"Big Girl Panties"

This baby is potty training herself!  I cannot believe what is happening here.  Against my wishes and with little help from me, Finley is going on the potty.  It's not that I want to keep buying and changing diapers, but I am trying to prevent spending the greater part of my day watching someone else sit on the toilet! She absolutely loves to go on the potty.  She started out telling me when she had to poop about 2 to 3 weeks ago.  Well, she got pretty good at figuring that out and I actually have to believe her every time because there have only been 1 or 2 false alarms.  About 3 days ago, she came up to me and said, "Finney tee tee" (she likes to refer to herself in the third person.)  I put her on, and she went!  Her diaper was dry, I might add.  So....we put her in some "big girl panties."  They are so cute, I can hardly stand it.  It is definitely not an all-the-time thing yet (I still don't feel like hanging out in public restrooms, more than I already have to.)  But, apparently I don't have a choice in the matter, Finley is growing up!

Slinky Dog

I cannot believe this baby is already 3 months old…and more shocking than that…I have to go back to work. I am heartbroken. If I knew then what I know now, perhaps I would have done things a little differently. I wish with all my heart I could stay home. I have had so much fun and I have been truly happy the last three months. I feel like this is what I was meant to do however; it is hard to do it sitting on your furniture on the front lawn because you have been foreclosed on…So, sadly, I will return to work and the relentless influx of cases where people have been abused in some form or fashion.

This little girl is amazing. She is the easiest baby I have ever had. I know I only have two…but I thought Logan was easy. Finley goes to bed at 8:00pm and wakes up at 3 or 4am. She goes back to sleep until around 8…and then eats some more and falls back asleep. It is obvious why she sleeps so much because she is huge! I cannot believe she is already wearing 6 month clothes, and I am sure she weighs over 13 pounds. She weighed 12 at her 2 month checkup. She is a good eater, but very efficient. She only nurses for about 10 to 15 minutes total and the best part is that she also takes a paci when she is full. I am no longer the human pacifier and she can be comforted by people other than me. After several tries we have finally found some pacifiers she likes, but she is desperately trying to get that thumb in her mouth. She only eats every 3 to 4 hours, (unlike Logan’s 1 to 2 hour window) and that means I can actually get things accomplished. We can go places without having to stop and go nurse in my car. That means, we have been able to go a lot of places the past three months. Logan stayed home with us the whole time and we have taken her to the Zoo, Children’s Museum, several parks, gymnastics, shopping, and over to friends’ houses for play dates and Finley is always a good sport who lays there quietly, either sleeping or awake. She is an angel. The one thing she hates though when she is awake…is traffic…just like her dad. As long as we are moving forward in the car, she is fine, but the minute we have to stop at a light or behind another car, she starts whining. It is pretty funny, because the minute we start moving again, she is content. This baby has several aliases…it started with Slinky Dog (Logan named her this) and it has evolved to Stinky dog and stinky and Finky and little toot, tooter McGee and tooter McGruder (for obvious reasons), finkalicious, stinkarino and on and on. The funny part is that we rarely use her name when referring to her. We almost always call her Slinky Dog. “can you go check on Slinky Dog?” is a common phrase used in my home.

Thanks to my best friend’s new photography business, even though this is a second child, Finley is not short on photographs. She has already been through 4 photo sessions in the past 12 weeks. I hope we can keep this up, however, I am running out of wall space. The ironic thing is that every single time I make eye contact with her, she smiles the biggest smile you can ever imagine and even laughs too, but we cannot get her to smile for the camera. She has been smiling since she was 7 weeks old (Sept. 14 was the first real smile…not gas related) and we cannot get a good picture of it. She is a very happy baby and so tolerant of big sister wanting to “tiss” her constantly all over her face. Her “cry” sounds like a little tiny kitten, and I worry that I am not going to hear her when she wakes up to be fed. The sound I have grown accustomed to unfortunately, is the gurgling sound of snot in this little one’s nose. She is going to be amazed at what breathing actually feels like without mucus clogging up her airway. She got her first little cold at 3 weeks and finally got over it at 6…only to get it again right before her 8 week check up. She still has it at 12 weeks and I am waiting patiently for it to subside once again. I feel so bad for her and she is the noisiest breather on the planet. I have no problems hearing her breathe on the monitor since she has been sleeping in her room.

All I want to do on this last day home is to hold this precious baby. The only thing that comforts me is that my mom retires on Friday and will be taking care of her every day. No day care for this one…at least for a while. The most amazing mother on the planet will be helping me raise my baby. I have to be grateful for that.

