10 Months

Quincy turned 10 months old two days ago. She likes to get creative while riding in the shopping cart. 

She took her first steps a few days ago!! I was super excited. She has been able to stand unassisted for a couple of weeks now. She stood up and I let go of her and scooted away and then she took three or four steps toward me. She hasn't done it since. She thinks it's really funny to stand up and have me scoot away from her and she just laughs and flaps her arms until she falls over. She must be trying to fly. She can bend over and pick things up and still stand back up but she won't take anymore steps! She likes to climb up the stairs. She hasn't figured out that she can't go down them face first though. She always stands up in the bathtub to try and play with the spout and I keep telling her no but she doesn't care. She does it over and over again after I pull her down and tell her to sit, and then she gets really mad and I take her out. Bath time used to be pleasant and easy, but this week it hasn't been! 

It's so fun to watch her figure things out. I stacked two of her toys on top of each other and then I watched her try to do the same thing. She kept missing but it was so fun that she was trying to do what I had shown her. I even caught a few hours later trying to stack some of her other toys. We need to get her some blocks so she can learn to build towers. 

She loves to drink out of my water bottle still. Kelly went and bought her her own cute little camelbak. It's purple with pink butterflies. She still chooses my water bottle over hers though for some reason. It's as big as she is! She learned to drink from a straw really well after we gave her some baby food pouches. Now she drinks a ton of water. She likes to take a drink after every bite of food it seems. She just sits in her high chair and sucks on her straw until she has to stop and pant and catch her breath. Then she does it again. She's so cute when she drinks from a straw. She furrows her eyebrows and her cheeks suck in and out. I need to take a picture because I seriously love her face when she does it. Kelly gave her a drink of mountain dew at Costco the other day. She liked it obviously. Here she is trying to find it. 

She loves to empty out drawers. She doesn't even look at what she's taking out half the time, she just throws everything behind her. I clean up the same messes multiple times a day. She gets in the bathroom drawers every day when I'm trying to get ready. It's better than having her get into the toilet paper or the toilet. She also likes to play in the shower curtains. 

She has gotten a lot more talkative. She yells a lot when she's doing something she likes. I picked her up from the Kids Klub at the gym the other day and she was going nuts playing with a toy kitchen. She was opening and closing the cupboards and banging on it and screaming super loud. They told me she does it all the time. Sometimes I catch her doing it on the TV monitors they have around the gym that are hooked up to the cameras in the Kids Klub. 

The other day Kelly walked in the door from work and she said "dad!" She gets really excited to see him. She knows it's him coming in when she hears the front door. She's also a lot more snuggly than she used to be. She'll lay her head on down on us for a few seconds at a time. Never for more than a minute, but that's a lot more than she used to do! She'll sit on our laps if we're watching the baby channel on TV. Those shows are seriously so weird but she likes them for some reason. 

She has been sleeping through the night for this whole week. For about six weeks she was waking up every 2-3 hours and crying until I came in and rocked her back to sleep and I got tired of it. So at first I tried letting her cry again which helped a little. I'd let her cry until she got really upset and then I'd go back in and give her her binki and she'd calm down and go back to sleep. What made the big difference I think was that I no longer nursed her in her room before nap time or bed time with the lights off and her blanket and her binki close by. I leave all the lights on so she wakes back up when she's done and then I lay her in her crib and give her her binki and her blanket. Then I turn the lights off and walk out. That made a huge difference. She still wakes up around 5 or 6 and I let her nurse and then she's usually up for the day by 7. She takes a short nap around 9 and then a longer one at 1:30 and then goes back to bed at 7 at night. I can lay her down for her first nap without rocking her at all and she usually goes to sleep on her own. I love sleep. 

She knows what "no" means and she understands "come here." She forgets quickly though and has to be reminded every few seconds not to do something or that she needs to come here, haha. I can't believe how much she has changed in ten short months. People told me that pregnancy would go by fast, it did not. After the baby comes out, that's when time flies! Being parents is the best. 

9 Months

I am so not on the ball! Quincy turned 9 months old last Tuesday! It's not like I'm super busy or anything, it's the fact that when I know I need to do something on a certain day or by a certain time, it kind of feels like homework so I put it off. It's pathetic, I know. That gives you an idea of what I was like in college. And high school, and all school, ever. 

