Daylight Savings Time is Stupid

 OMG I am so exhausted.  Today has been rough.  Normally the Fall time change is in my favor and I do a good job of leveraging the extra hour of energy in the morning to start working out or do other productive things but this year, not so much.  

First my appetite has been way out of wack.  I ate breakfast like normal but was hungry for lunch before 10:30 AM...So I ate a snack.  Then I was hungry again at noonish, so I ate lunch.  Then I was hungry again around 2, so I ate another snack, and again at 3:30, and again at 5:15 ...

Basically I was a caterpillar getting ready to go into a chrysalis...I wonder if I'll wake up a beautiful butterfly in the morning? 

Also Little Dude decided to have a huge party waking up every 2 hours (and staying up from 1:45 am until 4 am) on All Hallows Eve followed by waking up at his normal wake up time (or an hour before depending on who you ask) meant today was the most Mondayest Monday I've had in a while.

How about you? are you having an ok Monday post time change? 

Cloth Diapers, especially at Daycare

 Do you use cloth diapers?  We do...I love them, they have saved us so much money and are not that much extra work.  An extra load or two of laundry a week but luckily for me we have fancy indoor plumbing so I just throw them in the washer at night, hang them up in the morning, and have clean dry diapers for the next day.   

As far as sizing and type goes I started out with about 20 Best Bottom snap in diapers that I bought used from a friend and 6 Baby Goal pocket diapers that I got from my baby registry.  It was perfect, maybe 4 or 5 more diapers than I needed but that wasn't a bad thing...until Little Dude decided to grow super fast and be in the 99th + percentile for height and weight for his entire life...now he has effectively outgrown the Best Bottom diapers so I had to make a decision...buy more of the bigger size cloth diapers or make the switch to primarily using disposable diapers.   

I decided that since we would be using diapers for at least another year to look into more bigger cloth diapers and decided on Alva Baby pocket diapers and just a couple of weeks into using them I am in love...I bought 11 Alva Baby diapers taking our total count of diapers that fit to 17, which is perfect for where we are right now.  I am washing diapers every 3 days, and the Alva Baby diapers fit great with room for growth.   

As far as daycare goes, I've found cloth diapers to be even easier than disposable ones.   When we were at my mom's we had to use disposable and I had a hard time keeping track of how many they had at daycare/when I needed to buy more.  But having cloth means that I just send enough for a day every day and don't have to worry about it.  It's easy for my daycare provider because they just throw them in the wet bag and send them home.   When I get them home I throw the pee diapers in the washer and dump the solids out of the diaper into the trash, do a quick rinse in my toilet if the solids don't dump out but I use a bamboo liner that is flushable so usually all of the solids dump straight out.   

Do you use cloth diapers?  Have you considered using them?   I think the most important thing is finding a wash routine that works for you.  

Weaning...ish...during COVID

 Little Dude is over 1 now which means that food is now supposed to be his primary form of nutrition with breastmilk simply being a supplement.   Since we have had so many issues with Little Dude not drinking his milk at daycare we decided to stop sending milk to daycare and to wean off of the pump.  

I think doing this during the crazy COVID environment made me a little nervous, what if one of us was exposed to COVID and Little Dude needed the extra immunities from me to keep himself healthy? But in the end I decided that since he is still breastfeeding directly that it was the best option for us.  I hope that Little Dude continues to breastfeed through the next 10ish months until at least his 2nd birthday and possibly extended beyond that in accordance with the WHO recommendations but I am so glad that we were able to make it this far so I'm just going to do my best to provide him with the best nutrition available.  

Sippy Cups

 How do you pick a sippy cup for your child?    At his 1 year doctor appointment Little Dude's doctor suggested that we cut him off of bottles sooner rather than later but keep breast feeding as long as we wanted because Little Dude already has so many teeth.  

So I went shopping for sippy cups...

We already had 1 straw cup, 1 silicone spout sippy cup, and 2 360 cups that we were using for water but I didn't know what to get for milk.   

I stood in the isle of the store for a solid 20 minutes googling my options and trying to figure out what to get.   In the end I decided to get 4 360 style cups for milk and 2 straw cups for water to send to daycare and that we could have 2 sippy cups per day of milk and rotate day by day...

Now we are down to 1 sippy of milk and 1 of water per day and I am in the process of weaning off of pumping because Little Dude isn't really drinking his milk and I can't help but wonder if I should switch his milk to a straw cup ... 

So what do you think?  How do you choose a sippy cup?

Presidential Debate

 What am I watching????  I need more wine for this....three grown men on the screen all trying to talk over, not even letting the moderator ask the questions...Does any one remember in the 1980's when Bush Sr. accidentally dared to interrupt someone and it was super dramatic???

