OMG, it really has been the CRAZIEST week!

So much for getting on here more often and updating! Honestly, there just has not been the time. These days the bite-sized updates that I provide on facebook are just about all I can manage. But, every once in a while, and especially on a milestone day like today, I like to kick it up a notch and devote some time to some deeper explanation.


First, let's mark the date... One year ago today I peed on a stick and saw this...

Yup, July 31st 2008 was the date I realized I was pregnant. Totally not expecting a positive result at all because we had only been trying for 2 months. I'm not sure we were exactly ready to get pregnant so fast but then I feel bad even saying that because I have so many friends who I know are trying so hard and with no luck for much, much longer. In short, we were and are blessed in so many ways.

Does it seem like a whole year ago? Yes and no. Yes because pregnancy seemed to go on FOREVER and because our lives have changed so much since that day. No because I remember the day so clearly still, as if it was just yesterday. I remember the phone-call to Hubby saying that there was a second pink line but it was very faint (it had got darker after a few hours and that's when I took the above photo), the diligent charting of my basal body temperature every day prior to that, and the nonchalant way we discussed the possibility because, I think, neither of us really believed the darn thing was right.

Yet, here we are!

Second, Daisy is almost 4 months old now. Officially it will be next Monday, the 3rd, but today we had our 4 month check-up and shots.




Here are our vital stats:

Weight: 13.3lbs (50th percentile)
Height: 23.5 inches (25th percentile)
Head: Don't remember the circumference but it was 45th percentile

So, we're definitely carrying on the trend of short women in the family. I was hoping Daisy would break it but it does not look to be so.

What other new developments are there to report. Let's see...

• She ate her first solids this week. Rice cereal mixed with apple juice. She loooooved it, although she made a royal mess in the process. Doc says we can continue with the rice cereal AND add-in some other solids beginning now. She's showing interest in food (practically jumping across the table to get at our plates) and did pretty good swallowing the food off the spoon, so it's time to experiment, of course, one food at a time.
  
• She is rolling over from back-to-front like a pro but not so much front-to-back. On-form, she seems to be doing things backwards since most kids start from front-to-back but find it harder to go from back-to-front. The funny thing is that she absolutely HATES tummy-time. She's doing better in that she's pushing up onto her arms and not just doing the "superman" pose where all the weight is on her belly, but it's definitely not her favorite position. So, we'll put her on her back and she'll keep rolling onto her tummy but then is PISSED that's she's there! Contrary Mary! I think the reason tummy time is not the favorite is that she has always had an overactive reflux and the pressure on her belly usually makes her puke pretty good. Under the same circumstances I don't think I would relish laying face-down either.
  
• She's getting hand-eye coordination, holding rattles and blankets and bringing them up to her mouth. She can now see something and reach for it successfully, instead of just batting at it with only a 10% success rate. She likes to hold her bottle when you're feeding her but she's usually counterproductive since she has a tendency to apply downward pressure, pushing the nipple up into the roof of her mouth and making herself mad.
• She's mimicking walking motions. As you know if you've kept up-to-date with this blog, we've been wanting to stand with support for some time, but now we actually want to put one foot in front of the other. Really, we're not doing anything to encourage her, she just started lifting her foot off the floor and putting it on the ground a few inches in front. So now we walk from mommy to daddy and daddy to mommy, back-and-forth, killing our backs! She's also kicking her ball. Yes, she has a little pink ball and if you put it in front of her leg, she'll lift it and kick the ball forward. Amazing! A little soccer player on our hands? (That would explain the solid thighs!)
• She's yapping away in increasingly high-pitched squeals. We've gone from cute little "goooo, aaaaagooooo" to "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" and "YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE", "WAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" (I use the caps to demonstrate increased volume). All of which is usually accompanied by some significant drool and bubble blowing. It's absolutely adorable but not helpful if you have a headache.
• We signed-up for swim classes! There's a great facility in Loomis called Swim Otters that has pools and lessons exclusively for babies and kids from 4 months up. So no rowdy kids in the pool around you and lessons with similarly-aged babies. We begin mom-and-baby lessons in early September for 17 weeks. Only $10 per week. Can you believe that? Awesome!
  

