Once again I had issues breast-feeding, this time however I demanded a few “tools” from the nurses while I waited on the lactation consultant. Then a cleaning lady threw away my lanolin after a had finally gotten a nurse to get me some, so I had to ask the next nurse to get me more. Things would have been a lot worse had I not kept on each nurse asking over and over, as the time progressed I got worse and worse but getting the lanolin etc helped me a lot. Eventually the lady did come, and I got to see her the evening before I left instead of the morning of, which was also good. The husbeast had gone home and I was alone in the room with the lady and the baby and we spent a good hour working on things and talking. You really would think something that natural would be easier you know? Once I got home and became engorged things for worse, but I’m a warrior, and an experienced one so I knew what to do. Hospital grade pump for 24 hours straight, husbeast got to have some sweet time with the baby feeding her all day and once the engorgement was over things very quickly became much easier. 

I feel downright normal in fact! My stomach has gone down much faster then it did last time. I’ve gone through a myriad of nursing bra’s and I’m glad I had so many different types around the house, during each phase of my first coming home, I needed different ones. I feel like I’ve climbed a mountain, and DH was so amazingly supportive as usual. 

I have an old google spreadsheet DH and I used with BG, in order to track her feedings and also so I could remember when I fed her last and on which side. We once again are keeping a spreadsheet, we kept one for nearly 2 months with BG. It’s been neat to go back and look. We gave her loads of formula. This baby has so far only had 6 ounces total. So I know I did better this time around! Also LG is already sleeping 6 hours, she has done so for the last 3 or 4 nights. Totally freaked me out, BG didn’t do that until 4 weeks old around about. LG is also a bit taller and fitting into some 0-3 month clothing faster (though she doesn’t “fill it out” just yet). I love seeing the difference. Not to “compare” and it’s not a competition, but it’s just neat to see how each baby is so different. It’s like a great mystery, what will come next? What will the next month be like?

As I have a better handle on things I don’t need DH to bottle feed her like he used to at night with BG, not to say that we won’t because I remember at 3.5 months when I had to nurse BG once every half an hour for 3 hours I would loose it and he would come in and bottle her up to get her to sleep and give me a break so it may still happen but for now things are running smooth and DH has not had to wake up at all in the middle of the night. Sometimes around 10pm if I’m exhausted and she won’t go to bed I give him to her and he pats and rocks her until she falls asleep. Sometimes I think she can smell the milk on me and is only interested in one thing. 

Everyone says if you have another kid, well the new baby will just have to learn to fall asleep with noise. I can attest to the fact that they may NOT in-fact learn too. 4 hours this morning and my 2 week old fell asleep 3 times, each time to be woken up by my screaming toddler so I was stuck for 4 hours holding a fussy 2 week old who needed to sleep and trying to cook macaroni in cheese with BG grabbing ahold of my leg most of the time.  Maybe over time LG will get better at it, I hope so anyway. I’ve tried “wearing” her in all 3 of my wraps, Mai Tai, Moby Wrap and Ring Sling. She gets pissed off in each one so I’ll be waiting another 2 weeks. It’s awful hot anyway and I just don’t think she likes it. I have seen the women who swear by it and say their newborns fall right to sleep and love it. I guess I don’t make those sort of babies.

It’s nicest when they A) are both asleep and I shower and get a break or B) LG is asleep and I get some good one-on-one time with BG. She seems to know that if the baby is awake my attention is divided and she will have tantrums, also I am sure I’m more irritable trying to do things with 1 hand, but when the baby is asleep BG and I are in total harmony. I guess because I can give her all of my attention and whatever she needs. Having 2 certainly makes having 1 seems like a piece of cake.

LG likes being patted and held over your left shoulder. She burps well if you sit her up, and boy oh boy does she need her diaper changed a lot. Speaking of diapers I tried to cloth, and the covers for newborns are so lame and bulky. The prefolds are great, but I hate the covers so i feel a bit stuck and I am still using disposables. It’s too hot for soakers, at-least the thick ones I have and I just have no idea what to do except wait for her to grow a bit. I also can’t stand having something super thick you can’t put clothing on over, so I like the sized/fitted covers. The newborn ones I have are just awkward and huge. I have some thirsties/bummies in size small so hopefully we can try those soon but I’m not sure how much bigger she needs to be to fit into them.