Hiring new employees during an international pandemic

 Today I have a new employee starting to work for me, this is my second new employee to start in two weeks, and I am currently interviewing for a third.  

Interviewing/hiring during this strange time in this strange environment was quite an experience.  One of the people I hired was someone who had worked for us before so that was a much less strange interview as were the internal applicants.  Speaking to them on the phone and via zoom felt normal.  But interviewing external applicants was very odd.

Phone interviews for preliminary screening is pretty normal, so that wasn't that big of a deal.  Video interviews for finalist though were a bit more odd.  We normally have 1:1 interviews across the board, but having back to back 1:1 video interviews felt strange so instead we had me and my 2 bosses on a panel type interview.  But then it was odd figuring out how to handle asking questions, so we had to kind of appoint one of the individuals the point person for holding the interview.  We were able to figure it out and things ran fairly smoothly but it still felt strange...

But now for the really strange part...in about 2 hours I will be meeting my new employee for the first time.  I hired someone I have literally never met before.  It all feels so strange and there is no way that this would ever normally fly in my company.   Yet here we are in a world where it would be perfectly acceptable for me to even say "you know what...work from home until January and I'll just meet you for the first time ever then."  

Today is going to be odd...wish me luck!

Racing Baby

 I received what I found to be a funny flyer from Little Dude's school last week.  They are hosting a "Fund Run" in October where all of the students run to raise money for the school, a great idea for a fundraiser in my option; people love sponsoring kids to do active things and it has low overhead for the school; but the funny thing was when I realized there is a heat for Little Dude's infant classroom 🤣

So I obviously did the only thing I could and registered him to "run".   I hope that the teacher sends me pictures because I'm sure it will be cute, unfortunately I won't be able to go watch. 

Breastfeeding Troubles

 I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed any children I had.  All of the research talks about how much healthier it is for babies with the extra immunity protection from mom and great healing properties etc.  But honestly a large part of the reason I wanted to breastfeed was cost - Formula is expensive!!!

I also spent the last few years volunteering with the local Milk Bank through the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach.  We volunteer on Saturdays to man donation drop offs for the Milk Bank so that mom's have the opportunity to make breast milk donations outside of normal business hours.  Through this program we have really helped our milk bank grow and given lots of mom's more flexibility in when they can make donations, thus increasing the frequency of donations being made.  

Specifically I volunteer with The Kings Daughter's Milk Bank at CHKD and I highly encourage you check out their website if the idea of a human milk bank makes you a little squeamish or curious about why it is important.  For now I will just say that 1 ounce of human breast milk can provide 4 treatments for the average NICU infant and because of everything I learned while volunteering I was very hopeful that I would be able to not only feed my baby but be able to donate to help feed others as well.

After Little Dude's exciting entrance into this world we had more than our share of trouble getting started breastfeeding.  We started life on O2 and with a feeding tube, he was quickly transitioned from the feeding tube to a bottle but Little Dude was still unable to feed at the breast for his first couple of days.  I was pumping at the hospital but my milk was slow coming in so I wasn't able to pump nearly enough to cover his bottle feeds so he was receiving the .25-.5 ounce that I was able to pump followed by a bottle of formula.  After a couple of days we were able to attempt breastfeeding but we had a very rough time getting Little Dude latched and on more than one occasion I almost gave up.   

I will never forget one evening in the NICU trying to get him to latch, my husband was dripping sugar water down my breast to the nipple with a syringe to entice Little Dude to latch, one of the dear NICU nurses was next to me showing me how to hold my breast so that my nipple would fit more easily into Little Dude's mouth, another nurse was across from me cheering me on and tears were streaming down my face because I felt like such a failure.   

Luckily once my milk came in I was able to produce enough and we only opened 2 bottles of formula after we came home from the hospital and those were both only used to get him to latch onto me, not given to him in full but I honestly didn't think we would ever be as successful as we have been with breastfeeding after that rough start. 

By the time we brought Little Dude home from the hospital I was able to get him to latch with just my husband helping drip formula or expressed breast milk down my breast with a syringe (and sometimes into the corner of Little Dudes mouth to encourage him to start sucking) and by the time hubby went back to work I was mostly able to get him to feed on my own but it was painful and never quite felt "right".  After about a day I was in pain and by the second day home my nipples were chapped and starting to scab over.  

I was able to get an appointment with a IBCLC (International Board Certified Lactation Consultant) at the hospital where Little Dude was born and she was a life saver.   She helped ease my fears that he wasn't getting enough milk by doing a weighted feed, and showed me different positions to make breastfeeding a little easier.  She also was able to identify that he had a lip and tongue tie and wrote me a referral to get those fixed.