Baby Finley

So much for getting induced…right after I made the previous post, I went to bed expecting to wake up at 5:00am for my scheduled induction…but Finley had other plans. She woke me up at 1:30 in the morning because she decided the time had come. So…after only 2 hours of sleep and about 20 to 30 minutes of some pretty regular and pretty intense contractions, ranging from 5 to 3 minutes apart, I was confident “this was it” and we left for the hospital. I checked in and was taken into some sort of holdover room that was not very comfortable to say the least. I was in a room surrounded by a bunch of other people (Grey’s Anatomy style) with only curtains separating each of us and I had to listen to other people moaning in pain. I was lying on a very hard bed with one flat pillow, freezing to death because I refused to cover with a sheet that looked like it had someone else’s placenta left on it. Gross. FINALLY, after writhing in pain for about 30 to 45 minutes someone came in to check me and I was dilated to 3cm, admitted, and apparently now worthy of a labor and delivery room. By this time it was almost 4:00am and my mom, Nicole and, of course, Ronny, were all there. No more worries about Dr. Largoza being out of town. Everything was going according to plan. Dr. Largoza came in around 7am and broke my water. I was having pretty serious contractions before that, but they were at least bearable. After that…not so much. I thought I was going to break the arms off the bed. After 3 tries at my epidural…(post back surgery)…it worked, and I felt amazing. Time seemed to go by so quickly. I didn’t even get a chance to bust out the Mad Libs with Nicole. At around 11:30, Dr. Largoza came in and said I was at 10cm and here we go. I pushed through just a few contractions with (oddly enough) casual conversation in between about Nicole’s photography….at 12:08pm, Finley Caroline arrived…all 7 pounds 15 oz and 19 ½ inches. When I first saw her…I thought, “I have seen that baby before.” To me, she looked identical to Logan….with subtle differences. She was perfect and I am sure it was the best birthday present Ronny could ever have. It was such a great experience and I am grateful that everything went so smoothly. I am lucky Nicole was there to capture some pretty amazing pictures of my new princess.

Patiently waiting...and waiting...and waiting

I can't believe this night is finally here! Tomorrow morning, I am finally having this baby girl I have been growing for the past 40 weeks...and yes, I am ACTUALLY 40 weeks. This baby is either extremely stubborn, or extremely comfortable. I, on the other hand, am not...comfortable that is. I have blown through 2 huge containers of TUMS...with heartburn every night....tonight being no exception. I feel like Finley is doing a dance routine, or P90X constantly. It sometimes feels like she is trying to birth herself out of the side of my stomach and it is rather painful, but fun to watch. Most days, I feel like I cannot breathe and I have constant contractions...not to mention it has been 100+ degrees since August 1st. There are a few good things though. I have only gained 26 pounds this time, and I wasn't sick. So, I guess it could have been worse.

The other night I thought the time had come, when I woke up at 3:oo in the morning having contractions that were 10 minutes apart. They progressed until around 4:30 when we called Ronny's parents to come over to sit with Logan and as soon as everyone was here, and ready...at around 6:00...everything stopped. We were all just sitting in the living room and I felt like everyone was staring at me wondering if I was having any pains. I felt bad that we had a false alarm, so we just went to breakfast and went about our day. Very weird, and disappointing. I guess I should also mention that we originally thought Finley would be with us on August 4th...which was my scheduled induction day. My doctor was going out of town for the 12 days leading up to my due date and we were going to try to do it before she left...but this little stubborn girl wasn't ready and my doctor didn't want to set me up for a C-section. So, we just had to see what happened and hope that she waited to make her appearance until the 16th. Ronny wanted her to be born on his birthday, the 17th...and apparently he is getting his wish, because as of now, I am one day overdue...and we are being induced tomorrow morning at 6am. I am so relieved.

Today was the first official day of my maternity leave. Ronny and I stayed home with Logan and spent some quality time with her. She is so excited about her sister arriving tomorrow. I am not sure if she really knows what is coming, but she seems to be happy about it. When we tell her Finley will be here tomorrow...she says, "and I will hold her." Logan has many names for her baby sister. She calls her, Finley Caroline, but it comes out, "Finney Taroline," or she calls her "sister" and sometimes even "Sister Caroline," which sounds like a nun is coming to live with us. It is really cute when she says things about her sister and she hugs and kisses my stomach. I hope she is excited tomorrow when she actually gets to see her. More than her being jealous, I am gonna have to worry about Logan trying to pick her up and play with her...because she absolutely LOVES babies.

Since deciding that I wasn't going to have Logan and Finley share a room, I have been working like a crazy person on this nursery and I love the results. Check out the cute bird mobile...thank you Nicole. Sometimes I go in there for no reason, but just to look at it one more time. I love this room!

This room is not the only thing I have been crazy about. Ronny has been making fun of me because I have been cleaning out every cabinet, basket, drawer and shelf for the last few weeks. I was actually surprised that today...while looking for something, I discovered one more drawer and one more cabinet that could use a little bit more organization. I think my nest is complete and I AM READY!!!

