Christmas 2012

Christmas was a fun time.  The kids are in their Christmas jammies above.  Somehow, I think Peter's pajamas were mislabeled as 3T when they were really 4T.  Oh well.  I guess he can wear these for another year.   

This is one of the few Christmases that we have spent at home.  For the first time, Peter really understood Christmas, and it was very fun for him.  For Elly, it seemed like just an ordinary day. 

Santa brought Peter some new tracks and a Thomas train and made a fancy track for him.  Peter didn't really seem to notice, but he did enjoy the new Thomas train.  

We went ridiculously overboard for Peter this year.  Will have to pull back a LOT next year.  We think it's funny that the presents he enjoyed the most were his matchbox cars from his stocking.  

Very excited about the cool and very beautiful looking instrument that Papa made for him and Elly.  Thanks Papa, for being an awesome wood carver!  We are the grateful recipients of a few of his carvings, including a very fun ark set.  

7 months

Well, here is Elly at 7 months.  She is sitting up very well and hardly ever falls over, but I still like to have the boppy behind her just in case.  Now if we can ever get to crawling.  Whenever I put her on her belly to practice, she immediately rolls over.  She hates being on her belly.  I hope she learns to crawl soon, though, because she's not very good at entertaining herself lately.  She is bored with her usual toys. 

 

It is hard getting this girl to smile at me for pictures.  She smiles much more readily at Peter and Chris.

 

 

 

I recall trying to get her to smile in this picture, but she was clearly done with the picture taking.

Here's a big smile for Daddy.

She just lights up with Chris in the room.

And this one was when Peter was doing something she found amusing.  She smiles at Peter often.

She is a cute little 7 month old.  Now we wish she would start jabbering.  Still nothing.  Little coos, but mostly just silence.  I know she can hear really well because she's very responsive to sound, just not very vocal.  And she's oddly good at expressing her wishes, despite her lack of jabber, but she doesn't seem to want to experiment with sounds yet.  Although in the past few days she has been doing some raspberries.  We are a little impatient I think because Peter was saying all kinds of consonants and combining syllables at 5 months. 

She is doing crazy things with her sleep.  Sometimes she is up several times, and sometimes just once.  It was so easy to sleep train Peter because he was bottle fed.  Not proving so easy with a particular breast fed baby.  Hopefully she will adjust to a schedule sooner rather than later.     

Elly, five and six months

Here is our cute little angel at five months.  She started to get super interactive around this time.  She especially loves her daddy and Peter.  She smiles whenever Peter gets close to her or whenever he is also smiling.  So fun to see..  Although it has only been recent that he has taken an interest in her.  

She has not been babbling at all, which worries us a little, but she coos and is very social in every other way.  It's probably too bad that she has an older brother that was super advanced with his speech, thereby causing us to compare Elly with Peter all the time. 

She started rolling over at five months, but hates being on her tummy.  In fact, only at the end of six months did she learn to sit up.  We worried about that because she always hated when we would try to have her sit anywhere.  She always wanted to be standing or be held.  She has been a very particular baby so far. 

Chris and I have noticed that she is polar opposite from Peter in every way.  Girl.  Not a great night sleeper.  Great nurser.  Very sensitive and gets feelings hurt very easily.  Cries easily.  Won't take to solids.  Slow to speak.  Even though Peter is in his terrible twos, he is still fairly mellow, which does not describe Elly AT ALL.  I have a feeling I might understand what karma is when she gets old enough to be a dramatic young lady...

At six months she finally learned to sit up.  At the very end of six months.  She was just too stubborn to practice it.  She would always arch her back whenever you tried to sit her down, making it impossible for her to be sitting.  Thank goodness for the bumbo to give her some practice.  She couldn't arch her back out of that thing.  :)  But strangely, she didn't seem to mind sitting in it.   

She is chewing on everything, all the time.  At six months, she was content to chew on her teething toys, but now she is getting moody if we don't let her chew on non-teething items.  I guess she is bored.

Also I feel I should mention she transitioned from 3-6 clothes to 6-9 clothes at 5 months, and then just a month later to 9-12 clothes.  Somebody had a little growth spurt!  So now she is back on target with her growth from when she was two months. 

Sleep has been a real issue.  She was so great at five months, but lately she has been getting up at least three times a night.  I tried doing the cry-it-out thing, but that was disastrous and she just screamed.  The girl really likes to nurse for comfort.  I always put her down for naps and sleep when she's still awake, and she is able to fall asleep without any drama.  So I can't understand why she feels the need to nurse every time she wakes up at night.  I'm really hoping she gets better with her sleep, but I am feeling at the end of my rope sometimes.  SO TIRED!   