Using the tricks I learned from the IBCLC I was able to feed Little Dude successfully with less (though still some) torture to my poor abused nipples until we were able to get in with the dentist I chose to perform the tie release (generally the dentists who perform these releases use lasers which are less invasive than the cutting that is performed by ENT's and surgeons) was able to get us in.  After we had Little Dude's ties released it was like I was feeding an entirely different baby.  

I will admit I didn't do the best job with his stretches after we had his ties released and the lip tie has grown back slightly but it is significantly better than it was before the release and I am counting on a childhood fall to re-release it so that he doesn't have any long term cosmetic issues from the tie.  As for the tongue tie I believe I did a better job stretching it and it appears to still be fully released to my untrained eye.  Either way I no longer have any breastfeeding pain caused by the ties and we can just hope that if it has grown back any it isn't enough to cause any speech issues in the future.

I have now successfully breastfed my baby for over a year.  I am still sending a sippy cup with expressed milk to daycare every day and breastfeeding multiple times when we are together (here's looking at you 03:00 wake ups!) I also have been able to make a few donations to the Milk Bank and gave some milk to a mom who wasn't producing enough that the Milk Bank couldn't take because it was pumped while I was sick with strep throat (they have VERY strict screening guidelines for every donation to protect the high risk NICU babies).  Now I am hoping that we will be able to make it to 2 years of breastfeeding at least twice per day to keep giving Little Dude the great immunity boost from my milk.  I plan to continue to pump until I go back to work in the office in January but am thinking that I will begin to wean myself off of the pump in December so that I no longer have to take time out of my in-office work day once we are back onsite.

If you want to breastfeed but are having troubles please do not hesitate to ask for help.  If you can't afford an IBCLC at least reach out to a local La Leche League   for free support and guidance.  And if you want to breastfeed but really aren't able to because of low production or medications or any of the 100's of other valid reasons don't feel guilty.  Formula is perfectly fine.  It is formulated specifically to meet the needs of a baby and many perfectly healthy, well adjusted adults (especially those born in the 70's-80's-and-90's) never had anything other than formula that was less advanced than what we have today.  But if you really want your child to have human milk you always have the option to check out Human Milk for Human Babies  which is a milk sharing network that helps put mom's with extra milk (me) in touch with moms in need of milk.   

All of this is to say - feed your baby - that's the important part :)

Starting a New School (Daycare) During a Global Pandemic

 Since a lot of kids are in the process of going back to school right now and I know that looks very different from last year for all of them wether they are going back for in person instruction or virtual learning or some sort of hybrid model due to the current pandemic I thought I would take a moment to talk about our decision to not only send Little Dude back to daycare but to start at a completely new facility in June during what we thought at the the time was the height of the pandemic for our area.  

The daycare that Little Dude attended in Virginia Beach from the time he was 11 weeks old until he was approximently 8 months old (with a brief hiatus when we had to go back to Kentucky to help my mom while she recovered from surgery) was perfectly fine.  I loved the diversity in students and staff and very much liked the way they were set up for infant care.  They allowed me to use cloth diapers and glass bottles and gave great daily reports about how Little Dude had spent his day.  

However there were 2 things I really did not like about this center - first and foremost they had an open floor plan with all ages other than infants separated by half walls at most and with 4 year olds and up in the same area together (the center also offers before and after care so there were 4 year olds in the same space as 7 or 8 year olds).  While not an inherently bad thing it is not a set up I would choose for my child to be in daily; specifically I would walk in sometimes and a child who had learned a new 4 letter word would be using it loudly so that all of the other children were now learning a 4 letter word, while my husband and I certainly drop our share of F bombs I don't want my child to learn those words sooner than necessary.  Second, and perhaps more importantly, the center does not allow parents to provide their childs food, all children must eat the food provided by the center.   While the center serves a perfectly fine USDA menu similar to what I had when I was in school my husband and I don't necessarily agree with these guidelines (more on that later) so for these two reasons we had left Little Dude on the waiting list at a couple of other daycares that we like more than the one he was at in VB in hopes that something would open up before he was too far into solid foods.

Luckily for us a global pandemic happened and Little Dude was home with me starting in mid-March before he was really eating more than vegetables at daycare and I had full control over the food he ate daily.  

Working from home with an infant is not easy, even though he was only really army crawling and not getting into things yet it was tough juggling giving him the attention he needed and getting my work done.  Many nights I would log back on after putting Little Dude to bed or be feeding him dinner in my office while I continued to work because trying to juggle being a full time single mom (remember hubby was deployed until mid June) with being a full time work from home employee was tough.   

