1 month down!

Jaxon recently had his 1 month check up with the pediatrician. In his first month he has gained 2 pounds and 9 ounces, and has grown 2 inches. That puts him in the 94 percentile for weight and 95 percentile for height. Sydney was always off the charts in height, but usually hung out around the 80-85 percentile in weight.

I know that the doctor said he is a big boy, but he is still such a little cutie to me.

Pictures

Donnie is like his dad and loves to take a lot of pictures. He can’t take pictures of one and not the other, so here we go:

And when she is at her absolute most beautiful:

The joys of being 2 years old

We were watching a movie the other night and so we let Sydney watch Dora in my grandmother’s room. About halfway through the movie Grandma decided she should probably check on Sydney.

I told her she was probably asleep, but he thought she should check on her anyway. Donnie went upstairs with her, and quickly returned with a screaming Sydney. I went over to see what was going on and almost died. Sydney had painted her feet, hands, face, and grandma’s carpet with bright red fingernail polish! It was EVERYWHERE!

Donnie put her in the bath while we tried to clean up the mess. We called my mom to get some ideas on polish removal. After a lot of scrubbing, most of the five feet of painted carpet looked pretty clean, but Sydney still looked red.

Needless to sat, Sydney is no longer allowed in Grandma’s room.

At Home

Now that we are back home with Sydney and Jax, she has decided that he’s not so bad. Sydney likes to help change his diapers and give him baths. She also likes to give him toys – even though he’s too small to play with them.

The thing she finds most intriguing is his “special baby milk.” She doesn’t understand why Jax doesn’t drink out of bottles. When I tried to explain to her that he’s little and little babies drink special baby milk from their mommies she wanted to try some too. Thankfully she stopped asking after about a week.

Sydney likes to kiss Jax’s feet, but the other day she took it one step further and bit his foot. He screamed and screamed. It was so sad. She screamed too, but only because she had to sit in time out. She tried to bite him again later, but bit my finger instead.

Her jealousy is showing in other ways too. She yells at Jax to “move over” when I’m holding him so that she can sit in my lap too. When I’m nursing him she tries to pull his head away from my breast so that he can’t eat. As soon as he falls asleep, she yells at me to put him in his bed.

Baby brother arrives!

The long awaited event finally occurred. Baby brother decided to grace us with his presence. It’s funny though, I forgot how uncomfortable labor and delivery actually are until I was right back in the thick of it.

We spent Thursday running errands and then we met up with Deidra and Jeannette and families to hang out. We ended up going to Chuck E. Cheese’s that evening to eat and play.

Sydney loved it – until she noticed the talking Chuck E. Cheese robot. Then she started screaming and shaking. She kept asking Donnie to take her home. She finally calmed down when she saw the picture sketching machine. She liked to have her picture taken and even after we ran out of coins she continued to go back and sit by the machine.

After our little outing, Donnie went fishing with Dustin. By this point I was feeling really tired and a little uncomfortable, but Donnie really wanted to go fishing. I think it is hard for guys to understand because they have never (and will never) experienced it.

We finally returned home a little after 11 p.m. and I crashed. I had a hard time sleeping because I couldn’t get comfortable. Finally around 2:30 a.m. I woke up with a contraction. Then I had another one. After the third contraction I decided I should time them.

So I tried to find my cell phone, but I didn’t want to wake Donnie and Sydney so I was stumbling around in the dark – breathing heavily through my contractions and grabbing on to whatever I could – trying to find the diaper bag so that I could fish out my cell phone.

Finally, at about 3:30 a.m., I called the doctor, but Donnie had to talk because I could barely stand so putting together a coherent sentence was out of the question. We arrived at the hospital at 4:15 and everything moved pretty quickly from there.

At 6:30 I received an epidural, only to find out afterwards that I was already dialted to an 8 and 90 % effaced. I almost made it all the way without an epidural – but I thought I was going to die! The epidural only worked on my left side, so I feel like I kind of experienced a natural birth too :-).

Potty Training

We are slowly making progress with Sydney’s potty training – very slowly. She tells us when she needs to use the bathroom, but she still doesn’t want to sit on the potty every time. She has been doing better lately, but she is still in diapers/pull ups.

We tried the big girl panties for one day, but after cleaning up what had to have been a gallon of pee and a broken jar of fig preserves (don’t ask), we decided she just wasn’t ready for big girl panties!

When she does agree to sit on her “big girl potty” we have to bribe her with candy

And whatever else she finds around the floor to keep her interest.

A long time coming...

It has been a long time since the last post, so I will try to catch you up to speed now. In other words, this will be a long post!

After Donnie’s graduation we started packing for our move across the country. We had a little less than three weeks to get it all done, and we barely made it! In fact, if it wasn’t for the extra help we had from my mom and about a dozen neighbors, we would not have been able to take care of everything.

We ended up giving away our kitchen table and chairs, and throwing away a lot of other things just to get everything to fit into the U-Haul. Ohhh I hate moving! At least we will be here for the next 5 or 6 years before we have to do this again. Sort of. We are not entirely settled. Most of our things are in a storage unit and we are staying with my grandmother while we look for a place to live.

We haven’t really devoted any time to house hunting though because we have been preparing for baby brother and Donnie has been working so we can save up some money – or at least survive until school starts!

Sydney has enjoyed her time at Grandma’s house. She loves to lie on my Grandmother’s bed and read books. In fact, reading is probably Sydney’s most favorite pastime activity. When we do find a new home, we would like to set up a special reading spot for her. She can have a special chair and a little bookshelf, maybe a few over-sized pillows…who knows? She definitely needs something a little better than this:
















Sydney also has enjoyed cooking with Grandma. Sydney really likes cupcakes – she calls them Princess Cupcakes – and Grandma let her help make some. However, when you cook at Grandma’s, you have to wear a hair net. Sydney though that was pretty funny.

















Sydney has had a lot of time to play with her cousins too. Every day she asks if we can go play with cousins, and most days we do. It is nice to have so many around now!