37 weeks

Here we are! Within a few weeks of meeting our son! He is due on September 18, but we have idea when he will really show up, of course!

This pregnancy has been harder in a lot of ways.  My body has been more tired, I have had a lot more aches and pains, I've been lazier and eaten worse! Despite all that, I still have gained essentially the same amount of weight that I did with Talia, so I can feel good about that! :)

We are deep in the throes of getting the house in shape for his arrival.  We are trying for a home birth again, and crossing our fingers it works out this time.  This last weekend, our entire house was chaos, cleaning and painting and organizing. We are getting close.  The nursery needs a LOT of work still, but Kevin got the dresser painted and I did all the tiny baby laundry, so we just need to put it all back together now, and get a few last things.

         Eeeeek! This needs some help!

Talia seems pretty excited to meet her brother.  She gives him snuggles, and has started singing songs to him a lot.  She also says that when he cries, she will hold him and make him not sad! So sweet!!!! 

We haven't settled completely on a name, though I think we are close.  We will wait until we meet him to be sure though!

I'm a lot more nervous for labor and delivery this time.  I know I will do fine, but every time I think about how it went with Talia, I get pretty nervous for the pain and the amount of time it took!  Even though I had a great labor and delivery, it's all still really nerve wracking to think about doing it again, so I've been kind of avoiding thinking about it! Which means that I feel even less prepared.  Oh the vicious cycle!!!

I'm also nervous about where Talia is going to end up and if she is here while I'm in labor if it will freak her out.  We are nailing down our contingency plans with all our friends and family, but the unknown of when it's all going to happen doesn't jive well with my "make all the plans" self!!! Haha!  I've got a bag packed for her to go off to her grandparents for the day/night depending on how long not all takes, and lots of offers of help from friends, so I know it will be fine.  I'm just nervous about waking her up or her seeing me in pain.  She doesn't deal well with that at all!!!

I've been trying to relish my last few weeks with her as my only child.  We get so busy sometimes, and working full time means I don't get to spend as much time with her as I'd like.  This weekend was good though, she and I spent all day Saturday just playing, doing crafts, going to the park, reading, and snuggling!  She's the best kid, I love spending time with her so much!!!

So now we just wait!!! Hoping he stays in another couple weeks, I think we all need a little more time to prepare for his arrival!  But we are so very excited to meet him, and have our family become a family of 4!!!!

Baby boy Shaffer!

I'm a bit behind in blogging.  And laundry.  And exercise.  And a million other things. But we have exciting things coming our way, namely a baby boy arriving sometime in mid September!!!! Hooray!!!

We decided that since Talia is turning out exceptionally well, we should probably take the plunge for a second baby before we got too comfortable with life and felt like we have a handle on this whole parenting thing!  

My pregnancy is going well so far!  I will be 26 weeks tomorrow!  The first trimester was more difficult this time, as I had near constant nausea and threw up quite a lot more.  And I was waaaaay more exhausted! Like we would put Talia to bed at 7pm and I'd be out cold within  15 minutes.  Luckily that all ended around 13-14 weeks, and I've felt great since then!

Feeling so much different this time made me feel certain we were having a boy this time, and lo and behold, a boy it is!

He's growing well! In fact, measuring about a week ahead of time! He was in the 95th percentile for height, weight, and head circumference at our 20 week scan!  Not sure I'll be so lucky to have an under 8 pounder this time!! 

We are planning a home birth, and hoping it works out this time!  We really like our new midwives, who are both Certified Nurse Midwives, which means they have a lot more tools in their arsenal should things go less than ideally.  Kate has accepted her fate as my doula once again, for which we are truly grateful! She was so incredible during the whole process with Talia, I can't really imagine doing this without her!!

Talia is taking it all in stride so far!  She of course has no idea how much her world is going to change, but we talk about it all the time.  She knows baby brother is in my tummy, and that he's growing and will be coming soon! She gives him hugs and kisses and talks to him sometimes.  She also has been saying she has a baby in her tummy too, which is so cute!!!  We have been talking to her a lot about how she's a big girl, and all the things she can do that baby won't be able to do.  I'm a little (okay, a lot!) nervous about the transition for her to being a sister and not the absolute center of my attention at all times, but she's such an incredible kid, I know it will all get there eventually!

My weight gain has been good, just about even with my last pregnancy, which is incredible considering how sloth like I've been!  I take my gestational diabetes test next week. I'm just going straight for a 2 hour test this time, which will be diagnostic and save me the headache of having to do 2 tests this time!  Crossing my fingers that I don't have it, but I know this time that it isn't a huge deal and we will cross that bridge if needed.  And that it's NOT ANYTHING I DID if I do have GD.  