In the beginning of May I realized that Little Dude was starting to need more hands on attention than I could provide and still get work done, so I called in reinforcements, my mom came to stay with me for a little over 2 weeks and I was able to bust my butt and get reasonably caught up with my work.  I knew it would still be tough working from home once she left but we had a general idea that hubby would be home soon and I knew once he came home worst case I could make up the time I needed to stay caught up with my job in the evenings after he came home from work.  

Luck was on my side though.  The day my mom left my phone rang and it was Lincoln's daycare, they had a spot available for him if I wanted it.  I didn't have to take it and I could keep my spot on the wait list until another spot opened up but I could start as early as the next Monday if I wanted.   

I talked with the daycare director about the steps they were taking to mitigate COVID-19 risks and decided that the best option for my mental health, Little Dude's development, and our family as a whole was to send him to daycare.  While there was certainly a higher risk having him at daycare than having him at home I was impressed by the steps the school was already taking and decided that it was worth the risk for us.  

Little Dude has now been at daycare for almost 3 months and there hasn't been a single red flag.  They center has not had any cases of COVID among the students, staff, or had any reported related to the immediate households that any students are part of.  I am a little extra concerned right now as school is starting back up since the center is integrated with a K-12 school but they are even taking extra steps to protect students there by limiting interactions between grades, using different entrances for various grade levels and keeping staff assigned by age range (daycare, K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12) and keeping lunches in classrooms.  

Overall I think that it is a tough decision that parents are having to make and that each of us has to make the best decision we can for our families while balancing the risk of exposure against work obligations, technology access, developmental and social needs of the child, and mental health of all involved.  I even have one friend who has enrolled her youngest in a private school so that he can attend in person starting day 1 this year while keeping her daughter home for virtual learning through the public schools simply because the children have different personalities and needs and she felt that was the best option for each kid.  

It's tough being a parent and I want all of you to know that as long as you make the best decision you can with the information available in the moment you aren't doing anything wrong and you are a great mom/dad for your kid.  

 

We have a walker!

 Last week Little Dude's daycare had "back to school night".  Since the center is attached to a K-12 private school this wasn't such a strange thing and I really was glad to have the opportunity to see his teachers and get a better view of his classroom etc. since I haven't been able to go past the entryway of the building since his first day in the center thanks to the COVID-19 restrictions.  

I will talk more about the way his daycare/center is dealing with COVID-19 since I have been very impressed in general but right now I just want to share the exciting news, we have a walker!

At back to school night Little Dude apparently decided he wanted to show off in front of Mommy and his teachers at the same time and took off walking all around his classroom.  You could tell by the shocked reaction from his teachers it was the first time they had seen him take a step, he had taken 1-2 steps at home chasing the dogs but nothing really exciting and he would immediately would fall on his bottom, but that night he was all over the place taking 5-10 steps at a time and didn't fall at all.

After his first hurrah it was a few days before he really walked again but now I feel confident saying we have a full scale walker!!!  It's amazing how exciting the little stuff is when you're a parent.  Now send help because I'm sure we aren't properly baby proofed for this! 

Care Packages During Deployments

 Do you ever wonder the best way to send a care package to a deployed service member?  Or wonder what to send?  I don't necessary know about other branches but with deployed sailors in the US Navy the answer is simple...AMAZON PRIME!  

Last time my husband deployed I did  great job of sending a flat rate box full of goodies every month.  I took joy in making trips to the store to pick out items to send, decorating and filling the box, and going to the post office to drop it in the mail.  The USPS does a great job of making sending care packages as easy as possible, they even have a great kit you can order delivered straight to your house of shipping supplies. You can even order the kit here it comes with boxes, tape, address labels, and even customs forms.  

But here's the thing, this deployment I had a new baby, traveled to help take care of my mom after she had surgery, and then COVID-19 struck and I tried to avoid unnecessary trips to public places...so Amazon became my saving grace as a wife.  

Here are the perks of using Amazon to send your deployment care packages:

1. Free Shipping
2. Ability to send exactly what your service member needs without pressure to fill a specific size box
3. Flat rate boxes are all the same size and shape and therefore stack nicely, meaning they are usually bundled on the same pallet.  If a mail drop gets cut short guess which pallets have to wait until the next mail drop, that's right the ones that are nothing but flat rate boxes of care packages
4. If an order doesn't arrive in a reasonable amount of time Amazon will give you your money back, one of my orders for my husband (that I ordered in February) was split into two packages.  One package arrived in late March, the second package was just delivered to his office this week.  Amazon refunded the purchase price of the items in the second package in April when I submitted a claim that it wasn't delivered.  While flat rate boxes do include insurance the filing process with the USPS for your insurance claim is probably a little more difficult than just clicking a button in your Amazon account.

