Christmas is coming... and so is Baby

Well... it's been about 17 months since my last blog post. Clearly, I am no blogger. But my little family is growing, and stuff is happening, and it's probably time for a small flurry of blog activity... which will probably be followed by a long period of blog silence. This is the pattern that's been established; why change now?

And now, for the updates...

BABY NEWS
Baby number 2 is due on Christmas day. We are hoping for a slightly earlier arrival, so that Christmas can be spent with family and snuggling a new little one. That sounds much better to me than Christmas at the hospital. In labor. I'm just sayin'...

ROSEMARY NEWS
Rosemary is growing and changing every day, and I can hardly believe she is almost 20 months old already. She is very chatty and loves to color (scribble with crayons) and write notes and lists (scribble with pens or pencils). One of her most frequent phrases lately has been "Go play downstairs?" Which means, "Mommy, why are you making me hang out upstairs while you cook/clean/whatever - all my toys are downstairs and we need to go down there so we can play!" Another common phrase to be randomly uttered: "Stupid squirrels. Make grandma mad." Ha! I love it! But what I love the most is her singing. She is starting to catch the lyrics of a lot of the songs we sing to her, and she sings them to herself or sings along with us on occasion. "You are my sunshine" and "Eidelweiss" (sp?) are big hits, but she also enjoys "Bang bang, he shot me down..." thanks to repeated watchings of her favorite dance number on her favorite show: So You Think You Can Dance.

OUR LIFE RIGHT NOW
We are settling in to our new house, having taken possession at the beginning of September and having finally moved our stuff and ourselves at the end of October. We still have a lot of boxes to unpack, but it is definitely feeling like home. Our new home has a split entry, and Rosemary loves the stairs. I, on the other hand, am quietly (OK, not so quietly) cursing the fact that we moved into a house with stairs to climb just in time for my third trimester. Nothing like getting winded after a short flight of stairs to make you feel completely ridiculous.

B is for Baby. C is for cute.

Look at the cute baby!

Three Months Old

Rosemary is three months old today! She celebrated by insisting on an unprecedented FIVE outfit changes over the course of the day.

She also spent a little time in her crib getting to know her friends. She was smiling at her bear, so I moved him closer....



The two of them had such a good time, especially when I helped the bear move a little, so I thought she might like to hang out with her giraffe. He plays a tune and slowly moves his head when you wind him up.

Her reaction to the giraffe was decisive and immediate.


This giraffe is not Rosemary's BFF.


Our growing girl was 10 lbs 4 oz at her surgery consult on the 14th, so she is getting pretty big :)

Her hernia does not seem to bother her, which is especially good since they don't seem to be in any kind of hurry to get her surgery scheduled. At the consult, they basically said, "Yep, it's a hernia. We'll call you to schedule the surgery." To date, no phone calls have been received from their office.

What else is our three-month-old up to? She smiles pretty frequently and makes adorable little noises when she's happy... She swats at anything we dangle within reach, and occasionally even makes contact... She generally doesn't cry through baths or diaper changes any more... And to answer the most frequently asked question: No. She most definitely is not sleeping through the night!

Nursery Progress

As promised, here are some pictures of the progress on the nursery thus far.

We don't have a "before" picture of the room piled high with stuff, or a "before" picture of the room with its corner cleared out and cleaned up for baby... Our "before" starts with the raw room, with only a few items of furniture remaining in the middle (draped with a black sheet - that is the dark blob in the middle of the room). As you can see, the room started out with floral wallpaper, gray carpet, and dark wood molding.

First order of business: remove wallpaper. (Second order of business should have been a nap for mommy - sleep deprivation does not help you look pretty. Yikes!)

Next, spackle the walls, remove the molding, and sand the remaining woodwork.

And now, for the painting... the walls are no longer covered in wallpaper flowers, but are a pretty shade of yellow called "Shortbread."

We've had lots of help from my parents... here's Rosemary's grandma helping with the painting and also a bit of comic relief :) ...

... and here's Rosemary's grandpa pulling up carpet...

It's a good thing we have all that help, because most of my "helping" involves taking care of the baby. Speaking of Rosemary, here she is in her favorite position...

And then there's Henrietta. She is not so sure about all this ruckus, and she does not seem to particularly appreciate the carpet removal. As we were removing the padding, she kept moving to sit on a new section of padding until nothing remained but the wood floor... She also took a few time-outs to gaze out the window and occasionally glare at us in disgust.

That's all for now... we will be painting trim this weekend, but not installing it. My dad decided that the best way to make sure that Rosemary's room doesn't look like it was put together by a bunch of amateurs would be to hire a professional. :) So Alvin (family friend and professional house fixer-upper) will be here Monday morning to install trim.

I think that's all that remains before we start putting her room back together... yay!

The Many Faces of Rosemary

Rosemary has been watching toys for a while now... she doesn't really play with them yet, but she'll stare at the mobile on her swing for 20 minutes at a time, and her face goes through all kinds of different expressions as she watches. Lately, she has also started making happy noises while she watches her mobile go around. I'm convinced that she is talking to her friends as they circle her head. It is incredibly cute.