As for our little lady, she will be 2 years old in 2 weeks! My baby is decidedly not a baby any longer, but a full fledged toddler.  She is totally amazing!  She's incredibly verbal, speaking in full, often grammatically correct sentences.  She astounds me with the words she knows and her ability to communicate at her age.  She also is funny as all get out!  She's starting to crack little jokes, and pretends a ton. She's tall, and beautiful, and so so sweet!  We love watching her become this independent little woman, who knows how to assert herself and loves babies and eats berries by the pound and continues to be a fairly uncoordinated little toddler! She's the best!

Words words words!

Talia is approaching 17 months on Friday!  She has developed quite the little vocabularly in the last several weeks, thought it would be fun to list her words for posterity!

Baby, diaper, all done, up, down, night night, yeah, no, mama, dada, baba/papa (grandpa), Talia, eat, eyes, ears, toes, water, milk, please, thank you, phone, cheese,socks, dog, poo poo, more, moon, shoes, boots, out, hat, nose, teeth, belly button, eggs, Apple, book, bird, ball, choo choo, mine, kitty, banana, spoon

Animal sounds: moo, baa, hoo hoo, ssss, ah ah, woof, meow, elephant trumpet, mah, bock bock, gobble

That's all I can think of now! Talia is 17 months old today, and continues to be a pretty amazingly awesome little girl! We love her so!!!

15 months!

Talia is now a 15 month old toddler!  She is a walking, talking, hilarious, bright, loving, stubborn, adorable toddler!  What's new in our world?

Talia started walking!  She took her first real steps on August 9th.  It was after a busy week; she had surgery to remove a cyst on her skull  (That was a whole other ordeal that was pretty nervewracking, but we are so happy to have it over with!) and my brother Nicholas' wedding to his awesome lady Kyla, in which Talia was a flower girl!  We got home that Sunday, and Talia was supposed to be taking it easy.  Of course, she would have none of that and started taking all these steps everywhere, and toppling over left and right.  It was hilarious and exciting!

She then took quite a while to decide that walking was really her main mode of transportation, but about 2 weeks ago something clicked, and now she hardly ever crawls.  It's so so so much fun!!!  She had started "jumping" which consists of bending her knees and popping up.   She is getting pretty fast, but she still falls down A LOT!

She is really starting to become verbal.  Her signing has improved, she now uses More, Airplane, Water, All Done, Hat, and Help.  We are working on giving her some more words, as she is picking them up much more easily and it definitely helps her frustration levels to be able to tell us what she wants.  She also has a lot more words!  Her fav's are Mama, Dada, I read (ah wee) Bye Bye, Hi, Shoe, Nurse, Uh Oh, and No, which she says in the cuuuuuuutest voice ever!  She uses "ahh ahh" for all animals, except cows which say some variation of "meeeeee".  I love having her talking!

Daycare is going well, she seems to be enjoying her teachers and classmates, and having a lot of fun there.  She still comes home pretty worn out, but I think generally we feel pretty good about her going there.  It is still hard being away from her all day, but for the time being it is what we will continue with.

Sleeping is going sooooo much better!  She naps really well at daycare, and often naps for a couple hours at home on the weekend.  Kevin worked really hard on getting her to go to sleep on her own for a few weeks, and it seems to have paid off!  We really didn't want to use Cry It Out methods, but she was not responding well to me putting her to bed, so Kevin took over a couple months ago.  We stopped nursing to sleep, instead nursing first, then stories and song, then Kevin puts her into her crib.  It took a while for her to decide that it was okay for Kevin to leave the room, but now he puts her in and she gives a little whimper, but he shuts the door and she often stays asleep all night!  Wooohooo!  And she is also letting me put her to bed now, too!  Phew!

Eating tends to be a little bit of a struggle, in that she pretty much only wants to eat carbs, cheese, and fruit.  Veggies are not her thing.  Trying not to stress about it, but it is frustrating!!!!  She is, however, drinking more cows milk these days, so that is nice.  We are only nursing 3 times a day, wakeup, when she gets home from school, and before bed.  It was working really well for us both, except I got sick a couple weeks ago and had to go onto antibiotics.  She had a pretty nasty reaction to it, with a really bad diaper rash.  So we decided to just give her the last of our freezer stash of milk and I pumped and dumped.  We made it through the week, but it was hard.  Then this last week, I got a plugged duct which turned into mastitis, a breast infection requiring 2 WEEKS of antibiotics.  Ugh.  I needed her to nurse much more often to help with the clogged duct, which she was more than fine with, but then yesterday it looked like she started having the same symptoms.  So feeling a little frustrated since we are out of frozen milk.  We are going to try to power through it together and be really proactive treating the diaper rash, but if it gets too bad I will stop nursing her again.  Ugh.  I have been pretty sad about it, because I am worried that if we stop nursing for a week, then she will be weaned, and I don't think either of us is ready for that!  Ironically, I was considering weaning her next month, but with how I am feeling about it right now, I don't think that is really going to happen!  Ha!

