie’s, Danica is fairly willing to go to sleep on her own. It has to do with some combination of being at somebody else’s house, sleeping in Ella and Leila’s room (which was a princess room until recently), and Jessie keeping Danica’s blankie and Lulu from her until nap time. *sigh* They say your kids are always better for everybody else. We’re working on it, but like I said before, it’s been tough finding a rhythm.

Duh… I almost forgot to talk about Danica’s reaction to “Baby Coul-lin,” which is an approximation of what she calls him. When we were in the hospital, she was happy to see him and replied, “Yes!,” when you asked her if she liked him. If you asked her if she wanted to take him home, you usually got a “no.” The first couple of weeks, she was really sweet to him, giving him kisses and wanting to hold him. Then, about Week 3, her attitude took a decidedly negative turn, and she started to push, grab, and hit him. In the past week, she’s returned to being pretty nice to him, giving him kisses and wanting to lay with him, but she can be rough when she gets tired.

Also, we didn’t initially see any issues Danica had with having Colin around, but it’s since become apparent that she’s become more attached to me. For the first couple of weeks, she didn’t want to do anything with Kindra, which we perceived as Danica being mad that Kindra was spending all her time with Colin. It’s lessened some, since we’ve been able to spread our time out. That’s been nice for me, too, since for the first three weeks or so, I hardly spent any time with Colin.

Okay. I need to sleep since it’s 2:00 a.m., and I have a flight at 10:06 a.m. and haven’t packed yet. I want to write more about Colin’s birth and whatever else I missed (disciplining Danica comes to mind), so hopefully when I get back…

Friday, May 2, 2008

Happy Birthday, Danica!

Happy 2nd birthday to my girl… I can’t believe it’s been that long already. It seems like just yesterday we were bringing her home from the hospital (an eerie coincidence that we brought home The Boy from the hospital today). More on all of that later…

* * *
Had my first brush with real parenting tonight… I was holding The Boy and messing around with Flickr while Kindra was in bed at 11:30 p.m. I was just thinking about ten minutes prior that it was amazing that The Girl hadn’t woken up and walked out of her room, so naturally, I jinxed myself. Sure enough, I hadn’t been holding him more than five minutes when I look up and see her toddling out, clutching her blanket.

After the initial, “Oh, crap!,” I thought that I might get her to walk back to her room, which was clearly a ludicrous thought. So I held Colin in my left arm, picked Danica up in the right, and figured that I had to put Colin down in his bassinet before I could put Danica back to bed.

Walk into our room (where we’re keeping Colin for the time being), realize that I have to put Danica down before putting Colin safely in his bed (BIG mistake), put The Girl down, she screams bloody murder as I put Colin in bed (giving Kindra a serious heart attack), scoop up The Girl, and spend the next twenty minutes in her room making sure she falls back asleep.

This parenting stuff is fun!

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Bullet Time

Colin was born Monday, April 28 at 12:52 p.m. PDT. He weighed in at 6 pounds, 10 ounces and was 19 ¾ inches. Healthy with a good set of lungs.

His sister seems to like him okay, but she says, “No,” if you ask her if she wants to take him home.