That's me three days before Quincy was born. I thought it'd be fun to compare 9 months in, and 9 months out!! I can't believe she's actually been with me for 18 months. 5 weeks post conception, the baby's heart starts to beat. Her little heart has been beating for a year and a half!! Amazing. 

As Quincy grows, she just gets more fun!! Her little personality is so funny to me. She is very busy! She follows me all over the house. We put gates up to block her off from the kitchen and the stairs, but man she really loves the kitchen. If I have the dishwasher open, she wants to grab all the dishes out. So I either shut her out of the kitchen or give her snacks and leave her in her high chair. She LOVES taking everything out of the drawers in the kitchen. She used to only empty out the bottom one, but now she's figured out how to get to the next one up. So I clean up the kitchen like three times a day. I could just shut her out but she is learning and it's fun to watch her. She also loves the bathroom drawers. Long gone are the days I could go to the bathroom in peace. If I shut the door, she cries because she feels left out or something. If I leave it open, she crawls right up to me and stands up right in front of me banging her hands on my knees and stares at me. I just feel like I shouldn't be looking into someone's face that closely while I'm going to the bathroom. She always heads for nasty stuff in the bathroom like the plunger and the garbage. So gross. I spray everything with 409 regularly just in case she sneaks past me and gets to it. 

She likes to crawl even in the bathtub. The bath toys I gave her aren't enough, she needs to get to my shampoo. She even stands up in the bathtub, and in shopping carts. So now she rides in the basket of the cart most of the time. 

She likes to help with the laundry too, by pulling all of the clothes out of the basket piece by piece. The other day, I was folding laundry and she was on the ground, pulling all the clothes out and she started playing peekaboo with me! I've never really played it with her, but she had a shirt or something and she would hold it up in front of her face and then pull it down and smile. She did it like twenty times in a row. Now she does it at least once a day with random objects like my cell phone. I have an iPhone 6 so it does pretty much cover her whole face, haha.

She walks along the furniture pretty well now. For the last month or so she wouldn't go around the corners of the coffee table, but Kelly kept trying to lure her around them by placing his phone just out of her reach until she would go around the corner. After a day or two she did it. Once she got it, the next day she just kept smiling and doing laps around the coffee table, it was so cute!! She was very excited once she realized she could do it. 

We took a little family vacation to SunValley, ID this last weekend. We just wanted to get away for the weekend, and we'd never been to Sun Valley so we thought we'd go see what it was all about. We planned our trip a few months ago. We knew we wanted to take a vacation this fall, and our plan is to try to do something at least once a year. Doing stuff together as a family is what makes memories, and keeps you close together, I think. So I hope we always get to have fun and that our family will always enjoy going places and doing things together. 

 That was my hat when I was a baby :)

It was really cold there!! We stayed at the Tamarack Lodge in Ketchum, and it was right in the middle of everything so we just walked most places we wanted to go to. But it was 5 degrees on Saturday morning, and I asked Kelly if it was child abuse or something to have Quinn in the stroller while it was that cold! She was pretty bundled up, but my face was numb so hers probably was too, although she never indicated if it was bothering her. Then I saw a few other people with their babies in strollers and I didn't feel bad anymore. The people there live a different lifestyle compared to the one we live in Pocatello! The other strollers I saw were super fancy jogging strollers, probably with a leather hand grab, and we had a plain old Graco stroller. How embarrassing. Just kidding, our stroller is great. We went into a few stores and in one of them was a little girl who was probably two and she was wearing Uggs. Quinn was wearing little boots from Kmart, they were $12.99. Later, we were in a restaurant and it was kind of dark and a lady was like, "oh, your baby's little Uggs are so cute!" I guess they just assume? I don't have anything against Uggs. I just don't want to spend $100+ on shoes when they grow out of them after one season. We went to breakfast one morning and there was a little family in front of us waiting to order. They had a little boy and then a tiny baby asleep in her carseat. The mom was super skinny. I could hardly believe she had a baby that young. Then she ordered kale with quinoa for breakfast. I got a cinnamon roll with a burrito, haha. Which tells you everything you need to know about why I look the way I do, haha. Anyways, Sun Valley is beautiful. I'd love to go back when it's warmer and do some hiking or something. 

I saw Quinn start dancing for the first time today. A commercial came on with a song and she started waving her arms up and down with a smile on her face. It was so cute!! 

Also, she totally knows what the word "no" means. She usually stops what she's doing when I say it, but then looks up at me and jabbers something, and then she starts to do it again. 