... and I'm sure there's a lot more I'm missing but those are the major things that come to mind.

The week from H-E-double hockey sticks

If we're friends on facebook, I'm sure I don't need to tell you what a crazy week it's been for us. We used to think our weeks were jam-packed before but we really had NO IDEA.

This is pretty much how our week looked in as short of a rundown as I can possibly manage:

Sunday: Daisy wouldn't eat, wasn't pooping, had what looked like blood in her urine. Off to urgent care. Diagnosis? Constipation. Treatment? Try apple/prune juice.

Monday: I had a Physical Therapy appt for my hip in the morning but when I came back her nanny said she still would not eat. Was it constipation? Nope, poop was fine. Was it the formula? Was it the bottles? Screamed for 45 minutes straight with Brandy, her nanny (which is a long time for her.) Off to the pediatrician this time. Diagnosis? Either the type of formula or the bottles. (Um, thanks for the medical explanation!) Treatment? Try a new bottle. If that didn't work, try a new formula. Bought new bottles with diffent nipples and Hey Presto! we're fine. Arrrrgggh.

Tuesday: Had to move all the furniture out of the living and family rooms because we were getting new carpet and hardwood flooring on Wednesday. Hubby had to break-up the tile in the family room and was pounding away until 9pm.

Wednesday: Nan and Grandad got back from the U.K. Had to work from their house because of the flooring work, taking Daisy with me. Packing up a baby and all your work gear and heading out before 8am is almost impossible, I have found. (Not to mention moving the rest of the furniture and sanding down the area where the tile had been pulled up the night before.) All started to calm down and then WAMMY, at 12pm my mother's foot started to swell up and throb so badly that she couldn't tread on it. We sat her down, elevated it, iced it, but the swelling and pain only got worse, radiating up to her ankle. Gave baby to Grandad and headed out to Urgent Care (remembering Mum and Dad do not have any insurance yet!) Urgent Care doctor was worthless ($120 thank you!) and basically said it was either a blood clot or something else. (Again, thanks for that incredibly complex medical diagnosis). Because Mum had just got off a flight she was worred about Deep Vein Thrombosis and so we head to the ER. Seven total hours later and we left with NO DIAGNOSIS and some gout medication, just in case. Turns out the gout medication worked, so it must be gout. Floors look good btw although I was too tired to really appreciate them by the time I got home.

Thursday: My ill-fated appointment with the Osteopath. A 45 minute drive each way, 50 minutes in the waiting room, 2.5 hours of my life I can never get back and NO TREATMENT. Somewhere in here we managed to drive to Loomis and sign-up for swim classes.

Friday: (Today) Pediatrician appointment in the morning. Did great with our shots (we have the BEST nurse). Got home and our next-door neighbor who paints houses for a living says that he has time today and tomorrow and would like to paint our house for free if we could run out and get the paint today. Who can pass up free, right? So, now we're painting the house. The outside. We are going to paint the inside but that's probably next week. I know, right? Are we crazy? Probably yes!

In amongst all this we fought to work (um, yeah right!), eat, sleep, amuse Daisy, and (for me) workout on the new Total Gym. We fit it all in somehow although I have to say that, when I hit my pillow at night, I'm thoroughly EXHAUSTED. Thankfully Daisy is still a good sleeper and wakes up pretty much when we do in the morning. I don't think we could have got through this week without good rest.

As for my health, my back, buttocks, and hip have hit an all-time high with pain and discomfort. I have consistently been experiencing a 4-5 out of 10 in terms of my level of constant pain, even when at rest. Last night I gave in and took a muscle relaxant, heated up a rice-sock and had a 1/2 glass of wine before I went to bed. Sweet relief, it all feels much better this morning.