So all in all I realized that I did not totally fail as a wife this deployment with the care packages and hopefully others will take this to know that it's ok if you just use the ease of online shopping to send your loved ones the things they need.  Service members love getting cards from their kids and things from home but sometimes when they ask for a specific brand of granola bars it really is better to spend the extra $2 from Amazon and just order it on the spot. 

Home organization week ...who knows...

In January I started the home organization challenge with A Bowl Full of Lemons but got sidetracked and never finished.  So hubby and I took it upon ourselves to finish my purge of all of the extra crap in our house over the next few months.  So far we have done every room/closet in the house except the master bedroom and even then we have both taken a first pass at our own clothing.  Hubby also went through our storage shed and made a lot of cuts of the random crap we have boxed up in there.  It wen't from a disorganized disaster to about 20 or so boxes neatly stacked against the wall that I need to go through.  So my plan is to finish purging our bedroom and then on the next cool day go outside and go through the items in our shed so that next January I am able to complete the challenge in full without getting a side tracked.   

Between not having to leave town 2 weeks in and having significantly less random junk in our house I'm hoping it's a success.   

The challenges of reintegration ... with a baby...

When my husband left for deployment our sweet Little Dude was a 3.5 month old bump on a log.  He had started daycare but had spent the majority of his short life at home with mama during her maternity leave.  Daddy was great with Little Dude spending time holding and cuddling, giving bottles when mommy had milk pumped, and even changing (the occasional) diapers.  

When hubby came home from deployment our Little Dude was a 10 month old crawling machine.  His favorite pass-times were chasing puppies around the living room, screaming at the top of his lungs (Just to hear himself, not because anything was wrong/not crying) and dancing adorably anytime music was on.  

That's a big change!  Every day hubby was gone Little Dude learned something new, grew a little, and developed more into a miniature human.   Now he is eating solid food, toddling around (a little) and even says mama, dada, and hi/bye (though both really just sound like eye) when he waves.   

For hubby being gone for those 8 months in the middle didn't cause the immediate culture shock I expected upon his return (though I think COVID-19 may have caused a bit of a shock) but instead it is more of a daily struggle realizing the things that hubby doesn't know/hasn't had the chance to learn yet.

Question: What do I  feed him 

Answer: The same thing we are eating, or if we aren't eating then the same thing we would be eating otherwise at that time of day, just smaller amounts.

Question: When does he eat

Answer: Look at his daycare sheet??? Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, on snack between lunch and dinner, maybe some random cheerios thrown in there....

Question: Does he have a volume button?

Answer: Yes, but it only goes louder

Question: Are these clothes (in his dresser) the right size?

Answer: ...seriously??? You think I took the time to fold and put away clothes that don't fit...???

And so on.  My favorite so far though has to be the first night I missed bedtime (and only so far) for a meeting.   I got home about 15 minutes after hubby got Little Dude to sleep.  He had apparently had quite a night and they had gone pretty much immediately from high chair for dinner to jammies to bed; but then hubby couldn't get Little Dude to go to sleep, it was a battle, no surprise there though Little Dude had literally never gone to sleep without mommy in his life, even in the NICU I was in there most of the day if I myself wasn't eating or sleeping, so the baby was a bit out of sorts...Until the next morning when I went to pack Little Dudes lunchbox for daycare and realized that hubby forgot to give him his bedtime bottle.  Don't worry, this child drinks plenty of milk during the day and still wakes 2-3 times at night to nurse so his bedtime nursing session is 99% for comfort and my husband had fed him a big dinner so Little Dude was not hungry at all, but he did miss the comfort of his bedtime milk.  And who knows, he might have had to fight a battle anyway since it would have been a bottle instead of boob, but it will still make for a funny story 10 years from now.  

Birthday "party" recap

So I had the most epic first birthday party ever planned for Little Dude.  I had hired a DJ and invited basically everyone we know to come over for some fun and food.  I was so excited to have hubby home, celebrate my one-year old, and thought that it would be the first big event for my social circle since we started locking ourselves away for COVID.  

Unfortunately precautions still need to be followed, cases in the Hampton Roads area are on the rise because no one wants to follow the rules, and the Navy has issued very strict guidance about what the sailors are allowed to do (Basically go to work, home, and grocery store) so we had to put the kabash on Little Dudes super extra birthday party....But I wasn't about to let a little thing like a global pandemic stop me from celebrating my baby.  