She is much more coordinated. She can pick up cheerios and eat them all by herself! 

She says "mama" a lot now, or she says "mamamamamama" or "mahhhhmm!" I think she knows what it means. Even if she doesn't, it's still so cute to have her crawl up to me saying it. She allows us to hold her a lot more than she used to. She will sit on my or Kelly's lap and watch TV for a little bit, or play with a toy. She used to never sit still. Also, she needs me to sing her to sleep quite often now. It calms her down. Nothing used to calm that child down. I sing two songs to her, one is called "Angel Lullaby" and my grandma used to sing it to me when I was little. The other one is called "What Heaven Sees In You." It's an EFY song. I used to listen to it while I was pregnant and cry my eyes out. Sometimes I still tear up while I sing it to my sweet little girl, but it just represents everything that I want for my baby. I hope she remembers the lyrics of the song long after she gets too big for me to sing her to sleep and that they help her make the right choices so that she can be happy. 

When Quinn was born, both of her tear ducts were clogged. One cleared up pretty quick, the other stayed plugged until about a month ago. It finally cleared up. And then she got a cold, and both of her eyes got pretty goopy again. One cleared up after a week, but the other wasn't- the same one that had just recently unclogged. Then her eye started swelling up and it was so goopy she couldn't open it in the mornings. I took her to the doctor and she had an ear infection in one, with one starting in the other, and her eye was infected. They put her on augmentin to kill the infection and unfortunately that gave her diarrhea. I had to clean up blowouts almost daily for the first time since she was a newborn. Not fun. Especially now that she is mobile and her poop can get places. Her eye looked better the day after we started her antibiotics though. It's completely cleared up now. I think they upset her tummy because she's been waking up twice during the night. I had my first night of uninterrupted sleep the day she turned 9 months old, but she hasn't done it since because that next day she started the antibiotics. Today is the last day of them so I'm hoping for more nights of uninterrupted sleep soon! 

An update on me, I guess it really does take 9 months for your body to get back to the way it was. Obviously everyone is different but I finally am feeling like myself again. I've noticed little things are back to the way they used to be before I ever became pregnant. Like my voice isn't as nasally. It's nice. And I don't get as angry, haha. I lost five more pounds last month without really changing much about the way I work out or eat. Quinn's nursing slowed down quite a bit so I guess my hormones finally decided they'd let my body let go of a little more fat. So now I'm 3-4 lbs away from my pre-pregnancy weight. Also I fit back into my old skinny jeans. Things still aren't the same though, my hips are probably just permanently wider. It is what it is! I feel really good. 

We are all doing great!! Just living and loving life :) 

8 Months

Quincy Grace turned 8 months old last weekend. She got three more teeth, so she has six now. Two top ones and four bottom ones. She actually bit me on the shoulder a couple of times, I hope that doesn't turn into a habit. Her teeth are pretty short still but they are sharp. She crawls everywhere now. A few weeks ago she started army crawling. She didn't like to let me see her though, if she knew I was close she would just cry until I got her where she wanted to go. Probably because she knew it was faster than getting there on her own. 

She has pulled herself up to her feet a couple of times this week, but once she's up she's not really sure what to do next. We had to get baby gates up so that I could leave her downstairs while I shower and not worry about her going into the kitchen. She likes the stools and the other day she pulled one down on her face when I wasn't looking. 

She still wakes up once or twice at night, but her naps are usually longer now so I'm okay with that. She doesn't nurse before every nap either, so I think we have good sleeping habits so far. I had to take the bumpers off of her crib because she was destroying them. She broke one of the strings off of it. I caught her using it to push her feet on so she could push herself up a couple of times. With the bumper gone, she throws her binkies out of the crib every night. When she wakes up I almost always have to move the crib away from the wall and find one of her binkies. They are usually all in the same spot though, so I don't know what that's about. 

She still loves water bottles of all kinds. She grabs mine all the time and chews on the spout. I finally found her a sippy cup after trying a couple of different ones. She doesn't take a bottle and I didn't know how to get her to drink enough. The first one I got leaked everywhere and she pretty much just dumped water all over herself every time she had it. I tried one with a straw and I tried to teach her how to drink from it but she hasn't picked it up yet. I finally found one that she can drink out of but is also leak proof so she doesn't soak herself with it. 