Whenever I try to take a picture of Elly, Peter always wants to be front and center in the picture.  Such a funny boy.  He has taken to giving cute little smiles for pictures again, so that is fun. 

It is also nice that he acknowledges his little sister now.  Although he doesn't like to get to close to her if she is in a grab everything mood.  She can scratch pretty well if I don't keep her nails trimmed.

Fun picture of the three of them.  Oh how I love my sweet little family.  I'll have to update more on Peter and Elly at 7 months later.  I need to get more pictures.  With two kids on my own, I am so very bad at remembering to take pictures. 

Elly at 4 months

Wow, I think I completely missed Elly's 3 month mark for the blog.  Probably because we were packing up and moving to Virginia.  Yes, it was kind of nightmare packing up our little apartment with Peter and a 3 month old baby, but with Dad's help, we managed.  It was a very stressful last day of loading and cleaning and driving a very old, huge diesel truck with bad breaks.  Glad it's over!  We love our new little townhome that we are renting.  I'll have to get some pictures soon. 

In the mean time, here are some pictures of Elly at 4 months.  She has grown, but has not kept up with her height growth.  She dropped from the 74th percentile to the 49th percentile.  Part of me wonders if this is because I can't get her to sleep during the day for more than two or three hours on a typical day.  Peter proves just too noisy to get a good rest.  Two to three hours for a 4 month old is not enough! Especially when said 4 month old requires being held and walked around for her waking hours to be happy.  Yes, Elly is proving to be kind of a fussy baby.  But with the constant teething and constant sleep deprivation, I can't say I blame her.  I just hope she learns to sleep a little bit better so that she can stay healthy! 

 This is how Elly looks whenever she is put down.  She gets all tense and wide-eyed and nervous looking and wiggles her arms and legs and calls out until she is picked up.  This girl does not make it easy to raise two kids 2 and under.  Thank goodness for Dad's help of late, otherwise Elly and I might both go crazy.

 Elly with Grandpa.  I've decided that Elly just prefers men.  She loves Dad and Chris.  She likes me, but I suspect this is because I am her food source.  :) 

I love how sweet her countenance becomes when her face lights up in a smile.  She can be such a sweet little angel sometimes.  I hope she gets a little more satisfied with life when she can sit up on her own and crawl around.  I feel badly when I have Peter and Elly with just me, because inevitably Peter is very demanding of my attention, and Elly gets the short end of the stick occasionally. 

Grandpa's and Peter's birthdays

 Dad's birthday was on the 27th. This would have been a much more fun birthday if Dad hadn't had a strange salivary gland infection that made chewing and swallowing excruciatingly painful.  Poor Dad.  He could only eat soft food, so I made him a tuna cheese grilled sandwich and tomato soup for his birthday dinner.  Not too exciting, but this is one of his favorite comfort foods. 

 And Peter's birthday on the 28th.  He was very spoiled this year and got lots of toys and a tricycle.  He has not figured out how to pedal consistently, so this trike has not proved very exciting.  Oh well.  Maybe a few more months.

 Peter requested pasta for his birthday dinner over pizza and Baja Fresh taquitos, which he also loves.  I love that a home-cooked meal makes him happy on his birthday.  And I love his messy face in this photo.  Don't so much love to clean up his messy face, but it's pretty funny nonetheless.

 And we splurged and got him an ice cream oreo cake.  I love the excitement in his eyes in this photo.  Very fun.

And another messy face picture post-ice cream cake.  Yes, he was a happy boy this year as he turned two.  Yikes!  I can't believe my baby boy turned two!  He has been such a sweet little guy and it has been fun watching him grow this past year and hearing him take off with his talking.  He has started singing a lot, which is so fun to hear.  Oh how we love our little Peter!

Elly's blessing

It's official.  Little Elly was blessed as Eleanor Marilyn Layton on June 3rd.  It was a lovely day and Chris gave her a sweet blessing.  It was nice to have my dad be in the circle.

I am not super thrilled with her dress, as it is a little to frilly and not a comfortable cotton one.  However, she looked cute, and she didn't seem to mind the material.  I'm not so sure about the bow on her head, but both Chris and Dad really liked it, so it stayed.

Peter has seemed to figure out that it's appropriate to smile for pictures.  Funny boy.

Elly is gaining like a champ, as evidenced by her chubby cheeks.  It's so nice to have a good nurser!  It is so much easier than bottle feeding!!  And tons easier than pumping and bottle feeding.  Thank goodness for my little nursing baby girl.  She wouldn't have been patient for me to pump, and Peter definitely wouldn't have been patient for me to pump.  

It's hard to get any pictures of here with her eyes open in the morning, but we managed to get a few.  She also just started to smile at us socially.  She's not as smiley as Peter was, but she'll give us cute little smiles every now and then. 

 

For the first 6 weeks of her life, I slept on the couch--that's how bad she slept.  But finally, it has started getting better and she is sleeping longer in her little cosleeper bed that we bought. 

She is a little higher maintenance baby than Peter was.  She has sort of fussy periods in the evenings where she wants to be either eating or being held while we walk around or bounce on the exercise ball with her.  This lasts from about 5 to 9.  Then I try to put her to sleep, but I can't seem to get her to go down for the night before 11:30.  But at least she sleeps for a few hours once I've finally put her down.

Now if only Peter would sleep in a little later than 5:30...

She is a sweet little addition to the family.  We love you Elly!

Elly's first month

 Newborn Elly in the hospital with Grandpa.  She hasn't had her bath yet, so her hair's a little messy.  The hospital was nice about postponing her bath so that we could have lots of bonding time.

Our stay in the hospital was a little longer than normal due to my not having had antibiotics at least 4 hours prior to her birth.  But thankfully they let us go the evening of our second day there so that we didn't have to stay another night at the hospital.  It's so hard to sleep with nurses coming in and out at all hours of the night.

Elly was very healthy from the start and only had a little jaundice.  Poor baby--they kept monitoring her bilirubin levels, and so they pricked her little heels about 6 times in the end.  She was not a happy baby for those times.  Because of the jaundice, the doctor wanted me to supplement a little to get the bilirubin out of her system faster.  I was very sad to have to bottle feed her, but I soon got an SNS to supplement her to allow her to get her supplement while breast feeding.  I worked with a lactation consultant also because of lots of discomfort, and the consultant was hugely helpful.  I also discovered that Elly was gaining really well and super fast, and that I probably didn't need to supplement her in the first place.  But such is the way with doctors--they always err on the side of caution.  Anyway, she has been such a good nurser that she was 7 lbs. 13 oz. at her two week appointment.  A full 13 oz. up from her birth weight.  Go Elly!  And I happily only had to use the SNS for a very short time, and she is solely breast feeding now.  Such a huge relief and feels like quite a feat after pumping all of Peter's milk for ten months of his life.  When I told the lactation consultant I pumped for that long, she told me that she'd never heard of anyone doing it for that long.  I thought it was more typical of women to do it that long, but I guess I was wrong.

Peter's present from Elly upon her arrival.  He was VERY excited to have this special train set, and I think it has distracted him a bit from the very big transition of welcoming a new addition to our family.  Peter was sort of an indifferent big brother in the beginning, not really knowing what to make of his little sister.

 Grandpa and Elly on her 2nd day of life.  Dad has been great at helping out with both Elly and Peter.  Elly has not been the best sleeper by any standards.  In the beginning she wouldn't sleep unless she was being held, but thankfully she will go down now.  After the first week or so, I realized that she has a little acid reflux problem.  So that means I have to keep her upright for about half an hour after she eats before putting her down.  Also, she has a dirty diaper just about every hour of the day and night.  This causes some diaper rash issues which also affects nighttime sleep.

So because I have to change her diaper every time she wakes at night, burp her for half an hour afterward, then she only sleeps for an hour and half at best in her little co-sleeper bed when the cycle begins all over again.  Sometimes she I have to change her twice in a waking, and then she's so awake it takes me an hour to get her to go back to sleep.  Ew.  I think I average about 4 hours a night.  It is not getting better, and I have been sick three times in her first month of life.  And that's with my dad helping me out during the day.  I'm not sure how I'm going to survive when he goes, but I sure am so grateful to have his help while he's here!

 Daddy with Peter and Elly. 

 These items were a gift from the people at Chris's work.  They are all very soft and cuddly.

 Two weeks old

So little!!

 A gift from my in-laws.  So funny!  But I must admit I do sort of feel like I have superpowers for being able to nurse her. 

This is about one month old.  Notice her chubby cheeks!

Peter has started to take an interest in his sister.  He enjoys pointing out her toes and nose.  And he's started saying goodnight to her before bedtime.  I think she's winning him over.  :)