For starters my mom has had a flight booked to come visit for Little Dude's first birthday for MONTHS, so obviously she is here.   Which is great because I feel kind of bad that she doesn't get to see Little Dude more often.  

We planned to start the day in true first birthday fashion - with a crib full of balloons - but I had to delay that to nap time because Little Dude decides to give me a birthday present and slept through the night for the first time! I woke up about to bust so getting milk out had to take priority over balloons in the crib.  

Then we had a yummy lunch of barbecue and a friend of mine came over to take pictures of our little family and of Little Dude's smash cake experience.   I started to order a smash cake from a bakery but once I realized how simple the cake I wanted was (white icing, lots of sprinkles) I decided to try my hand at making it myself.   The end results were great.   

Little Dudes Godmothers daughter has the same birthday and turned 7 and the other friend who cames’ daughter turned 7 last week so I made each of them a special cupcake to match the smash cake.  

So happy first birthday Little Dude, and we will have an epic party next year hopefully instead.  (These pictures were all taken by me, not my friend - her pictures are way better!) 

I have a 1 year old

How in the world has it already been a year since I had my sweet Little Dude.   The past year has truly been a crazy ride but overall I am loving motherhood.  

Little Dude has been through a lot in his short life; but hopefully that means he will be a resilient adult who is able to roll with things when life decides to punch him in the face.  Here is a brief overview of what Little Dude has been through in the past year:

-A very dramatic entrance into this world followed by a 4 day stay in the NICU

-Coming home to a house with 3 puppies who love to bark whenever someone walks on the porch and scare the poor baby

-Daddy being deployed for almost 8 months

-A flight to Kentucky followed by a road trip to Indiana and Illinois with a flight back to Virginia from Kentucky to meet all of mommy and daddy's friends and family members

-Daycare

-Another flight to Kentucky

-A week hanging out in the lobby of a hospital with a constant rotation of people watching him so mommy could take care of grandma

-5 weeks at a different daycare in the middle of rural Kentucky while mommy continued helping grandma and tried to work from grandmas house

-5 more flights to/from Virginia/Kentucky while at Grandmas

-A 12+ hour one way roadtrip from Virginia to Kentucky then back again at the end of the stay at Grandmas with 3 dogs in the car

-Going back to his first daycare

-The start of a global pandemic and hanging out with mommy while she tries to work from home for approximently 2 months

-A third daycare, still during a global pandemic but with lots of extra cleaning and safety precautions

-Daddy coming home from daycare

But at least now we get to have cake!!!

And this sweet boy even gave me a gift for his birthday and slept through the night last night for the first time!!!!

SURPRISE!!!!

This afternoon I got a text message from my little sister in law telling me she was leaving after work to come visit us.  We decided to surprise hubby since she hasn't seen him since before hubby left on deployment and they are super close but I couldn't wait to tell someone - so I'm telling the whole world since I know he wont see it :)

Feeding an almost toddler

So part of sending Little Dude to daycare means I have to start packing lunches.  His daycare does offer food but he has a diary intolerance and so I feel better being able to make sure that everything he eats is 100% dairy free, plus it means I can control the quality of the food he is eating too. 
Many years ago I discovered the blog 100 Days of Real Food and I used it to help come up with healthy lunch options for hubby and myself.  Now I'm turning back to it to come up with ideas for what to pack for Little Dude.

What are some other great blogs for healthy kid-lunch friendly ideas?  (Please don't just say "check Pinterest", I get so overwhelmed when I try to find specific things on there and just end up with boards full of ideas that I never implement.)

Real Talk

So I was under the crazy idea that once I had our Little Dude that I would get back into the blogging habit because I would have something interesting to talk about...
What I failed to consider is that I wouldn't have time to sit down for five minutes to write it all down.
Then I thought I would get back into it when my husband left on deployment, but out of an abundance of caution I didn't want to talk about my husband being deployed while I was home alone with little dude.  (He's still gone, but will be home soon)
Then I thought I would complete the Home Organization Challenge with A Bowl Full of Lemons this year and blog about that...but less than 1/2 way through (and only 1 blog post in) I had to go home to Kentucky to help my mom because she was having surgery.
After about 6 weeks going back and forth between Kentucky and Virginia with an infant and working remotely while I was at my moms I made it back to Virginia full time just in time to work a full week in my office before we started shutting down and sending people home to work remotely due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Now after 70+days at home Little Dude will be returning to daycare (a new daycare, but more on that later) on Monday while I remain working from home.
Sending Little Dude back to daycare wasn't a decision I reached lightly.  COVID-19 is still a very real virus and the new mutation that hits small children so hard is very scary.  Also Little Dude was on a ventilator in the NICU for a few hours when he was first born so I do have concerns about potential respiratory problems.  However I had to weigh those risks against what was necessary for my sanity and our combined health.
The daycare Little Dude will be attending is very clean and taking precautions also I feel confident that the health system in our area has taken the necessary steps to be able to properly care for patients even if there is a second spike.
On the flip side it is almost impossible to be productive all day with a 10 month old requiring constant care.   Little Dude is crawling and climbing and constantly discovering new things.  Every day it is something different and I can't imagine how much harder it is going to get as he gets more and more mobil and more and more curious.
In the end my friend Sara and I have developed a shared mantra when it comes to the pandemic and parenting - we are living in a world with no right answers and very few wrong ones, a world full of grey and it is harder than ever to know what the right choice for your family and your kids is.  We are all doing the best we can, but dammit we are doing it. 
So to all the other mom's out there - you're doing great.