We spent the last four days at my parents' house while our hardwood floors were being refinished, and during that time Rosemary got to know the new toy at Grandma's house. This morning, her Grandma took (literally) 100 pictures of her as she watched the frog (on her left) and beach ball (on her right). Unfortunately, you don't get to hear how cute she is, but at least you can see it. I managed to narrow it down to just 11 pictures (I know! It's still a lot... but she's just so gosh darn cute!!)... and now, I present to you... the many faces of Rosemary:



















Uh oh... looks like play time is over...


Grandma! Stop taking my picture and get me out of here!

Fixing up the nursery

I was still in the process of sorting through the boxes stacked in Rosemary's room when our girl surprised us with her early arrival... And my mom saved the day by moving most of the boxes to my parents' garage, disassembling the bunk bed, and setting up a corner of the room to be ready for baby, all while we were still in the hospital. When we came home, we found a nicely cleared space with baby's armoire, a borrowed changing table (thank you, Silvas!) and a new garbage can and diaper pail. Everything was ready for being able to change diapers and dress the baby, and keep most of baby's stuff organized. This is how the nursery has remained until a few weeks ago, when I decided it was time to get her room "finished."

Since then, our house has been in a state of upheaval... We moved almost everything out of her room and into the living room, with the exception of a few pieces of furniture, so we could remove the old wallpaper and then paint. Our plan was to remove the carpeting in chunks so that we wouldn't have to move the remaining furniture out of the room... This plan didn't stick, as we didn't count on my parents (our landlords) insisting that the hardwood floor get refinished. It was a bit of extra work, but we got the rest of the furniture out of the nursery, and stashed it in the living room with the rest of the stuff - by this time, the living room was quite full. Removing the carpet was not too tough; it only took an hour or so. When the flooring guy came to look at the space and give us a bid, he recommended that we also do the hallway and living room because it would be more cost effective.

So now here we are, three weeks into the project, and spending our second day at my parents' house while half the floors in our house are being refinished. Todd is being a real trooper, especially because I know this is a lot more than he bargained for when he agreed to this whole project! It's been pretty fun for Rosemary and I, getting to hang out with her grandma and her cousin Emma for two days, but it will be nice when we can be back in our own house. And even though Pokey and Henrietta Pussycat seem to be acclimating to our temporary lodgings, I'm sure they'll be happy to return to familiar surroundings as well.

I'll post some pictures of our progress later - I can't get to our pictures until we are allowed back in our house!

Baby needs surgery

How to stress out new parents:

1. Tell them their 7-week-old baby needs surgery. (What? Yikes!)

2. Let them sweat it out for a week trying to schedule a consultation visit with an unresponsive surgeon's office.

3. Get their appointment scheduled for the soonest possible time (with a big push from the pediatrician), and tell them it will be in THREE WEEKS.

4. Give them a list of things to watch for in the meantime that would necessitate an immediate trip to the Emergency Room.

Trust me, this works.

I had noticed some strange swelling just below Rosemary's abdomen a few weeks ago, and was not sure what to think about it, but kept an eye on it at each diaper change. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not...and sometimes it was two swollen lumps, sometimes just one. Last Sunday, she had two very swollen lumps, and I asked Todd and mom to look and see what they thought. The three of us agreed that it would be best to take her to the pediatrician ASAP. We took her in on Monday and found out that Rosemary has a hernia, probably a double hernia, and the solution for that is surgery. (Surgery?? This is not something I had expected to hear!! Yikes!)

I called the surgeon's office on Tuesday morning to schedule a consult (per the pediatrician's instructions), and was told they were working on the schedules and would have to call me back. I hadn't heard anything by Wednesday, so called back and asked when I should expect to hear from them. Their response? "By the end of the week." (umm... Ok... What? Are you kidding me?) So Friday rolled around, and Todd had taken the day off work and we were heading out to run errands, so I called the surgeon's office to give them my cell number... At which time they told me they'd probably call me by the middle of the next week. What?? By this time I am quietly freaking out. Our girl needs surgery, and I can't even get them to call me back to schedule an appointment for the consultation!!! Aaaaaaargh.

On Monday, the bulge looked and felt esprcially bad, so I called the pediatrician's office and they asked me to bring her on in. By the time we got there, Rosemary looked normal as can be... So no real cause for alarm, but the doctor was surprised to hear of our scheduling difficulties and asked her assistant to make some phone calls. Apparently, we were on page four of a list of people to schedule. Thanks to the pediatrician's intervention, we were moved to page one and are scheduled for a consult on June 14. This still seems like a long time to wait - I hate to think how long we would have had to wait if we'd stayed on page four!

So for now we wait. And keep an eye out for the indications that she needs to go to the Emergency Room (if the bulge looks red or purple, or feels hot to the touch, or if Rosemary has a fever). We don't think it's causing her pain right now, but it's kind of hard to tell since she can't really tell us what hurts or why she's crying. The good news is that she doesn't cry ALL the time, so even if it is painful once in a while, it is not a constant pain.