Snaggletooth

A few months ago, June to be exact…I brought home a surprise for Logan...some new crocs. She absolutely loves those ugly shoes. I was so excited to give them to her and she was wearing them all around the house. I was just about to leave to meet my mom for BINGO, when the worst thing could have happened…Logan fell while running and hit her mouth directly on a tile step. I saw it happen in slow motion and there was nothing I could do to stop it. When she started crying and saying, “my mouth…” I was panicked and my worst fear came true. Her front tooth was bleeding and pushed back. I tried to pull it forward and it wouldn’t budge. After having my husband blame me for letting her wear shoes that were too big…as if I didn’t feel guilty enough. I finally talked to the dentist and he reassured me that he gets one call a week for the same thing. He said it probably wouldn’t fall out, but was just going to turn gray…which it did. It looked weird for a few weeks and it slowly started to turn a shade of gray. Eventually it seemed to move back up even with the other tooth, but is still discolored. I was very upset at first, but now, I am used to it, and it looks cute when she smiles. I guess that is the only thing on Logan that resembles me…since I had a gray tooth as a toddler. I suppose she gets her gracefulness from me too.

Logan's eye surgery

After 2 ½ years of cleaning eye boogers and gunk out of a very uncooperative toddler’s eye…it is finally fixed. Ronny and I bit the bullet and made the decision to do the surgery. Honestly, the only thing holding us back was the fact that they were going to have to put our only precious angel under anesthesia and that, in and of itself, was enough to put it off for this long. I would rather have the eye to clean every day, than regret that I made a bad decision for vanity or convenience. But, all is well and I am glad we did it. If Finley has so much as one eye booger, we are going to start discussing the options immediately. Now that I know how to “fix” it through massage, you better believe that poor thing is going to be looking at the tip of my fingertip for the first few months of her life.

I wouldn’t say that Logan was completely excited about the whole experience. When we took her in the room the first thing we tried to do was weigh her on the scale and she was having none of that. If this was a sign of things to come, we were in trouble. Going by my estimate of 38 to 40 pounds rather than an actual weight added to my nervousness about the anesthesia. Next, they wanted us to put a gown on her and they said the “goofy juice” they gave her was supposed to relax her so she would go back with them no problem. Well, apparently they should have given her double the dose because she would not sit down on the gurney to go with the nurse. The nurse tried holding her, but said she was too heavy and had to call in reinforcements. When she came back with the Mexican Shrek I knew it wasn’t going to be good….and it wasn’t. She screamed, “no, no no, stop it!!!” the entire way into the operating room while looking at us to save her from these horrible people.

To add to my frustration about the whole experience the absolute spaz who checked us in lost my brand new driver’s license and my insurance card and then insisted that she gave it back to me. After cleaning out my entire Mary Poppins bag to be sure before I went ballistic, I asked her to double check. She told me three times that she gave it back. I was livid. I could not believe that my daughter was having eye surgery and THIS is what I had to worry about. When we were called in to the back, everything was fine and Logan was coming to. She was NOT happy and was screaming to take the I.V. out of her hand. They had to give her Demerol to calm her down. I had to lay down on the bed and hold her and she wanted that gown off and her clothes back on and she wanted to LEAVE. I don’t blame her. On the way out…last ditch effort, I told the nurse that the idiot at the front desk lost my license. When we were driving home, she called and said they found it on the OTHER copy machine. I don’t know how you can not remember something like that from 1 minute to the next, but now at least my purse was clean.

Logan’s eye was awesome and she never had any more eye boogers or eye gunk. What a relief! She just couldn’t get in the water for 2 weeks, which put a damper on our Lake LBJ trip scheduled for that afternoon. Oh, and as for the eye drops and nasal spray we had to administer 3 times a day for the next week…that requires another post all by itself. Let’s just say, it would have probably been easier to floss a stray cat’s teeth.

Bedtime Routines

I am the luckiest mom ever! I always hoped there would be a day when I could put my 2 year old to bed and she would go to sleep without the crying that gives me sweaty armpit anxiety. Well...that day has finally come (and it couldn't have come at a better time.) Logan has always been a good sleeper, but she has been absolutely perfect for the past week. Ronny is in Alaska for 6 days and counting...and it has made my life a whole lot easier that she is being so cooperative. Every night I read her 2 books and sing her 5 songs, (with a countdown of course... "2 more songs...1 more song") the last song ALWAYS being "sunshine." This kid really loves her routines. After the last song is sung (very badly I might add) she says..."good night mommy," kisses and hugs me and then lays there quietly. Last night she said, "no crying?" and I said, "no crying, and I will come get you in the morning." and that was it. I have to admit I owe it to Ronny. He is the one who started this amazing bedtime routine. I wish he was here to see it in action.