August 2009 Weddings
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
*new mums*
I feel like there's a ton of y'all on the board who have babies under 6 months, and I'm SO curious to hear about your little people! How have you been holding up? Biggest challenges so far? What's one thing you wish you'd known earlier?
Re: *new mums*
Well Preston will be a year old 2 weeks from today so not sure If I should be posting but o well. I am so sad our first year is almost over. I think the biggest challenge has been juggeling 2 kids. Trying to give both the same amount of attention. Also not letting preston get away with stuff just because he is a baby. Preston is a major momma's baby, but Jordan was use to having me all alone. I am so proud of how Jordan has stepped up to a big brother. preston worships the ground Jordan walks on and tries to do everything he does. Jordan is wonderful to preston. He plays with him and loves on him all the time. He told me a few weeks ago he doesn't know how he ever lived without preston. It made me melt.
Preston is something else. He is cute, tiny, VERY loving, and michevious. He climbs on everything. He has an attitude and a temper like no other. Just for fun here are few recent pictures of his latest stunts.
I am telling you this kid loves to climb on anything.
This is the picture on his invitation for his party.
He loves to watch tv with brother as long as he can have the remote.
The biggest challenge for us was breastfeeding and the lack of sleep early on. My milk took 7 days to come in so we had to supplement with formula because she was getting dehydrated and losing too much weight. It tooks days before we knew that and since she was hungry all the time, she wasn't sleeping and neither were we. Then she started sleeping better but the pedi said we had to wake her to feed her every three hours. Well it took an hour to BF her, another 15 minutes to fill her up with a bottle, 15 minutes to burp her, 30 minutes to an hour to get her to sleep, she would fall asleep and we'd have to wake her and repeat an hour later.
I wish I had known how hard BF'ing is and how much it hurts initially. I wish someone had told me that it's normal for them to want to be on the boob all the time except when they're sleeping. My supply was always low and I could never keep up with her so we had to keep supplementing. Then I got sick, my supply really tanked because I had to pump and dump and couldn't BF because of the med's, and when I was ready to BF there was little to no milk. I feel like a huge failure because we only made it to three month's and even then I had to supplement all along.
Things are so much better now. Olivia sleeps through the night, she's really mellow and rarely cries, she's healthy and eats like a champ, and is such a happy girl. The only times we have difficulty is when she goes through a growth spurt and during the wakeful periods and even then, they don't seem to last too long. I don't think things could be any easier although I know it will be different once she starts teething.
The biggest challenge for me was not having a lot of time to prepare for Myles' arrival. The second biggest was/is the lack of sleep.
With Myles being a preemie he eats more frequently than other babies his same age. he has a really fun personality, and doesn't fuss or cry much unless he's hungry or wet.
The other hard part is when people ask Sean if he's babysitting when he's with Myles.
We're doing pretty well! It helps that V has been able to work from home most days though. The days when he's out, and I'm alone, are challenging. I think Darian is in the middle of a growth spurt and a fussy period (they say it peaks at 6 weeks) but I feel like we've really gotten into the swing of things. As for sleep... I have to say I'm surprised that it hasn't been as difficult to deal with the sleep as I'd thought. I haven't had a full night's uninterrupted sleep yet but I guess I've adjusted, and I feel like I'm still functioning pretty well.
I think that the biggest challenge was dealing with the baby blues at the beginning. The hormones were crazy, compounded by the new experience of focusing SO much on one thing that you completely forget to take care of yourself. I could barely recognize myself, crying randomly all the time. Fortunately, V was super supportive which helped a lot... and katsblaze and I chatted for a bit too, which also helped!
I wish I had known how insane the first few nights would be. He'd scream and scream all night and we honestly had thoughts of regretting this whole baby business. I knew we'd be missing out on sleep, but I didn't know the explanation for why he'd be so unconsolable. (It turns out, the first couple of nights, baby slowly realizes that he's out of the womb, and is really, really upset about it. So he demands to nurse constantly so that he can be close to mom. I wish I had known that I was supposed to keep nursing him that night.) It would have been nice to know that it was normal. The hospital actually gave me a booklet that had a page explaining all of this in detail but I didn't read it till later. I wish I had read it earlier, lol.