I bought some baby finger foods this month as well. I figured she should learn how to feed herself a little bit. When I would pour the little puffs or fruit melts in front of her in her high chair, she just looked at them. She didn't know what to do with them. Then I went and bought some veggie straws from costco, which are longer, and she grabbed those and put them in her mouth right away, and she made the connection that they were food. She munches them down until she hits her fist, and then she tries to get the last part out of her hand. She's kind of getting it. Since she's been eating those she has been a lot closer to being able to eat the little puffs and melts on her own. I love watching her try and figure out how to position them in her fingers right without dropping them. Her coordination isn't quite there yet. 

 Babies are seriously so cute when they sleep with their butts up in the air!! 

My mom came to visit last weekend and we went down to Utah to go shopping. Quinn was a great little shopping buddy. She got tired of the stroller pretty quickly so then she rode around on my hip in the sling for most of the time. That worked out though because then we piled the stroller up with our shopping bags and pushed them around. She grabbed anything she could reach. She dove for the things she couldn't reach. She would literally bend over backwards trying to touch things. 

We took jars of baby food with us in the diaper bag and then whenever we stopped to eat, we fed her in the high chair at the restaurant or in the stroller. She loved being in the stores and the restaurants. She couldn't get enough of watching what people were doing. She would turn around backwards in the high chairs so she could watch people. She does that when she rides in the shopping cart too. I usually try to buckle her into those things, but for some reason they are always super tight! Yes, I know they can be loosened. Even all the way loose though, they barely go around her belly. What kind of kids are they thinking ride in those carts? 

I just love this outfit. She gets all dressed up most days, because I love doing it! She looks more put together than I do. Maybe she makes me look better. 

She has been pretty clingy lately, and she likes me to sit on the floor and play with her. She used to not even notice where I was but now she crawls over to me and attempts to climb up me. I love it. I love playing with her. Even though she thinks that my hair is a toy and that my face is a stepping stone for her to try to get wherever she is going. She makes me laugh every day. She blows raspberries all the time and sprays me with spit, and it's so cute. She squeals as high pitched as she can. She hums while she eats. She sings in the car. And I just love her. 

VBACs, TOLACs, & ERCs

VBAC: Vaginal Birth After Cesarean
TOLAC: Trial Of Labor After Cesarean
ERC: Elective Repeat Cesarean

My next birth is something that I have thought about every day since Quinn was born. When I went in for my six week check up, the doctor who performed my c-section said I had a small pelvis and guessed that if I were to attempt a VBAC, I would have a 13% chance of succeeding. Those aren't good odds. At the time, Kelly and I just accepted it and decided that I would just deliver the rest of our children via cesarean. I never thought that I wouldn't be able to deliver babies normally, but at least I could have babies, right? I'm still one of the lucky ones. I kind of went back and forth, maybe I would attempt it, maybe I wouldn't. I think that at that time, the only reason I was considering attempting another normal birth was based on how much I hated recovering from a c-section. It seriously sucks.  The first few days of Quinn's life, I couldn't get up when she cried without someone helping me. I'm her mom, I'm supposed to be able to get to her when she needs me.

Well, Quinn got older and we had always said that once she was a year old, we were going to start trying for baby #2. She turned six months old, and I realized that I was getting so close to her turning a year old and I was starting to freak out. I was going to have to get pregnant again so soon! I finally confessed my fears to Kelly and he was like "Uhhh.. we don't have to have another baby until you want to." So then I felt relieved and kind of dumb, haha. Nobody is making me have more children right this minute. I also realized that I needed to find out as much as I could about all of these birthing options.

I had to have a wellness check up or whatever those appointments are called where they do a pelvic exam every year. I questioned the doctor at the time on his opinions about VBACs. He told me he generally didn't have a problem with them, but then when I told him that I was told that I have a small pelvis, he made it sound like I wouldn't be a good candidate. He said good candidates are usually those who had to have a c-section because of a breech baby, or a cord prolapse. After that appointment I decided I needed to find out all that I could about my chances of birthing normally.

Why is the VBAC rate so low? It's only around 8% of women who have had prior c-sections that choose to do VBACs. ERCs are basically considered benign by the general public and some doctors and they really aren't. I'll get into that later. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) says: "Attempting a VBAC is a safe and appropriate choice for most women who have had a prior cesarean delivery, including for some women who have had two previous cesareans." If it's safe, why is nobody doing it? There are some guidelines in place from ACOG that say that facilities had to be completely prepared in case of an obstetrical emergency. Not all hospitals have an anesthesiologist on the floor 24/7, so they don't allow VBACs. I'm not sure whether the interpretation of the hospitals just varies on this one.

