I Promise I'll Do Better

*sigh*

Well I'd like to say the "sleep training" worked like a charm but that would be a big fat lie. We have good nights and horrible ones. She refuses to go to bed before 9:30pm which takes its toll on Ray and me. But when 9:30 comes at least she's tired enough to not cry hysterically for 45 minutes like when we put her in there before she's "ready" to go to sleep.

Fact: She is her mother's (and father's) daughter.

Ray and I are both night owls. We both hate getting up in the mornings. Clara is exactly that way. Getting her up in the morning is a battle and it involves loads of crying and misery for everyone. If only the girl would go to be earlier she would save herself the pain of that 6:30am wake up call. As an adult I can hardly handle getting up that early but our schedules require us to be up until 11pm- but her's doesn't. Go figure.

Other than that she has managed to pull herself to standing without any assistance. Walking can't be too far behind now. She'll be 15 months in a week but I am not sure she'll walk before then. I guess I shouldn't be shocked at how long this is taking she's always been a little bit behind on the gross motor skills. I am hoping she will walk before summer though.

Overall she is doing very well. She was sick two weeks ago with tonsillitis and this past Monday and Tuesday she had another minor throat infection which, thankfully, did not require antibiotics. She recovered well from both bouts but I do worry about her throat and upper respitory stuff since she's had two upper respitory infections and two throat infections (not counting this minor one) in the last year plus. Thankfully, no ear infections though.

Friday she gets her MMR/Chickenpox Vax. I won't be there with her :( only Ray has time to go with her. I hope she does okay. I know that shot can be very painful for little arms. I told Ray to make sure she gets some ice cream (or a cookie) for being a good girl.

Ray and I are supposed to discuss the possibility of having another baby. This conversation is supposed to take place some time this summer. We have casually discussed in the past and while both of us would like to have another baby- finances, educational goals, and time are huge factors in why we probably won't for quite a while.

I have a pro and con list working about having another baby but at the end of the day it's going to come down to feelings and right now I am not sure how I feel because I know I am losing time and especially with the PCOS I have no idea how it will go with the next one, if there is a next one.

The New Adventures of Old(er) Clara

Clara is now 13 months old. No, she still isn’t walking but she is definitely finding her legs. Her not walking doesn’t surprise me at all. She was quite a late crawler- waiting until she was just over 10 months old to do that. I think she’ll be closer to 15 months when she finally ventures off the furniture and steps out on her own.

We have finally decided to let go and try and get Clara to put herself to sleep. I waited too long to do this with her. I should have started when she was about 7 or 8 months old. It wouldn’t be so hard right now if I had. Anyway, since I cannot do straight CIO (despite my best efforts to do so otherwise) I have taken a sort of modified CIO approach which I found in a parenting magazine recently. AND it seems to be working (well last night was only night 2 of this new routine for her). The first night she screamed bloody murder for 25 minutes until she finally exhausted herself. When she finally settled down to go to sleep she still had some pitiful sobs which broke my heart but, she did eventually fall asleep and stayed asleep through the night (score!). So last night we did it again. Ray and I made an agreement. I would give her a bath, put her in her jammies, give her the medication for her VUR and read her a story and he would actually stay with her while she wailed and finally fell asleep. BUT what happened stunned me. Not only did she not cry she barely fussed at all when he put her in the crib (I listened over the monitor). He was tapping her, singing and saying encouraging things. It still took her 20 minutes to go to sleep (and she woke up 45 minutes later but went down again easily) but she didn’t cry or fuss before hand and she managed to once again sleep through the night. Tonight is our last night with the patting and encouraging words. Tomorrow night we are supposed to move to the middle of the room and just talk to her until she goes to sleep on her own, no patting. Not sure how it will go (but I’ll be sure to let you all know).

Additionally, Clara has been a signing fool lately. She has picked up and uses consistently the signs for “more”, “milk”, “all done”, “eat” and “please” (she even uses them together- “More milk, please”). I am in the process of teaching her other signs like “duck”, “bath”, “water”, “wet”, “pain” and “diaper change” (if she just gets ½ of that sign it would be good)- I am fairly sure she knows what the signs for “don’t touch” and “no” are, even though she doesn’t use them (why would she, only mommy and daddy have to say “don’t touch” and “no”-lol). Her level of understanding and cognition has exploded lately and I am amazed by her daily. When she was younger it was much harder to tell if she really understood us but now I know she does understand and watching her communicate is so cool. She has been saying mama and dada for a little bit but now she says “du” for duck. Every time I bring her duckies out I say “who is this” and she says “du” so she is trying to talk to but I am surprised she doesn’t have more words.

We have an appointment with the ped at the end of the month for her MMR and chicken pox shot. I think I might ask Dr. DeVoe whether I should be concerned about her not having more words. She’s a great mimic but for some reason she doesn’t want to say real words. Either that or I am not noticing them. I know I probably have nothing to worry about since she clearly understands language and she signs very well.

Well, that’s all from here, for now. I’ll be updating on how her sleep routine is going. Hopefully in a few days she’ll be able to just get in the crib and go to sleep without any help from either of us.

6-12 month picture retrospective

And last but not least

Has it almost been another month? Geez

So we've returned from Disney World. And here is a taste of a few pictures from the trip. We had a pretty decent time. I'd rather not talk about what went wrong but Clara wasn't harmed by any of it, it just made for a difficult time for me. I realized a lot of things on this trip that I probably knew before going but that I now know for sure...