Baby #2: Surprise BFP 9.19.12, EDD 5.24.13, natural m/c 10.19.13 at 9w
Baby #2: Surprise BFP 9.19.12, EDD 5.24.13, natural m/c 10.19.13 at 9w
I just want to say all of you ladies are amazing and are ALL doing a GREAT job!
StarSailor: Don't let BF get you down, you did the best that you could, and your little girl is getting what she needs either way. Trust me, I understand the disappointment. I only made it 5 or 6 weeks.
MO: I HATE it when people say babysitting. NO Ryan is not babysitting, he's being a farther.
Ringy: Glad to hear things are better, keep up the great work mama!
ZOMG, you have to fart babies?
Mo - Some people just don't know how to keep their mouths closed. Sigh.
Starsailor - There used to be wet nurses for a reason! I think the whole "breast is best" campaign glosses over the fact that, for many women, it's not a possibility. You're an awesome mum.
Crystal - That's too cute that he has to hold the remote!
I love hearing about this stuff guys.
Alyson & Phil | Planning Bio | Married Bio!
Dates & Quinces Blog
I wish I had known that postpartum depression wasn't just crying all the time. There's other types. I definitely wasn't handling the baby well in the beginning. There were many times I really had to take the advice of the nurses and just let him cry in his crib until I could compose myself. Even though it's easy to console Jackson, it's not so easy to constantly hear him crying. I wanted to rip off my ears and bury them in the backyard many times.
I am a totally different person when I don't get my sleep. He's still waking every 3 hours at least. Thankfully, DH takes my pleas seriously and gives me a break a few nights a week to just take a nap or get out of the house for a few hours. I come back so refreshed and loving on Jackson again.
I feel your pain on BF. Unfortunately, with all of our problems in the beginning, I never got to feed from the breast. I've been pumping since day 1. I'm grateful he's still getting milk, but waking up to a pump or controlling your day around a pump is very exhausting. We're fighting with how much to feed him now, trying to figure out when he's full and when he's going to puke it all up because he ate too much.
I'm still struggling with dealing with the fact I don't feel like he's mine and like I got jipped out of the whole birth experience. I'm not sure when or if that feeling will go away. DH interacting with him or telling me he's so amazed we made him seems to help a bit.
Ha, I don't have to try to make Olivia fart. She does it on her own all the time.
Thanks kaesha. I know that the most important thing is that she is eating well but on the days I allow myself to dwell on it, it really gets to me.
Snoopy, some of the ladies on GP Moms were recently talking about feeling the same way after having c-sections. They talked about attending meetings to come to terms with their experience. If it's something you're ever interested in, here's a link to the website. http://ican-online.org/
RE: Farts
I have accidentally "Farted" Myles. When he was having really bad gas (before we changed his formula) I had to burp him over my knee to get the most gas possible out, half the time it resulted in farts instead of burps.
Today at Myles' appointment we found out he's in the 75th percentile for height and weight, and the 90th for head circumference, we didn't expect him to catch up and surpass the average so quickly!
It's crazy how we've learned to survive on such little sleep. He's getting much better at the night time sleeping though.
This is what Sean says to people dumb enough to say something to him.
Edmund is doing very well. We had a small setback with him being allergic to the tape that held the NAM in place so we had to stop using it for a couple days. Well in just a couple days it didn't fit anymore and we had to have a new one made. Now the new one is working just as well as the first one. Other than all that he is doing great. He is gaining weight like a champ and is overall a very happy baby.
Things have been quite a struggle for us. With weekly doctors appointments and just the wait on when surgery will be has been extremely frustrating. I'm keeping my ticker for the countdown to surgery on September 20th as a hopeful that it won't be rescheduled later due to the setback above which put us 2 weeks behind.
Our challenges have mainly been feeding related. He has to use a special bottle because of his lack of suction and that bottle can be very frustrating at times. I have tried several others and nothing has worked anywhere near as well as the crappy one. We do have one other option but we have tried it a couple times and with the appliance in his mouth the nipple is just too big to work well for him and he just ends up frustrated.
I don't know why really but I wish I had known that clefts ran on Hs side of the family. Maybe I could have prepared myself more for the possibility that we had a slightly higher chance of it occurring.
My MIL had this happen a lot to her, when DH and his Sister were little. She would just give people a look and say, "no," and they would be embarrassed.