60-80% of women who attempt to VBAC will be successful. I don't think that this means the other 20-40% of failed attempts die or lose their baby, because uterine ruptures occur .5-1% of the time. I'm guessing this means that their labor stalls or something happens where the doctors decide that it's no longer save to continue laboring, and they perform a c-section. TOLACs have a maternal mortality rate of 3.8/100,000 births.

First of all, the biggest risk people talk about with TOLACs is uterine rupture. You could have a uterine rupture, and your baby will suffer severe brain damage or die. How is uterine rupture detected? Signs include: fetal bradycardia, increased contractions, new onset of uterine pain. The most common sign is the fetal heart rate abnormality. Once the uterine rupture occurs, I found two different statistics on this, you either have 16-17 minutes or 10-37 minutes to get that baby out before it gets serious brain damage or dies. I'm guessing that they don't take the time to give moms a spinal before that emergency c-section. Knowing how bad the incision hurts the day after getting it, I can't imagine getting one without being numbed. My friend had to have one and she said they strapped her to the table. Awful. I found these statistics from the 2010 NIH VBAC Conference: of women who have uterine ruptures, 6.2% (1 in 16) result in infant deaths. Mothers who deliver at term, 2.8% (1 in 36) result in infant deaths. So I'm not sure what the difference is, maybe in the first statistic, mothers were induced? In the second one, the moms were maybe allowed to go into labor on their own? I don't know.

Like I said earlier, ERCs are generally considered to be harmless by most people. They aren't. ERCs have a maternal mortality rate of 13.4/100,000. There are quite a few risks involved, but perhaps the biggest one is the risk of placenta accreta. I had never heard of this until a few months ago. This condition occurs when the placenta attaches to the uterus right where the scar tissue is. The placenta can't get proper oxygen from the scar tissue, so it burrows deeper into the uterine wall until it finds oxygen. In some cases, if even goes through the uterine wall. Once baby is born, the placenta fails to detach properly, part or all of it remains attached after delivery and severe hemmorhaging occurs. 90% of patients with this condition require blood transfusion. 40% require more than 10 units of packed red blood cells. This condition is generally detected during pregnancy. This condition has a 7% maternal mortality rate or 1 in 533, (I found two statistics for this one too). It has a 71% hysterectomy rate. I was surprised when I read the hysterectomy statistic though because from what I read on ACOG's website, almost every time they have to do a cesarean hysterectomy in order to save the mom's life. In some cases, if the mother wants more children they may attempt to remove the placenta surgically, but that comes with a lot more risks. ACOG says that the occurrence of placenta accreta has been rising with the higher c-section rate. Of 39,244 women who had c-sections, 186 of them had cesarean hysterectomies. I found two statistics for the chances of this occurring: after 2 ERCs it's either .57% or 5.77% I found those on two different websites so I'm not sure. The first one definitely sounds better though. This risk goes up with each ERC, so family size is definitely something to take into consideration.

Why don't doctors talk about this? All they ever tell you is that you shouldn't VBAC, because your uterus could rupture. I think that doctors like to be in control. If they can go in, get that baby out and sew you back up nice and tight, then they have done their job. Healthy mom, healthy baby for the time being. If they have to sit back and let your body do it's thing, it's hard for them to know exactly what's going on.

A successful VBAC has fewer complications than an ERC, but a failed TOLAC that ends in an emergency c-section has more complications than an ERC.

Fun stuff.

They told me I have a small pelvis. Quinn's head was stuck in me and the doctor had a hard time getting her out. So what is the deal with cephalopelvic disproportion? Basically that means that the baby's head is too big for the mom's pelvis. At first I had a hard time finding out much about this subject. What I did find is that this is actually pretty rare in the US these days. It usually happens because of malnutrition in the mothers that leads to bone structure abnormalities. The only thing I could find that made sense to me, is that the baby being positioned incorrectly can lead to the pelvis failing to make room for baby's head to pass through. During labor, the body releases hormones to relax the ligaments of the pelvis allowing it to expand. There is no way to know whether my pelvis would have expanded more if I had been allowed to go into labor on my own. But I do know that Quinn was posterior, or sunny side up. I definitely think it is possible that this is why my pelvis didn't spread far enough. She was correctly positioned before my labor started, but at some point she got stuck the wrong way.