She has her 15 month pediatrician appointment on Wednesday, so we will find out how much our girl has grown then, but dang she is TALL!  We were at the park a few days ago and ran into our neighbor who has a 2 year old, and Talia was as tall if not a little taller than her!  And she definitely eats a lot of food, just maybe not the best food! ;)  She can eat 2 whole scrambled eggs for breakfast along with peanut butter toast and fruit!  Whoa!

She has done some epic traveling the last couple months, with her first trip out of country and her first flight across an ocean!  We took her to the Women's World Cup final in Vancouver at the beginning of July, and then headed to Hawaii with the whole family at the end of July!  She did awesome on the flights, and was a pretty good travele overall!  We've done lots of hiking and she always does well wherever we schlep her!

She is really funny, she loves to make us laugh these days, and her own sense of what is funny is expanding a lot!  We are having a ton of fun watching her grow!! 

***

Update from the pediatrician:

Height 31.5 inches, 81st %ile

Weight 22 lbs 15.5 oz, 73rd %ile

 She is clearly doing great!!! :)
 

Talia is ONE!

Talia Camille is a one year old! We have a toddler pretty much on our hands! We had such a whirlwind and wonderful weekend celebrating Talia with 2 giant birthday celebrations this weekend.  For now, a few stats on our crazy, smart, beautiful, hilarious little lady!

Talia one year ago!

Talia on her birthday, at 4:26pm, the exact time of her birth!

Talia had her 12 month checkup today.  

*20 lbs 4.5 oz, a little over 50th %ile

*30 inches tall, 78th %ile

Wow!  What progress, and what a tall girl we have on our hands! She's already in 18 month pants because she's so long!  I am so so pleased with her weight, it's just not even remotely a concern for us anymore.  Phew!

Talia has 7 teeth, 4 on top and 3 on bottom.  

She can sign "all done" and "airplane" easily.  She is not interested in anything else for the moment!

She is talking up a storm!  She says mama, dada, duh (dog, duck) bah (bird, bottle, ball) and dis/dat (this/that).  She is jabbering all the time, and you can tell she wants to say a lot more!!!

She has started to stand and let go of things for a few seconds at a time.  The longest she has stood is about 6 seconds.  I am really really excited for her first steps, and hope they happen in front of us and not at daycare! :)

She crawls, cruises, dances, and climbs a over the place.  She is great at going up stairs.  We are working on down...

She loves stuffed animals, and now her baby doll she got from her aunt Lauren for her birthday!  She likes to put blankets on then and pat them, like she's putting them down for naps!  She gives them all giant hugs when she comes home from school.   It's pretty much the sweetest thing in the world.

She loves to read.  If she has disappeared from a room, she most likely is pulling books off her shelves and turning the pages.  Her favorite is "That's Not My Monkey" followed by the "Edible Alphabet."  We read a couple stories before bed most nights, as well.  She turns the pages when asked.  

She loves putting things on her head that shouldn't be there, like blocks or toys, because she knows it makes me laugh! Her sense of humor is definitely coming out, and she is a goofus!!!

She is sleeping better at daycare! She usually takes one nap for an hour and a half there, and then falls asleep on the way home for 30-45 minutes.  At home, we've been struggling a lot to get her down without me nursing her.  Not sure what that is all about!

Night sleep has been okay...not great.  She wakes up at least once, often 2-3 times each night.  Kevin has to get up a lot more than he used to, for sure!  I just don't have the energy now that I am working to do it all at night, I need the help.  He's been really awesome about it.  We are trying something new where he takes the first shift and we don't feed her, because if I go in she absolutely wants to be nursed and she really doesn't need to be at this point.  Plus, if she doesn't wake up again til early in the morning, I can try to just get up with her instead of bringing her into bed with me to get a little more sleep.  So far that part hasn't worked out.  She is waking up around 5-5:30 a lot, and that is really early if I've already been up with her twice! So it's a process.  The good news is she sleeps with both of us much better than she used to! ;)

She isn't as adventurous an eater as she used to be, but that's okay.  We just keep trying to offer things! She's crazy for all things cheese and berry.  She doesn't really like most veggies, so that's hard.

We started giving her cows milk with meals last week or so.  She's not super into it, but is drinking a little more each day.  Which is maybe an ounce or so!  So not much, and definitely not replacing breastmilk at this point.

Speaking of which, we freaking made it a year of nursing!  There were a whole lot of days where if you'd asked me if we would be breastfeeding at a year, I would have laughed (well cried, more like it!) but here we are, still going strong!!! It was my goal to at least make it one year, and I am so proud of our whole family for getting here.  It really was a team effort, I never would have made it without Kevin's unflagging support, even in the hardest days.  I know it wasn't easy for him either, so this is just as much his hard work as mine in a lot of ways.