Breastfeeding is harder than it looks

When Little Dude was first born we had a hard time with breastfeeding.  He had trouble latching and hubby had to help me entice Little Dude by dripping expressed milk or formula from a syringe onto my nipple while we tried to get hit to latch.  Then after a while of attempting to breastfeed we would have to finish off with a bottle.
This is not an unusual experience, especially when the baby starts out in the NICU and unable to breastfeeding initially like Little Dude did.  But we stuck with it and got help from the amazing NICU nurses and a lactation consultant and now we are doing great.  Little Dude is nursing like a champ on weekends and at night and I am pumping at work during the week so that he can have breastmilk bottles at daycare.
I even have a bit of an oversupply so we have been able to donate about 300 ounces of milk so far to the King's Daughters Milk Bank, which I volunteer with for Junior League.  I am so happy that I am able to put my extra milk to good use to help feed the sweet babies in need at the hospital.

So why do I say it is harder than it looks?  

First because we had trouble getting started.  Breastfeeding doesn't always come naturally.  Unfortunately many mom's are led to believe that it should happen easily and when it doesn't they give up thinking that breastfeeding is an all or nothing game.  It isn't, any amount of breast milk is good for a baby and even if future generations learn that formula is as good as breastmilk you can still save money by feeding a baby what breastmilk you can produce even if you are supplementing with formula because you don't make enough.  So don't give up if you don't want to, do what you feel is best for your self, your baby, and your family.  

The Second reason is a bit more recent.  I am currently battling a clogged milk duct on my lower producing side and it hurts like a bitch.  I apologize for the harsh language but it is awful.  I have tried salt water soaks, I have tried a heating pad, I have tried hand expression.  Thank God it hasn't turned into mastitis (yet, please let it clear up before it gets infected!) but I have even gone as far as buying a vibrating back massager thing to hold on it to try and break the clog up with little relief so far.   And since it's my slacker side having this clog slow down/reduce milk flow even more than normal has made Little Dude want nothing to do with latching on that side to help a mama out.  He will but he gets annoyed quickly and isn't nursing as long as normal on that side which I know is making it worse so I have started just walking around the house this evening with my Haaka attached to that side.

Pray for me :)

I still hate running

I realized I never gave an update about the 10K that my dear sweet hubby registered me for.
At the end of October Hubby, Little Dude, and I ran/walked the Wicked 10K in Virginia Beach.  Despite the fact that I was less than 3 months postpartum and had no intention of getting some sort of amazing time I managed to PR the race! (I've only ran one other 10K in my life so the bar was pretty low).
I was super proud of our cute outfits.  Hubby & I wore T-shirts that had dinosaurs on them and said Mommysarus and Daddysuras and Little Dude had a super cute dinosaur outfit.
I didn't purchase any pictures but looking at the official race photos I'm amazed at how different I look already, just 2(ish) months later.  

Hamilton, the musical

What a wonderful show.  It completely lives up to the hype.
For Christmas I got tickets for my mom and I to go see the touring production of Hamilton when it was in town.  I already loved the music, and I am a huge Broadway fan in general but this was probably in my top 10 shows of all time, actually my top 5.
And with that thought process...my top 5 Broadway Musicals are:
1. Thoroughly Modern Millie
2. Chicago (this was the first/only show I have actually seen on Broadway, the others have all been touring productions, though I have also seen Chicago on tour)
3. Wicked
4. Hamilton
5. Mama Mia
What is your favorite musical?  Have you seen Hamilton yet?

Home Organization Challenge Week 1 - Laundry

This weekend I started the 2020 Home Organization Challenge.  I have done this challenge a few times in the past, the first being the 21 day challenge in 2011 and the last time being in 2016 though I didn't make it through every room and didn't blog about that one as much.
This was a tough one.  I'm very glad that now that I'm in a house and have a baby this is a 14 week challenge instead of a 21 day challenge.  There is no way I could complete that again with my current life.