ACOG says: "The chance of having a cesarean delivery is greatly increased for first-time mothers who have labor induction, especially if the cervix is not ready for labor." Well, my cervix certainly was not ready for labor. I was at a 0 and very hard. I had high blood pressure at the end of my pregnancy, and after refusing to take the prescribed beta-blockers, they wanted to induce me. I understand why they wanted to, I had really bad anxiety with each doctor visit during the last weeks of my pregnancy. I had never had a baby before, so I was kind of freaking out! Plus, since my blood pressure was rising, I felt like I had to stay calm or else I would get a bad reading!! So of course I couldn't stay calm. They got two really high readings on two different days, so they worried and induced me. They said I might have a seizure. A few hours after I had settled into my hospital room, my blood pressure went back down to a safer range. I really believe there was no medical need for me to be induced. Baby was fine, I was fine. So right now, my I strongly feel that I have a good chance of being able to birth babies normally. I think that I will probably have high blood pressure again towards the end of my next pregnancy (my mom always had this happen, and she delivered four healthy babies normally), and I will have to just either learn to calm down or put my foot down and tell my doctor that I don't need medication for it, and I don't need to be induced. I think that when my body starts to go into labor, we will check and see that the baby is positioned properly, and if he/she is, then we will go ahead and let me labor. I plan on hiring a doula for my next birth, statistically, births that are coached by a doula are much shorter. I would definitely need time to be on my side.

Something else that bothers me, a lot of doctors tend to scoff at things that midwives do. There are seriously so many things that can be done when a baby is turned the wrong way. Why don't doctors do that?! They want you to be lying on the bed when you push your baby out, because it's easier for them to catch the baby. Squatting can increase pelvis size by up to 30%. That's significant. Somewhere along the way, a lot of invaluable birthing knowledge has been forgotten, and now some women are paying for it with their lives. The US is now ranked 50th in the world for their maternal mortality rate. For every 100,000 births, 21 women die here in the US. We should be better than that.

I know that interventions save moms and babies. I am very thankful for modern medicine. I also know that interventions occur unnecessarily all too often, causing problems that could have been avoided.

I know that I am one of the lucky ones. My baby is here, I get to hold and nurse her. I thank God every day for that blessing.

Most of the information for this post comes from ACOG's website. I initially began researching on www.vbacfacts.com and then I checked ACOG to back up most of the stats I found.

Pants

It's been 7 months since I had my baby. That's a long time. Especially when I consider the fact that those jeans that I got into three months post partum are still the only pair of pre-pregnancy jeans that I can get on. I never wash them. Unless I spill something on them. They shrink when I wash them and then I have to stretch them out again until they are finally comfortable. This isn't as gross as it sounds because I only wear them when I leave the house which is usually only for 1-2 hours at a time, to grocery shop or for the occasional outing. As soon as I get back home, it's back into my yoga pants. 

These jeans don't even fit that well, which is probably obvious considering I try not to wash them, if I sit down I better be wearing a long shirt or else my post baby butt will be coming out the top. A few months ago, I was really excited that it wouldn't be too long before more jeans and my old pencil skirts fit again. I have 3 or 4 skirts that still don't fit so I usually wear stretchy clothes to church. That was a few months ago and my pants still don't fit. So now I'm thinking, should I just go buy new pants? If it's going to take this long, every time I have a baby, to get into my old jeans then I should probably just get some bigger pants, and skirts, right? Especially when I look at those jeans that fit and notice that they are wearing really thin in some places and are about to rip.

 Ugh. I mean, what are people even wearing these days? Last year, I was in college and I felt like I knew what was going on in the world. Now, my days consist of outings to the gym, walmart, winco, and Costco. One of my fears is that I'll be like one of those people who never moves on from the styles they wore in high school and college. I'm 23 but I feel so old. Right now, my wardrobe consists of v-necks from target and those one pair of jeans. Is that embarrassing? When I get dressed to leave the house I catch myself thinking things like, maybe I can find a shirt that I could just wear a sports bra with... Or, if I find a long t-shirt then I can wear leggings as pants. And then I realize that no, you need to wear a real bra with a real shirt and real pants. Have I let myself go?!  I still wear make up when I leave my house, so that's a good sign. There are days when I leave with my hair wet though, which I never used to do.

