Music of the Night

I realized EARLY this morning how loud our house is at night. I seem to be the only one who gets to enjoy it's full range of noises.

Garrett: He grunts in his sleep a lot! Usually for the first couple minutes that you put him down each time he strains and grunts against the swaddle. He also moans, gasps, burps and farts. There have been many times when the room is silent and this loud perfect fart rips through the room just as we are drifting off to sleep. All of these sounds though are better than cooing. Happy cooing sounds from the crib in the middle of the night is like a death sentence. It means that he is up, happy and WIDE awake and one of us isn't getting sleep for at least another hour and a half. or so However, the little guy is quiet compared to the big one...

Brian: He snores...we all know this, I am pretty sure that I have mentioned it before. I have never wanted to suffocate someone more than at 4am when I am up for the fourth time in a row, after an hour and a half of sleep between every feeding, and his snores are RIPPING through the room...Like so loud I can't even think (not that my sleep deprived self is trying to think very hard.) At this point in the morning I am convinced that he is snoring to rub it in that besides one diaper change in the last 7 hours, he hasn't even MOVED. Hence the feelings of extreme violence. Sleep deprivation is a weird thing. He is lucky because I really do like him and he is pretty useful to have around, or else...!!

Of course I am the only one who hears all of these wonderful sounds. Sometimes Garrett spends twenty minutes grunting and fussing before he gets upset and I get him out of the crib (I have a don't pick him up out of the crib until he is actually crying/upset policy...half the time he either falls back asleep or is already asleep when he is fussing.) Brian sometimes doesn't even hear him...it is amazing.

Postpartum

Well we are pretty close to the six week postpartum mark. I have my doctor's appointment on Thursday afternoon. I am really feeling pretty good. I would say besides the lasting effects of extra chub and stretch marks I feel pretty much normal!

When it comes to my body I actually feel okay about it. I don't think that I would be happy about it six months from now, but for six weeks after giving birth I am happy with where I am at. My weight is the same as it was at my 8 week prenatal appointment. I am about 15-20 lbs heavier than I would like to be but really only 5-10 lbs heavier than I was right around when I got pregnant, so I feel like that really isn't too bad. At my appointment they will clear me to start working out so hopefully I will start with that (at least I intend to...we will see!) I still don't entirely fit into my pre-pregnancy jeans and pants, but am only one size bigger. Even though I would like to blame it on my hips expanding, my suspicion is that if I drop that next ten pounds that my pants will fit again. Which is good, I mean who really wants their hips to actually just be a size wider (Right???) but bad because it means that I definitely have more chub to lose!

Emotionally I feel great. Of course there definitely have been baby blue moments where I have lost it or felt a little down or wondered what in the heck we were thinking. But all in all I feel much happier than I did when I was pregnant, which is sort of weird!

After all that complaining and hating being pregnant, I actually can't wait to do it again (just not right away!) I think that I didn't really "get it," like I didn't understand how cool of a thing it is that after 9 months this beautiful little being comes out of you. I am excited to possibly enjoy the next pregnancy and even birth. Well, I actually thought that giving birth was an incredibly cool thing, I mean as cool as pushing a watermelon out of a wine bottle can be!! I just realized that I never really wrote about Garrett's birth...I will have to work on that post...

1 Month

This is a couple of days overdue. The picture was taken last weekend though! Hard to imagine that we are into the secound month already!

The 4th of July Weekend

We had a great holiday weekend with family. This post will be mostly pictures. I am proud of myself for getting so many! I only missed one day, the day that we went to and old mining town called Virginia City.

The weekend started out with a HUGE hail storm. Well actually two storms. This is the second one. Tim and Amy's poor van got pounded as they were pulling into town. Bozeman has millions of dollars of damage. Including tons of broken windows in cars and houses. The university had 200 broken windows from golf ball and baseball size hail. We were lucky and seemed to miss the brunt of both storms out in Four Corners.

We hung out with cousins. Garrett got showered with attention. All of the cousin's wanted to hold him and touch him. Our saying for the weekend was, "please don't touch his face!" or " let's give Garrett a little space now!"

Tim wanted to try fly fishing for the first time, so we headed out to the Madison. While the guys fished the kids went swimming. The water was 65 degrees and it was only 70 outside. They didn't seem to notice though!

One day we headed off to the Lewis and Clark Caverns State Park. The caverns were awesome and everyone had a great time. I ended up having to exit the caverns early with three kids who had to go to the bathroom and one child who was hungry and screaming his head off. I didn't time feeding Garrett very well and needless to say he let everyone know.

On the fourth we watched the fireworks from a place called Pete's Hill. We had an awesome view of the fireworks. It was definitely an interesting night. Three of the kids fell asleep before the main fireworks show even started. It was windy and raining off and on and finally started coming down pretty good about 10 min before the fireworks were over. The four adults where all sitting their hunched over laughing because it was sort of miserable. I also thought that I smelt a skunked and as soon as I loudly exclaimed "does anyone else smell a skunk?" I realized that it was not a skunk but someone smoking a dobie...I am retarded and we got to enjoy the scent all night long!

I Am Still Here

I have post with a bunch of great photos from the holiday weekend all planned out in my head. Now if I could only find the time to get it typed out and posted! Soon, I promise!

Breastfeeding

I think that we are pretty lucky. Things have been going really well with breastfeeding. Garrett nurses every two hours like clockwork during the day and at night he goes 3-4 hours the first stretch and the 2-3 hours after that. He always initiates feeding and almost always nurses ten minutes on each side every time he eats. Since he is gaining weight like a champ (up almost a pound from his birth weight at his two week appointment) I assume that my milk is more than enough for him.

Now I am wondering how long we are going to do feedings every two hours. As grateful as I am that everything is going so well it is hard having your life run on a two hour schedule, and really since it takes a half hour to feed it is more like an hour and a half schedule. I know that eventually he will go longer between feedings as his stomach gets bigger. Since we are home and I don't really have that much to do it isn't a big deal to feed him that frequently but it does make going out and doing anything pretty hard. I have not actually feed Garrett in public yet and while it makes me nervous I know that I am going to just have to buck up and do it at some point. That point will definitely be this weekend when Brian's sister and her family come out. We have a lot planned, and most of it does not include sitting around the house.

I bought a pump hoping to get enough milk stored up that I could have at least a little for when we are out and about and just do the feedings by bottle but pumping has been harder than I thought it would be. The first day that I pumped I tried it a couple of times after feedings or when he only ate off of one side. That night he was fussy and wouldn't let us put him down pretty much from 7pm to 1 pm the next day. He was asking to eat most of the time as well. I think that he was hungry because I had pumped a lot of his feedings and my supply couldn't keep up. To top it off I really only got like an ounce and a half total that day. So I have been trying not to pump as much. In three days I have about 2 and a half maybe three ounces. That is discouraging. I know that all I can do though is keep at it and hope that it picks up.

I am also nervous to give him a bottle at this point. I don't want him to realize that the bottle is easier than nursing and start to refuse to nurse. I also don't want to hurt my milk supply by feeding him from a bottle instead of nursing or pumping.

I guess we will see how this weekend goes. I will probably throw a bottle and that extra milk that I have in the diaper bag when we go out and just see how it goes. I may use it and I may not. I am guessing not and all in all even though the freedom would be nice I am not sure that I am ready for him to have a bottle yet and risk messing up everything especially since it is going so well.