I need to somehow work-in some yoga to my week because I definitely sense the stiffness from not stretching my body regularly any more (when do I have the time?) Time is definitely an issue for overall recovery since there are PT appointments, massage appointments, osteopath appointments, time needed to work-out for strength, time needed to work out for cardiovascular fitness, time needed to stretch, plus time needed to prepare and eat healthfully, is all in short supply. Some days I don't even manage to eat or brush my hair let alone shower! (Sorry, it's a fact.) It got to Tuesday and Hubby and I realized that we hadn't eaten a proper meal between us since probably Saturday. (Yikes!) My back keep cracking and I commented to Hubby last night that maybe I should go back to the chiropractor I was seeing when I was pregnant. And then we looked at one another and laughed. Yeah right, when would I find the time for THAT!?

So I leave this post taking a deep breath. This was just one week out of many and I'm sure next week will be easier. The conclusion of all this madness is actually a lot of good things: Daisy is happy and healthy; Mum and Dad are back from England; we have gorgeous new, clean floors; and we're soon to have a house that is not the color of poop (we're going with a soft sage green and white by the way.) All-in-all we have little to complain about. Now if we could both just have fewer doctors appointments, get back into some kind of rhythm for a while, and knuckle-down to make some sales ($$$!!!!) , life would be almost perfect.

**Wipes Brow**

For more recent pics from the past few weeks, click here.

TTFN!

After bath chats

After her bath every evening, Daisy loves to tell her Daddy about her day. As you can see, she has quite a pair of pipes on her when she gets going. We're thinking she's going to turn out to be a world-famous singer with oodles of money and will drag (yeah, right!) her poor mother all around the world with her to sing in exotic locations. (But no pressure.)

Not much other news to report right now. We had a totally chill weekend, giving ourselves a break from the crazy all-day jaunts of weekends past. Daisy played, ate, and napped well, and was generally a happy-happy baby, which was just what the doctor ordered for the both of us.

We're now sitting up a lot (LOVE our Bumby seat), getting our head up during tummy time (especially when we use the TV in front of her as the dangling carrot), rolling over (occasionally) from front-to-back, kicking like crazy (especially digging our "kickin' piano") and killing our mommy and daddy's arms and backs by continuously wanting to stand (which, of course, we can't do without help.) Every day it's something new. She definitely keeps us all on our toes.

Finally, it's hard to believe but, around about this date last year, Daisy began her journey into the world. In cellular terms, she is approximately one year old right now. From a ball of cells to a gorgeous little munchkin. Crazy.

And now for a mommy update

I hate to say it, but I'm back to square minus-one with my hip. The level of discomfort and pain has got so bad at this point that I finally succumbed and went to the doctor today. Unfortunately, the news is not exactly positive.

I have pain in my right butt-cheek that radiates around my hip joint and down my leg to my knee. My IT band "snaps" frequently, my knee pops all the time, and my hip socket is constantly clunking around. The joint itself just feels unstable and unhappy. I have referred pain in my lower back and I'm still getting stabs of pain across my pubic bone. I'd say that, with one thing or another, I have a constant level of pain of around 3-4 out of 10. Yes, you can see why I picked up the phone and made an appointment.

As I've said many a time before, I'm so lucky in that my PCP is also a "D.O", a Doctor of Osteopathy. This makes her uniquely placed to evaluate my particular type of physical malady. With a few pushes and prods here and there, she was able to determine that my psoas, IT band, and Tensor Fasciae Latae are all extremely tight on the right side, and overall my right hip has significantly less range of motion than my left. She feels I will definitely benefit from loosening these muscles and tendons, however the "clunking" I described to her, and the level of tightness, do suggest to her a continued skeletal impingement.

So, in short, exactly what I had surgery for just 16 months ago.

