On Saturday May 8th, Daniel turned two. Man two is different.
Daniel is amazing. He runs, he jumps with both feet off the ground, he throws balls, does somersaults, and laughs. Oh my gosh, he laughs. He laughs with his whole body. Sometimes, he laughs like a short evil genius.
First Snow
His words are coming along. We hit a snag at the beginning of the year, but that deserves a post of it's own, so I won't go into it.
He loves to tell me, "I see it!" or "I did it!" He yells out Ta-da! And Woo-hoo! He likes to tell me about choo choos and trucks and how the cat says Mao. He fills in gaps with some sign language. More, Please, Thank You, All Done, Car, Play, Thirsty, Apple.
Frequent boo-boos are the norm.
He's begun to sleep a bit more. 5-7 hours a night in his crib and then some cuddle time in our bed. We will not speak of naps here. I do not wish to jinx it.
Daniel has a friend, a little blue elephant we call Peanut or Ellie. He goes everywhere. To the store, to the doctor, to church. He goes so many places we had to adopt a brother for Ellie. They trade places every week while the other one gets a bath. Ellie helps Daniel be brave, and Daniel feeds Ellie chocolate chip cookies.
Temper-tantrums have become frequent and harder to deal with. He tells me no. He tells me "No Mom!" He hits. He cries. The stand offs could make an FBI negotiator sweat. He has a mind of his own and when it is made up, no one can change it. We're just hoping to teach him to use his powers for good and not evil.
He is absolutely amazing. I can't wait to see what the year brings.
After being typed very slowly whenever I've had a spare moment, at long last Danny's birth story is finished! It includes some very unflattering shots of me (Oh the water weight! Aak!), but nothing graphic so don't worry about little eyes peering at the computer screen (or dads =) I apologize for it being kinda sketchy. I've been typing this for the last 8 months.
By Wednesday evening, I'd been having contractions on and off for three days. As long as I was walking they were perfect. Really strong, moving closer together and lasting a good amount of time. As soon as I sat down, they went away. So when I started having contractions, I figured nothing was different and went to take a shower. When it took me twenty minutes to wash my hair, my mom suggested that these might be a little different. By 9pm, they were coming about five minutes apart and weren't going away no matter what I did, so I made the choice to head to the hospital to get checked out. I figured they would take one look at me and send me home, but at the very least it would put my mind at ease.
As we were walking out the door.
The car ride was really calm. I don't think any of us were expecting to stay even though we'd come prepared. We chatted and laughed in between contractions, and Mike didn't speed. It did, of course, start thunder storming the moment we left the apartment. I always have to make things difficult.
When we arrived at Labor and Delivery, it was deserted (in way of patients I mean, not nurses), so I was quickly ushered in a huge, newly remodeled room (SCORE!) I was only three centimeters dilated and eighty percent effaced and after an hour I hadn't changed at all, so I could have technically gone home till morning, but after they saw how badly my legs were swollen (9 out of 10 on the edema scale) they told me that there was no way they were letting me leave still pregnant, so I signed about a ton of paperwork, was hooked up to more monitors than an astronaut and was given a cup of ice ("Hi! You're having a baby! Eat ice.") I was having really good, hard contractions and while they weren't fun I didn't mind them. It wasn't an agonizing kind of pain. In an odd way, I actually sort of enjoyed this part of labor.
Danny's heartbeat is the blue, mine is the red, and my contractions are green. He kept kicking the monitor and then wiggling away from it so it would lose his heartbeat and the nurse would have to come in and fight with him to find it. They argued a lot. He won most of the time.
By 2am, I hadn't slept at all, and I was exhausted, so Mike and Mom talked me into letting the nurse give me something to sleep since the baby wasn't coming any time soon, and I hadn't slept in almost 20 hours. I may have said yes, but I kept arguing about it as she put the medicine in my IV, and I just really wanted to k...and then I woke up 5 hours later.