I've been thining a lot about weaning these days.  I'm definitely over pumping while she's at school.  I'm going to keep it up until August when I go back full time, but after that I want to start dropping a pumping session every couple weeks until she's completely on dairy during the day.  I am perfectly happy to keep nursing her at night and in the morning though, so hopefully my supply will keep up enough to keep her happy to do that!  I'm not ready to give up the cuddles (and extra sleep) that those sessions afford us!!!  We shall see, Talia may have other ideas about what she would like to do!!!

Happy birthday to the greatest girl I know!  Talia, you have rocked my world foenthenlast year, and I can't wait to see what the next year brings us!  I love you so much!!!

11 months!

Talia celebrated 11 months a couple days ago.  I can't believe she is almost a year old!!!!! Every day is an adventure, she is learning all kinds of new things, communicating more and more, and just developing into such an awesome little person!

Talia one month ago!

Yesterday!

What's new in her world?  

*She says "mama"!!!! Officially her first real word, and it just melts my heart!!!  She definitely seems to have a few other words in there, like banana (nana) and all done (ah dah) but nothing as clear or consistent as "mama".

*blows kisses, claps, dances, waves bye bye, gives hugs when asked (and not, girl loves hugging!) signs all done and airplane, and sometimes up.  Still not doing more or nurse. 

*expert peek-a-boo player, and getting pat-a-cake down. Also seems to be figuring out Itsy Bitsy Spider.

*Loves music, and dances to some songs that stir her heart!  It's so cute!!!

*crawling on hands and knees a lot more!  This has just been in the last week or so. She always does it when on grass, and sometimes on carpet, but on slick floors she likes to speed on her belly!

*pulls up to standing on everything!  She is very steady, but hasn't really started doing it without holding onto an edge.

*cruises around furniture! Yay! 

*LOVES her stuffed animals, especially bears!  So much so that when she sees bears in books, she tries to hug and kiss them!!!

*seems to be enjoying daycare!  Kevin has been having an easier time with drop off and pick up! She likes her teachers and has a couple little buddies!

*has become a picky eater.  Boo.  She still loves all cheese products and fruit. Refuses meats, and most veggies.  Is okay with bread, but not pasta or potatoes.  Hmmmm.  Was hoping we wouldn't deal with this until she was a bit older, but oh well!

*loves babies and big kids, but is not really into babies her own age, and is still pretty shy around adults most of the time.

*stacks things, and enjoys taking things out and putting them back, over and over!

*discovered picking her nose. :/

*has gotten sick a lot.  She has had fevers and colds, roseola, and possibly croup this week, though it didn't seem too bad so may have just been a weird sounding cough.  Darn daycare.  Made it 9 months with nary a sniffle, and she's now been sick every week since starting school!

*napping slightly better at school, but still not great.  Napping poorly at home, too.  

*went about 1.5 months without sleeping through the night, and being extremely difficult to get to sleep! However, the last couple days have been great! She's been going through a lot of development, so we weren't surprised that her sleeping was bad!  Hoping we will get a few weeks of good sleep in again.

*nursing is, well, I don't really know anymore.  I'm not pumping as much at work, so that is disconcerting.  She sometimes likes to nurse for long periods, and other times can't be bothered.  She had her first nurse strike this week, just would not eat. It was hard, and makes me think the end is near for us.  I have mixed feelings about it.  My goal was always to make it a year, and we are definitely going to make that.  After that, we are thinking we will just let her have cows milk at school instead of expressed breastmilk.  But I plan to continue nursing whenever we are home together for as long as she wants, but I am guessing that won't be too terribly long.  I'm proud of how hard she and I worked this year, and am going to be sad to let go of it, but also really looking forward to some flexibility!

*has 6 teeth! 2 middles on bottom and 4 front teeth on top.  She hasn't been bothered too badly by the last few teeth, so that's good! But I'm glad to have a little reprieve, doesn't look like there are any poking through in the immediate future!

*not sure what she weighs these days. She feels heavier.  She's wearing 12-18!month clothes and fills them out.  Her legs are loooooooong! She high waters some of her 18 month pants already!  We should get her weight when we go in for a doctor appointment next week.  Hoping it's around 19 pounds.  She's growing though!

*loves reading, playing with blocks, going for long walks and hikes, has a blast splashing in the tub, and is generally a pretty easy going awesome little squirt!  

We've had a few adventures this month! We took her to another Sounders game, and this time she stayed awake for the whole match! Yikes!  We've taken her on a couple great hikes, and she has been super!  Kevin also had to go to Montana for work, so he spent his first nights away from her, and she and I had an adventure on Bainbridge bouncing between grandparents' houses!  We took her to Folklife, so she got to see her first concerts! She's game for pretty much anything, as long as it's before 7pm, when she turns into a gremlin! ;)