If there was a way to truly vent the level of my frustration here on the blog, you would see many cuss words, grrrs, arrgghhs, and 'virtual' sniffles. However, I'll save you. I'm sure you can imagine how this would be frustrating, upsetting, and darn-right disheartening.

The treatment right now is a combination of traditional physical therapy (which we all know I thought was a waste of time through my medical group/insurance after the surgery) and (lucky for me this time) a course of treatments with the new chick in town - an Osteopath that is trained in Osteophathic Manipulative Medicine. Basically it's another form of physical therapy and theraputic massage (I'm vastly oversimplifying here.) According to my doc, she's the only one in Sacramento and she just recruited her personally from the bay area - the new chick was one of her star students when she was chief resident at another hospital.

We'll see where all this takes us and leaves us but the bottom line is that, with a weakness in this hip, I'm probably looking at a lifetime of maintenance and injury prevention. Which is just depressing when you're only 34. Likely more than half of my life is going to spent massaging, stretching, and manipulating myself against pain. There are days right now when I feel like I'm already in my 60s, wincing as I get up out of a chair or holding onto a railing just to get up stairs, so I can't imagine the pains I'll be experiencing by the time body actually starts to go downhill.

Right now, though, I'm just focusing on getting back to being active and reducing my overall pain. I would like to be able to "hang" with Daisy as she gets older. Right now I can barely walk around the block, let alone play soccer or roll around in the grass with her.

Sigh...

A rocky (vs. rockin') 4th

I've decided that babies and 'holidays' just don't mix. Mother's Day was a rough day, Father's Day was a rough day, and now we can officially add Independence Day to the list. Yes, July 4th will go down as the day that Mummy, Daddy, and Nanny experienced Daisy's true vocal abilities. If this child is not a Mariah Carey-quality singer, then I'll eat my hat.

To be fair, she hung in pretty good all day with parades, sirens, new people and the like, although her moods were more volatile than usual and I spent a lot of time walking around with her, trying to get her to calm down and nap. She didn't do a full melt down mode until we got home in the evening but, when she did, oh boy did she let rip! A good hour of completely inconsolable screaming at the top of her lungs. Daddy couldn't stop her, Mummy couldn't stop her, even the magic Nanny touch wasn't working. We all just sort of looked at one another, perplexed and just slightly panicked.

(As an aside, I'm aware that one hour of screaming would be a picnic for many moms, especially those who experienced a baby with colic. However you have to realize that, up until this point, we have been very lucky with Daisy and have pretty much been able to quiet her down within minutes of her turning into a cranky-pants. So, this was unusual for us and came as a complete surprise. It's all about perspective, you know?)

So, we went down the proverbial Daisy checklist - diaper, bottle, binky, walking, singing, jiggling, butt-patting, walking outside, head on shoulder, the magic "Nanny Hold", staring at a moving fan, laying on side - you name it, we flew through it one after the other but all to no avail; full-boar screaming continued uninterrupted. Mummy disengaged and let her cry in her crib with the door closed (sorry, that's how I deal), Daddy had to walk out into the front yard because he couldn't stand it, and finally, after nothing else had worked, my Mum started to undress her and she fell asleep in her arms. Go figure!

Sweet mother of God, when the house fell silent, I felt the greatest moment of release ever. I realized that, while I had stayed calm overall, every muscle in my body had been tensed-up for 60 minutes straight.

So, the $70 of noiseless fireworks we had purchased for Daisy's first 4th sat up at the front door, un-lit, and after an evening of alternating between trying to keep Daisy asleep and the dogs from barking, Hubby and I trudged up the stairs to bed completely emotionally and physically exhausted. Thankfully, our fitful evening did not translate to fitful sleep or I think there would have been a parental meltdown also.

Fortunately, the whole weekend was not like that but it's amazing how one hour out of 72 can cast a shadow on all three days.