Anyway, here are the pictures

There will be no apologies

Well folks, I would apologize for not keeping you all up on the comings and goings of a Clara Rose but well it wouldn't make a difference would it?

So what's been up since November? Lots of things. My baby is almost a year now. I can hardly believe how BIG she is (I'll post another picture retrospective at the beginning of next month). She LOVED Thanksgiving and ate everything (including my cranberry sauce, go figure). Then it was Christmas and that was a ton of fun watching her open gifts and getting distracted by the kitties.

She isn't walking yet, heck she won't even pull herself up to stand yet but that's okay her gross motor skills have always been a little behind. But once she's up and moving no doubt she'll be all over the place. I love watching her as she eats because she enjoys it so much. She has eight teeth (soon to be nine) and looks so adorable when she smiles and laughs.

The last doctor's appoint has her at 17lbs 5oz (around the 20th percentile which is where she has been her whole life basically) and 29 inches (50th percentile). We are trying (failing mind you) to wean her from most of her bottles by her birthday (I only want to do 2 one AM when she wakes up and one PM when she goes to bed). So far we are down to about 4 a day. The only way to really do it is to send less bottles to daycare and more food/snacks for her. But I am so bad about doing that and putting together bottles is so much easier for us. But I will make an effort this week to prepare stuff for her to take (the same as I do for Ray) and hopefully that will help. I really don't want to be washing 5 and 6 bottles a day when we are in Disney. And I think honestly I can get away with bringing a few in the park with us but her mostly eating what we eat when we eat.

Which did I mention- that's what we are doing for her first birthday? Going to Walt Disney World? We go every year for Ray's birthday (5 days before Clara's) so now we have combined their birthdays into one longer/bigger trip. And we'll do it every year for her until she doesn't want go any more (and then maybe we'll stop). Ray said part of the wonderful thing about us getting married was being able to finally go to Disney World whenever we wanted. I tend to agree. It was nice spending all that couple time down there but I am really excited to see how Clara reacts to some of the stuff there too. And as she gets older it will be even more fun because she'll get to ride rides with her Daddy too.

Anyway, that's really all that's going on here. I'll try and be better about updating.

Illness

Clara is sick. Her fever is 102 today. That means in addition to a regular doctor's appointment she has to be cath'd and checked for a UTI. How fun, right? Because it's not bad enough that she's sick but then to be stuck in the bladder. Gah.

This time she's going to Hopkins. I don't care how much more it costs us to have it done there. I don't care that it's completely inconvenient to my house or my life. I will not have her screaming on the table again while an incompetent nurse trys to locate where to put the cath.

Ray is taking her to her doc's appointment at 3pm. She was just there on Friday and was diagnosed with a simple "virus" and "not to worry"- but she has since gotten worse. Last night was probably the worst night we've had with her since she's been three months old. I hope not to repeat that tonight.

And of course with all this illness going around one of us has to stay home with her and it's been Ray because I have absolutely no time to take. Life is sucky. We'll just have to hope it isn't a breakthrough UTI (that's really bad news) and that it's something that can be easily remedied (i.e. not H1N1).

I wish this post was happier.

I have to say though overall Clara has been really great. She still won't crawl-which has me somewhat concerned about her gross motor skills. Her fine motor skills are coming along great though. She's also been very iffy with food lately. Not sure why. I don't know if it has something to do with her being sick or if it's teething again (why is everything teething?) But she's a happy happy girl. LOVES being on her daddy's shoulders and playing with Aunt Jenni. I am thinking about buying her some toys she can really play with (we have a few dollies and thing but no real toys) I think she'll like that.

Christmas is coming- it's going to be interesting with her. Plus we've got some house issues to deal with so Christmas may be a bit on the lighter side. I told Ray that we really just need to wrap a few boxes and give them to Clara since she'll only want the paper and the box anyway. LOL

Well that's all for Clara updates. Sorry I have been so MIA lately. Life has been nutty. Check out my other blog for more about that.

Oh Wow

It's been a while eh?

So what's new, you ask, in the life of little Clara Rose?

She is learning to crawl. I am not sure we're ready for her mobility yet but, either way it's coming. And of course she gets cuter by the day.

She's eating some solid foods now. We're doing a baby led weaning approach which we love. It's a mess, but she's so cute eating that I could never do purees with her. She just enjoys gnawing on stuff too much. She's getting the hang of it. A lot less food on the floor and in her hair now anyway.

Clara is growing every day. I am so much enjoying getting to know her cute little personality. We have three teeth now too. She giggles so much it makes me heart melt. She's daddy's little girl.

As for me? I had my yearly GYN appt the past week. The PCOS is still running rampant. Dr. J and I talked about the possibility of having another baby. I told her that wouldn't be a for a while- as in Ray and I won't be discussing having another one until Clara is at least 2. She recommended that I go on birth control to help ease the PCOS symtoms. I agreed since the symptoms are f'ing with my life right now. I need to have some blood work done since I am being put on YAZ. I sure hope it works better for me than the last round of BC I was on.

If we have another one (which, I am not sure we will honestly since I am looking to go back to school next fall to do a very time intensive program) I will probably have to go back to the RE to do it. And although the 50mg clomid without the trigger worked last time there is no assurance that it will the next time. So needless to say, I am nervous about that. Maybe before head right back to the RE's office we'll do some trying on our own. Maybe additional weight loss and the control of the symptoms with BC will help the next shot out.

That's it here. I leave you all with a picture of Clara and her daddy: