Welcome, September!

10 Reasons why this September is a big month in our family.

1) We celebrate 5 birthdays in our family! Including mine :)

2) The Cowboys regular season kicks off.

3) Jeremy's cousin is getting married; and we will be attempting our first roadtrip to attend.

4) Ryan is 3 months old this month.

5) Fall is coming, and the temperatures will be dropping.

6) This marks the month Jeremy and I first started dating in 2005.

7) Ryan will be seeing ALL 4 of his great grandmothers this month!

8) Hatch green chile festival at Chuy's.

9) Small Group is back into full swing.

10) Did I mention the Cowboys kick off their regular season? This is huge, therefore worth making the list twice :)


Hope everyone is having a great start to their September!

Disappointed on SO many levels....

Well tonight I got to watch the Cowboys play for the first time this season. I even had a brand new shirt to sport in honor of my love of America's team (thanks,dad!).

And let me just say it very quickly turned me into an emotional wreck in which I immediately turned to icecream to numb the sad, sad feeling I had. And then, to make things worse, Jeremy played a HORRIBLE joke on me. And by the way, I blame the following completely for all of the mistakes and poor playing that I saw tonight.

Hope is all I have to get me through August to (hopefully) February. It is my dream to see the Cowboys play in the Super-Bowl at Dallas. But for that to happen, my husband needs to stop sabotaging the bloodline's love of all things navy, silver, and white!

Jeremy's Blog

I update on just stuff going on with our family. Jeremy's blog has more thought provoking and funny material. Check it out if you want. He's been blogging for several years, albeit randomly.

www.somethingseventual.blogspot.com

Sleep, Smiles, and a Sweet Schedule

Over the last two weeks, life has begun to settle down a bit. Or maybe we're adjusting into the role of being parents. Our little man is growing out of the newborn stage a little everyday. It amazes me when I see how much he has grown over the last three months. He is becoming quite the happy baby!

He spends many hours in the day contentedly looking at his mobile or play yard. And instead of screaming when he first wakes up, we can actually get smiles and laughs while changing his diaper or cuddling.






Also, about a week ago we received the precious gift of five glorious hours of uninterrupted sleep. And after going back and forth for about a week, now we are pretty much guaranteed at least a five hour stretch at night! And because of this sleep, we've also been able to develop a schedule.

Ryan is now eating every four hours. So we get him up between 7 and 8 am in the mornings, I nurse him, and then we spend the next hour or so doing fun things like a bath, or reading a book, or cuddling (which is my favorite, of course). He takes a nap about 9am and again around 1 pm. When he is awake we run some quick errands and what not or Ryan plays in his swing while I start dinner and do my Five Minute Frenzy (which is another post altogether). He goes down for another short hour nap around 5pm. After spending some time with Jeremy, and sitting with us while we eat, we do a bedtime routine with the little guy, put him in his Jammies and put him to bed with sweet kisses and love from both of us. Around 10 we do a dream feed, to extend his nighttime sleep. I usually give him a bottle, and he doesn't really wake up at all, not even during his diaper change. And usually I get to sleep until 3 or 4 after doing this feeding, which is beautiful.

It has been really helpful for me to have some type of routine to look forward to. I loathe surprises. I like things to be predictable, routine, and only occasionally throw in some spontaneity. Occasionally though I'll find that he wants to sleep all day (usually accompanying a growth spurt) and I get sweet moments like this, when trying to wake him up to nurse after a nap:




And speaking of growth spurts, Ryan has started to move into his next size of clothes, 3-6 months. I have a sneaking suspicion that he won't make it to 6 months old wearing these either!


Loving this time with our sweet baby boy!

Loving the Floor Bed

I posted before that we were going to be using a floor bed (Montessori philosophy) and so far I have to say that I am loving it!

The first month Ryan slept in a bassinet in our room, but that didn't seem to be working well once Jeremy returned to work. So then we tried the bassinet in the nursery, with me sleeping on Ryan's floor bed. This was great for me, and allowed Jeremy some rest. After about a week of this though, I missed my husband -- so back to my room. After I started sleeping in our room again, I moved Ryan to napping and sleeping on his bed.

Reasons this is working well for our family so far:

1) It is very easy to put Ryan in bed, and pick him up without hurting my back.

2) We can lay down with him and soothe, while being comfortable ourselves.

3) I can nurse very easily without much disruption to Ryan's sleep in the middle of the night.

4) If the sheet gets soiled in one area, we just move Ryan to avoid changing the sheets and disrupting his sleep.

5) It has been MUCH cheaper to do the floor bed than a crib.

That isn't to say it is completely without challenges. Ryan has rolled off of the bed a few times (no more than 5) but it happens less now that he controls his movements more. I put pillows down around the mattress and that helps ease the transition to the floor. It scares him, but doesn't hurt him. The last time, he didn't even really cry when he rolled off.

Jeremy and I are going to tackle building a Montessori bed frame sometime soon. It gives just a little lip around the mattress, with a lower area in the center to still allow movement in and out of bed.

Ryan's nursery:

On another note I love, love, love this Michael Olaf mobile that I ordered from "The Joyful Child". Ryan is so smitten!

It moves with the air currents of the room, and we can use it for years. Now as a mobile for his development, and as time passes it will just be some really cool art for his room.

Sorry for the Incovenience

This post may very well come off as a rant, because it is.

So today I worked very hard to get out of the house, on time, with my baby fed and looking decent myself to pick up Jeremy to have a nice lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. Not an easy task, and I was pretty proud of myself for doing so!

After arriving, the little man was content, smiling and cooing at us from his carseat while we waited on our food. I could see he was starting to get hungry again, so I warmed his bottle and started to feed him. Meanwhile, the restaurant is starting to fill up and there are very few tables that are open. A nice gentleman got seated at the table next to ours. A few minutes later, while I was feeding Ryan, another guy, lets not call him nice gentleman, joins the guy at the table next to ours.

As he approaches the table which is 2 feet away, he says "Were there no other tables that aren't next to a baby."

I chose to ignore this comment, but the more I thought about it the more infuriated I got. I finished feeding Ryan, put him on my shoulder, patted his back for a couple of minutes while he fell asleep, and put him in his carseat and covered him with a blanket. All the while, my sweet precious baby did not make even one sound, happy, mad, or otherwise.

I'm sorry mister not nice gentleman, that I love my husband, want to have lunch with him, and God has blessed us with a child. I'm even more sorry that I don't stay in the house 24/7 now after giving birth to said blessing. And most of all mister not nice gentleman, I'm sorry that you are so bothered by a baby who does not make a sound, in a family establishment, in the middle of the day, the entire time you are seated next to us.

And come on, how can you bothered by this:

Next time, I think might just say something with a comment like that. I feel better! Thanks for listening.

Welcome, Ryan!

After a week of being on bedrest, and combating contractions with medication the doctor said "when he comes, he comes". I was expecting to have a least a week :| Within two days, I was in labor. We had known for awhile that I was a "high risk" pregnancy, and for the last week before Ryan was born I could not be left alone -- in case of an emergency.

So after the doctor took me off of bedrest and trebutaline on Tuesday -- I felt that urge to get things done. I cooked and froze meals, cleaned, did laundry, ran errands.... Fast forward to Wednesday evening, around 9 pm I started having contractions -- by midnight they were five minutes apart and the "just in case of emergency" was happening. We very quickly (without half of our things) got in the car and ran every red light to get to the Emergency Room.

After seeing a resident, they decided I could labor for awhile under close monitoring. So for the next 21 hours I labored. Around 8:30 pm the doctor noticed that something had changed -- and recommended we do a c-section in the next hour.

Ryan James Spell was born on June 3, 2010 at 9:20 p.m. For being born at 36 weeks (which is considered premature) he was a pretty healthy guy at 6 lbs 4 oz and 20.5 inches. However, he wasn't quite pink enough, and was grunting while breathing -- so he was taken to Texas Children's NICU. I saw him through the incubator as they were leaving the room, we couldn't even hold him until the next morning when he had been taken off of the machine to help regulate his breathing.

Here are some pictures from the next day....I can't post up the ones with all of the tubes/monitors as its just too traumatic for me :(

Kisses from Daddy

Mommy meeting Ryan for the first time.

Praise God for a healthy son, and for the ability to come home from the hospital all together!

* I had been writing this post for awhile -- so I will play catch up over the next few weeks with updated happenings and maybe some old drafts that are in my queue.