My husband describes her as “chill”. She’s just got this totally chilled out but alert look about her when she checks you out or looks around. She seems very alert, but with a laziness to it. it’s totally cute, reminds me of a turtle. She doesn’t really cry a lot, more grunts and whimpers. She loves to grunt out some gas. I want to capture her grunting on video, it’s so funny/cute. Well that’s all for now, gotta run! I’ll leave you with some video of BG dancing.

Rowan Tivonah (Rowan is a type of tree in Ireland and Tivonah is Hebrew for “Lover of Nature”)

As this is most of the time a knitting blog I will say right off the bat, I did not name her after a certain yarn company of the same name. I actually had heard the name Rowan used for a girl ages before I started knitting (I think Brooke Shields has a daughter named Rowan as well) and thought it was funny that a yarn company had the same name. 

I have a picky husband, we have a hard time picking names. I really liked Rowan and he approved so there you have it!

I was 3 days overdue and went in for an induction. It turns out I was already in labor! I was pretty stressed preparing to leave BG and the AC was not working well because it was 90 out and I was hungry and having the contractions I had been having for well over a week. Last the doctor checked me 3 days before, no progress. So we get to the hospital that evening to start things off and they check me and I was 4cm! So we didn’t do anything at all that night and waited until morning. My doctor was out of town so I had a different doctor whom I had met the week prior. I was so afraid of not liking him, okay wow did I get lucky. Turns out we like him even more then my normal doctor. They barely used any pitocin on me and he let me “labor down” for an hour at 10cm so the baby could come down on her own so I wouldn’t push for 4 hours like last time. I pushed maybe 25 minutes and out she came!

It was so much of a better experience then I had with BG. The nurse was NICE, the doctor came in 3 times to check on me (he also broke my water which scared me but wow shortly there after I was moving!) and was just wonderful. The hospital which previously shoved formula down BG’s through did not this time and was super supportive of my feeding the baby myself. 

BG at the top, LG at the bottom (Little Girl)

The first few nights home have been a mess, I was not sleeping more then 2 hours a night but last night. Ahhh last night I think I got 6 hours total. They say not to let 2-3 hours pass in-between feedings but the baby is fine and my sanity is improved! I didn’t get 6 hours straight but I think there might have been 2, 3 hour stretches in there. Baby Rowan is perfectly perfect and a joy. BG is adjusting okay. She’s not a huggy girl so she doesn’t ask for hugs but last night when I picked her up when she was having trouble at bed time she just held onto me. She seems perfectly happy and is totally obsessed with “baby, she crying! baby she crying!” even when the baby is not crying. She’s a bit too young to hold her (we tried) so we have her kiss her head and touch her hair as much as she likes.

Oh yeah, she had the cord around her neck TWICE and some maconium (very small amount) but was a champ just like BG during the entire delivery. I didn’t get to hold her right away which was frustrating because they had to suction her out really good to keep the stuff from getting into her lungs. She came out with jet black hair. My sister and mother have black hair, and my father did when he was younger. We have a real mix of coloring in my family from olive skin tones to pale, alone with DH’s side a child of mine could come out with red hair and pale skin, or black hair and olive skin. It will be fun to see how she changes as she grows!

All is well here, had a rough couple of days dealing with Breast-feeding issues, which I think I have a handle on now. Way less physical pain then last time but still on the mend. Lots going on with Petite Purls or at-least I’ll have a lot to do for that in the coming weeks, but for right now I am focusing on enjoying a week home with my “new” family and the husbeast who took the week off.

Eating a Pretzel and Barbecue at the fair.