On Friday we had a GREAT day, however. Mum, Daisy and I went to a local 4th festival, hitting the shady park before it got too hot and crowded. We saw sheep, goats, ponies, and all kinds of other new and exciting things. Daisy got fixated on my Jamba Juice smoothie and knocked it over trying to launch herself at it. It seemed like she was having a great time, sitting in the baby carrier and watching the world go by around her.

On Sunday, AKA: "The Day After The Night Before", Hubby, Mum, and I traded-off and gave one another some much-needed non-Daisy time, while little missy herself caught up on her naps. In the morning, Daisy and Daddy hung out while Mum and I went to Target and then got the expensive, super-duper pedicures at the local nail salon. Then Mum and I hung out with Daisy while Hubby mowed the lawn and had some "me" time. Finally, we took Daisy to her Nan's house for a couple of hours in the early evening while Hubby and I went out for date night. I can't tell you how good it was to sit on the restaurant patio with a cocktail in hand, the warm breeze blowing through my hair, eating yummy food and listening to 80s music that made Hubby and I reminisce about our "wild", teenage years. On the whole, Sunday was exactly the kind of day we all needed after being put through the ringer on Saturday.

Whew!

Here are a few photos from the better parts of the weekend. Can you believe we're now officially 3 months old, as of Friday the 3rd? Where does the time go with these kids?

Watching the crazies in the Foresthill 4th of July Parade


Proud Daddy showing off his little girl in his "hood"


Practicing standing with Nanny and Grammie


Learning to share our toys with cousin Adah


Meeting lambs and goats at the petting zoo. Next year we'll be big enough to actually go in.


Crazy about smoothies!



Morning giggles with Daddy

In other Daisy news, we have two teeth coming through, both on our bottom gums, one on either side. Little missy is munching on her knuckles and drooling non-stop in response. She also has the dreaded flat spot on the back of her head, which I have been absolutely dreading the appearance of. Even though we only have her sleep on her back at night (we nap her on her side during the day) and spend most of our day sitting up, she is still getting a flat and bald bit. This is freaking me out more than slightly since I have heard horror stories about babies who have to wear some kind of re-shaping helmet if their skull doesn't develop right as a result of a flat head. I don't think I could bear it if I had to put a helmet on her pretty little head but what is one to do if she's too young to sleep on her front becauuse of SIDS and she natually sleeps with her head straight when we put her down? If you're reading this and have kids, let me know if your baby had a flat head and if so, what happened. I need the benefit of parental experience on this one.

Later...

Daisy likes bad singing. And other lunch-time adventures.

One of the great benefits about working from home and having Daisy cared-for just downstairs, is the fact that I get to come downstairs and get lunchtime cuddles and play time. It's especially fun when it's one of my mum's days because then I'm getting to spend time with both of my favorite ladies!

Daisy absolutelty ADORES her Nan, of course. To the extent, it seems, that she even loves her bad singing.

To be fair, my singing is horrific also, as is Hubby's, but Daisy is just a little giggle-monster whenever any of us sings to her. Current favorites include: Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, The Wiggle Song (from one of her toys), and When You're Happy and You Know It. It's even more amusing to her when we also dance for her amusement. She especially likes it when you wiggle your butt in front of her face.

Seriously! Aren't kids great? I can't think of anyone else who appreciates my currently over-sized butt in such an honest and whole-hearted way!

Daisy also seems convinced that she is more than 3 months old. Although she isn't YET officially 3 months (will be so on Friday of this week - the 3rd), she's behaving like a kid months ahead developmentally. As you know (from previous posts), she has begun teething, loves to stand with your support, and now enjoys nothing more than hanging out on her Bumby seat and grabbing at one of a bevvy of toys that we lay before her.

None of us can believe how fast all this is happening... she barely seems like a baby any more! Today I'm even convinced that she leaned in and opened her mouth when I went to kiss her. Of course it will be wonderful when she actually does come and give her mummy kisses but everything in it's own time!

Sing: C'mon Wiggle with me!

Hmmm... I wonder how THIS will feel up against my new toof?