When the doctor checked me again at 10am, I was only 4cm and wasn't really progressing. It was incredibly frustrating, and I finally bit the bullet and told them to break my water. At 12pm, they broke my water. Nothing happened. At 1:30, they started me on pitocin. By 2pm, I was in so much pain I started blacking out during contractions. When they started the pitocin, Danny's head finally dropped into my pelvis, but unbeknownst to any of us his head was pressing directly into my pelvis instead of going through it because I have a tipped pelvis (Wide on the outside, narrow on the inside. Long and short of it, he was good and stuck. Ouch.) I tried to handle the contractions on my own, but finally I just screamed and begged for an epidural. I don't remember much until the medicine started working, but I've been told that in the five minutes it took for the anesthesiologist to arrive I began screaming, "Where the *%#@ is HE?" along with a few other colorful phrases. The only part of the whole procedure that I remember is leaning on a stool while Mike and the nurse tried to help me sit up and crying, "I can't sit down! I don't care if he paralyzes me!"
Blissful, blissful pain relief.
After the epidural took effect, I fell asleep for a little while. I was so wiped out from the pain. When I woke up, the nurse was checking me. I had gone from 4cm to 10cm in a little under an hour. I realized I was feeling a lot of pressure, so we decided to go ahead and start pushing. The whole pushing part was amazing. It was just me, Mike, Mom & the nurse in a quiet, dark room. We were all really relaxed and were making jokes and talking between pushes. I pushed for almost two hours and each time I pushed the top of his little head would be visible and then when I stopped it disappeared. Finally, the doctor came to check on us. After saying, "Hmmm." a lot, he finally told me what was up. Daniel's odds of being born safely without a C-section were not very good. So after some hard thinking and prayer, Mike and I made the decision to have the C-section.
After I signed the papers, everything went so fast. While the nurses were prepping me, Mike donned his scrubs.
Proud Daddy...dressed as a banana :D
I was wheeled into the OR and strapped down to the table. Which terrified me. I wasn't so scared of the surgery, but being unable to move my arms was scary. Also, I was little high from all the medicine, so hearing my heartbeat over the monitor was freaking me out. I'd hear it skip a beat and then beat a little faster, and I'd start panicking internally. I remember thinking, "Am I dying? Oh my God I'm dying. Why is no one else panicking? I'm DYING, and they're making jokes about the price of gasoline." In spite of my internal freaking out, the atmosphere was really relaxed. Everyone did their best to make me feel at ease, and the doctors and nurses were amazing. Since we had decided to the CS before we had encountered any problems, nothing had to be rushed. It took about 20 minutes to get Danny out. It's still all a little blurry, but I remember Mike squeezing my hand tight, and then seeing this swollen, gray baby being held up over the curtain. Then he let out a loud, pitiful "Waaaaaaah!", turned pink and was whisked to the other side of the room to be cleaned. The whole experience was not what I'd hoped for originally, but it turned out to be really positive. Danny and I both came out healthy and the entire maternity ward staff was awesome.
In recovery.
And at the end of it, there was this:
And he is so worth all of it.
Whoa. It's been a while. Can I lie and say I've been incredibly busy and unavailable? Because it sounds so much better than saying I simply have a baby who went through a period of refusing to nap. Also! My family visited. So I TOTALLY have an excuse.
Daniel is...incredible. I look at my last post, and I can't even fathom how fast he's grown. He's almost crawling. He pushes himself up on his hands and begins to pull his knees under him constantly. Every once in a while, he gets up on all fours and rocks back and forth for a few seconds before sliding onto his tummy.
He loves to talk and sing. In the morning, he sits in the living room and sings to all his toys while I make coffee. He's begun mimicking sounds we make and yells "NANA! NANA" when he is angry in the desperate hope she will appear and save him from our evil torture. My worst fear is that his first real word may be boob. I say the word boob way too much. I've never been able to give nursing a nickname. I feel weird referring to the girls as "num nums." To make matters worse, he's begun making an "ooo!" sound before we nurse.
Nursing has finally become something wonderful for us. We had a really hard time in the beginning. He was so hungry that I couldn't keep up, and then he tried to quit at 6 weeks and again at 10 weeks, but I'm so glad I stuck with it and that we pushed through. It's become something very comforting for both of us. Gotta a boo boo? Thirsty? Tired? Lonesome? Hungry? Boobs are the instant comfort cure all. I love being able to comfort and calm him down so easily. And having baby food always on hand doesn't suck either. Sometimes it's frustrating. Like when I'm walking through the grocery store and Danny begins howling and exposing my bra to elderly women, but most of the time I enjoy it as much as he does.
Teething has been rough. No teeth have reared their shiny little heads yet, but I don't think it's far off.
In the last three weeks, Danny has begun napping by himself. For 45min - 1 1/2hrs. It's the most miraculous thing I've ever witnessed. I don't know what changed, but I can take absolutely no credit. One day I laid him down, and he napped for an hour. And I was convinced I'd killed him. He's still not sleeping for more than three hours a night in his crib, and he won't fall asleep unless nursed, but we're taking it one step at a time.
I'm so excited to about Christmas. I know that it will mean nothing to him, but I, in my silly new mommy glee, am thrilled. I can't wait to see him open his gifts. He will probably eat wrapping paper. There will be pictures!
We sit up like a pro now. No more of this lying down stuff! Sitting up is AWESOME. We try to sit up while we're supposed to be sleeping. While we're nursing. While we're having our diaper changed. We've also just learned how to pitch a fit. I have begun reading Dr. Dobson's "The Strong Willed Child."
Everyday, he seems to get bigger and bigger. He's continually changing. Somedays, I wish I could hit pause, scoop up our time and memories and store them away in a bottle so that when he's big and grown, I could open it up and relive it.
So I've been a little busy lately. Not so much in the running around sense of the word as in the holding-a-screaming-baby-24/7 kind of way. Teething is a bi...err, moving on.
Remember this little guy? I do. I remember every wrinkly skin roll, his tiny mewling cry, and his adorable inability to keep his thumb in his mouth. I only set him down for a second and when I came back someone had replaced him with this:
This little person. This little person who is now five months two weeks old. Who eats from a spoon and likes his sippy cup. Who is almost sitting up, can bang spoons on his highchair tray and carries his stuffed giraffe around everywhere. This amazing little person who is currently leaning over the keyboard with drool dripping off his chin and a slightly menacing grin on his face, trying to push buttons.
Danny learns and discovers new things everyday. I love seeing the world through his eyes. Something as simple as a sock on his foot is fascinating to him. He is...incredible.
Last night, Danny slept for almost five whole hours in his crib. A new record! We're not really pushing the crib sleeping hard. He nurses most of the night, so sleeping with me is easiest on both of us. I'm not up and down all night, and he doesn't scream. Every once in a while though, I lay him down in the crib after he's fallen asleep to see if I can get an hour of baby free sleep, and last night was a miracle! I don't know if we'll be able to repeat it, but that's life =)
I cannot believe Daniel will be four months old in a few days. He's grown so fast. He's easily 17lbs and more than 26 inches long. Yesterday, he rolled from his back to him tummy all by himself! He was so excited, and I was excited for him =)
He's become so social. He chats, laughs, grabs EVERYTHING. Being able to shove things in his mouth brings him endless amusement. He's not saying Mama or Dada yet, but he enjoys yelling, "Woo woo! Woooooo!" at the top of his lungs. He loves talking =)
We've begun teething. He chews on his hands, our hands, stuffed animals, blankets...you name it, he'll nom it. All of his baby hair is falling out (No!) Who told him he was allowed to get big boy hair??
He's so beautiful. I'm so proud to be his mama.