We went through a 2 week point of time where just like back when she had her ear infections, I was no longer with “my child” she was acting totally different. Tantrums over random little things she never would tantrum about, clearly in pain. One night we had to stay up until 9pm letting her watch TV so she would eventually go to bed (my girl loves her schedule, and she is a champion at bed time so this for us was a huge shocker. People say “oh there will be more of that to come” but honestly compared to other stories we here we have a freak of nature child when it come to her night time habits. She’s always in bed by 7:30pm and even on a “bad” night she will lay in bet, doesn’t even get up and just knock her feet on the wall until she falls asleep. On these “bad” nights due to the molar coming through she tore her entire room apart, discovered the top drawer of her dresser (and all the bad things in it, but we got to her first and now it’s someplace else, which is sad because I really liked having her thermometer, Band-Aids, medicine etc in her room – all child proof caps etc of course).

She wasn’t angry when doing it, she just couldn’t go to sleep because of the tooth, so I had DH just let her watch some TV for a while which did the trick and got her past the pain. I tried Tylenol and Motrin during this time, but honestly i think the sugar in it amped her up worse. It just didn’t seem to help. Then one weekend after two weeks of this, bam, bang, boom. She was fine. 100% totally fine. Thank goodness that has passed! Our happy little girl is back and we are so thrilled. I am so happy we didn’t have to go through this with a new baby around at the same time (geez I hope there isn’t another molar, or at-least hope it waits a few more weeks). She’s such a happy and good girl that when something is wrong it’s so very obvious and out of character for her. Most people say “oh it’s the terrible two’s” but we knew it was not, it was something different. The husbeast ran her by the doc and confirmed one tooth was coming right through and it was very angry looking. I wish the medicine would have helped her more but I’m just glad to be past it.

Waving at the Ferris Wheel

The other day a friend came over and brought her 2.5 year old over. After a bit of tug of war over toys, the mom asked her son to give BG a hug on their way out. I about fainted when BG opened her arms and hugged him as he hugged her (and he was so sweet and delicate about it too). I had no idea she would hug other kids! She’s at daycare and I’m so freaking pregnant I avoid going out on the weekends normally, and she gets loads of socialization at daycare so I’ve not had to worry about that. Then my friend said “Give her a kiss” and OMG I nearly fainted again as my girl put her face right up to his and tilted her head back for a kiss (on the lips no less!). I had no idea she A) knew to do it and B) was happy to do it! My friend got a wonderful photo of the moment too, but has not emailed it to me yet. I’ll have to post it once she does but I’m not sure how long it will be until she does (hence my not waiting to post this).

Cleaning her legs with a wipe, one of her favorite activities.

It was so sweet, and it’s not like she doesn’t hug us or kiss us but it was just so nonchalant and like an every day thing and I’ve never seen her do either to another child so it totally caught me off-guard. It was terribly cute.

A coy little look at me, thrilled to be on the Mary-Go-Round.

We’ve tried to do special stuff with BG each weekend that I remain (still) pregnant. One weekend we took her to a playground and got her new shoe’s, the next we went out for a special sushi lunch and this weekend we ran by a small town carnival for an hour. 

The carnival was wonderful, she didn’t even want to get out of her stroller she was so fascinated just watching things. In fact after we got up from eating she climbed right back in, not something she normally does! it was very hot though so I think she liked sitting. She saw the horse rides and I don’t think she’s old enough to ride on a real horse just yet and it was right next to the mary-go-round so we opted for the fake horses. The ride was very long, but ah not long enough. She screamed as we took her away. We went straight for the car, it was already late and we knew if we stayed she would never stop asking “ride ride, horsey horsey” oh how it breaks a mothers heart. I wish she could have ridden them all night long. We got flash backs to the beach. When BG adores something, well she could literally never stop, never get tired and never want to leave. 

She had such a great time prior to that I felt so bad, but it was for the best to leave, and teach her having a tantrum will not result in good things. On our way out, the husbeast was far ahead of me walking/caring her quickly to the car, and several people stopped and asked me why she was so upset, and was she okay. I think that gives you an idea of the level of a tantrum she was having. She doesn’t do this at the grocery store, or restaurants or anything like that. She saves that classic two year old behavior for very special moments, hah! The husbeast says it’s worth it because of how much happiness she is having prior to the bed moment, and I think he is right. The look on her face while ridding that mary-go-round, and the pure joy she had while fishing for fish and winning a big blow up rubber duck were priceless.

As for myself, I now 40 weeks pregnant and past my due date, again. Enough said!