My laundry room is also the primary entrance we use to get into the house (aka, the back door) and by some sort of magic it never gets really out of control but lives is a state of not quite clean and not at all organized.   I followed the steps set out by the challenge kit and in doing so realized that the reason it lives in this state of just shy of chaos is because our shelves become a catch all for stuff we don't want to put in the garage/shed but don't really have a home for in the house either.  We also just kind of stacked the leftover paint from when we bought the house in a corner in there so it was in a climate controlled space but it wasn't really organized.

So here are my before pictures

As you can see the shelves are piled with random things, the deep sink is in desperate need of a scrub (though it is still stained pretty badly, it is much better) and for some reason we have 8 folding chairs just hanging out in the laundry room.  Also our ladder never made it to the shed after we cleaned the pine needles off of the roof in the fall.

This is the corner we stashed the paint cans in between our deep freezer and water heater.

And here we have more paint, and the ladder, and brooms and mops and a random box of books that I need to take to the little library at the end of our street. 

Unfortunately the jogging stroller has to stay even though it takes up a ton of space in the laundry room.  That is really the only place we have to store it and I use it frequently enough it can't really be shoved in the back of a closet.

And so after a day of pulling everything out of the laundry room into my kitchen.  Scrubbing stuff down, throwing away 1 bag of trash and loading the car up with items to donate I now have a much more organized space.   

(The ladder does still need to go out to the shed, but I couldn't find the key, so that will get done later this week.)

My shelves are neatly organized and only contain things that actually need to be in the laundry room. I do think I am going to put to gather a small in-the-house tool kit to keep on the top shelf over the deep sink.  We can never find simple things like a hammer or screwdriver when we need them, then we run out to the shed to get one and it just gets put in a random place creating a vicious cycle.  

You can't see it in this picture but all of the paint is on the bottom shelf of this unit, then I have any chemical stuff (bug treatment stuff from when we had an ant problem outside, weed killer, motor oil, windshield washer fluid, miracle grow etc) is on the second shelf.  Paper towels and small kitchen appliances (Stand Mixer, Bread Machine, electric griddle) on the middle shelf, paper plates, plasticware, and extra laundry detergent are on the 2nd to the top shelf and on the very top I have our coolers and my husbands bike stuff (helmet, bike lock, tire pump).

Overall I consider week 1 of the home organization challenge a success.  I eventually want to tear up the cracked tiles on this floor and either replace them or paint the concrete underneath.  I also want to paint the entire room white and sand/refinish the metal pipes that run along the walls so that they really pop out in either a copper or rubbed bronze finish (depends on what they are actually made of, there are too many coats of paint over them now to tell).  I don't know if any of my decorating vision for this room will ever happen since this isn't our forever home, but if we get another set of orders to Hampton Roads and stay here for a few more years I might go ahead and do it.  

Happy Monday!

Home Organization with A Bowl Full of Lemons

It has been a few years since I have completed the Home Organization Challenge from A Bowl Full of Lemons.  This year I am going to make a concentrated effort to complete the entire thing on schedule.  One of my goals for 2020 is to purge the excess junk from our house/stop buying stuff and I feel this is a good way to get me started.  
Are you interested in the change?  It starts this weekend with the laundry room!

Check it out here:
https://www.abowlfulloflemons.net/2019/12/2020-home-organization-challenge-coming-soon.html

New Year's Resolutions

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Do you make New Year's Resolutions?  I don't necessarily make resolutions but I do try to set goals each new year.  This year my goals all center around the health and wellness of my family.  I have even gotten hubby on board with the goals.  

Physical Health/Fitness goals--

Focus on eating at home

Eat a variety of fruits and vegetables as a family

Introduce Little Dude to nutritious foods and avoid processed crap

Workout at least 3 times per week

Everyone to be a healthy BMI/BF%

Financial Health goals--

Payoff all"bad" debt (credit cards, miscellaneous loans, cars)

Stop buying "stuff" we don't need and get rid of the "Stuff" we already have

Hit a specific $ amount in our savings account

Emotional/Relationship goals--

One date night per month when hubby is home

No cell phones/computers/tv/electronics in bed

No TV on weeknights before Little Dude goes to bed

Read at least 1 book to Little Dude per day

Read 1 story from the Bible as a family at least 2 times per week

Purge excess junk from our house to help encourage a sense of calm/limit clutter

What are your goals for the new year?  How do you plan on accomplishing them?