Anyways, I've gotten down to about 8-10 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight. It doesn't seem like that much weight but it does at the same time. I'm sure that by the time I get it off it'll be time for my next baby though. So I really should just buy some bigger jeans. 

Also, I know I wrote about some trivial things like clothes and make up in this post and they really aren't that important in the grand scheme of things. I still want to look nice though. 

7 Months

My baby is 7 months old!! Can she please just stay this way forever? I feel like I wanna have 20 babies so that I always have a sweet baby. Most likely that won't happen, but she just makes me so happy! I don't want her to grow up! I had to buy her some clothes the other day, which I always love doing, but I was buying her some 12 month sized jammies because she doesn't have any, and I almost started crying in the store when I held up those huge pajamas! I don't want her to get that big! She's still wearing 9 month size but I know it won't be long before she fits into those. 

Anyways, she has become much more vocal in the last week or two, she chats all the time! I love it. In the morning, I lay her down on the changing table and sometimes she just looks right at me and jibber jabbers and it is the sweetest thing. I think she is telling me about her dreams. She also likes to make high pitched squeaky noises. And she has learned to make popping sounds with her lips, so she does that all the time too. She laughs more than she uses to. I took her to the park the other day and I have a video of her giggling while I pushed her in the swing. I wish the blogger ap would let me add video. 

Here she is playing with her friend, Lily! They are only a week apart I think. They took turns stealing toys out of each other's hands. They are too young to he mad about it and I love that. It is the most wonderful thing to watch my baby take in and try to make sense of the world around her. 

In my last post, I mentioned that Quinn is sneaky and likes to practice new tricks while she alone in her crib. Sure enough, the first few times I caught her pushing up onto her knees she was in her crib! She did it for about a week in her crib before I snapped this picture of her doing it in the living room this morning. 

I think she knows it's faster and easier to just yell for me so I'll help her, maybe that's why she only did it while she was alone. 

There she is at church a few weeks ago. Man, church is difficult with this baby. She refuses to nap while we are there and she usually wakes up around 7:00 and church starts at 9:00, right when she needs a nap. I see other moms holding their sleeping babies and I just think how nice that would be. She never just sits to be held. Another reason I am thankful I am able to breastfeed her because that's one of the only times she will relax in my arms. She will get sleepy while I'm holding her afterwards but she doesn't usually like to fall asleep with me, she would rather be in her crib. Which is good, I am glad she likes her crib. 

I like this picture because I feel like she kind of looks like me in it. She loves to play with her bath toys! She hates when I lay her down to wash her hair, she just tries to sit up. I finally got a bath mat in there just today because last night I had a little heart attack after she slipped sideways while I wasn't looking! She choked on some water and I freaked out because I read about secondary drowning this summer and I was scared that she was gonna die in her sleep. I called Kelly and he told me she would be fine. Then I called my mom and she said the same thing. So I relaxed and she is still alive today, so that's good. I still have to watch her like a hawk though, she almost fell a bunch of times tonight in her bath because she was trying to get things out of her reach. Like the wall of the bathtub, which she was trying to bite. I think her fourth tooth is about to come in, because she is biting everything again. 

Here she is laying down watching the baby channel on tv. She likes to keep one or both feet in the air while laying down. This picture shows how out of proportion babies are, her feet are so tiny and her head is so big! I love it. And I love baby skinny jeans.

Something sweet that she does it she will touch my face so that I look at her. She does this every time I pick her up from the kids klub at the gym, and it is so sweet. I am glad that she misses me :) 

She loves to be out and about. She gets bored at home. I take her for walks in the evening before dinner time and she refuses to sit back in her stroller. She just holds on to the tray and leans forward and looks all around. She doesn't want to miss anything! I love my curious baby girl, she brings me so much joy! I am so thankful for a happy, healthy baby! 

6 1/2 Months

Quincy has grown so much in the last two months!  She weighs around 18 lbs and she is 26 inches long. She has tripled her birth weight. Her two bottom teeth came in a few weeks ago and a part of a third one has popped through. 

Her favorite toy is still water bottles of all kinds. 

She also likes anything that will make noise. She started flapping her arms up and down like a bird a few weeks ago, and now she does it whenever she is excited, or if she's holding a toy that makes noise. She has these toy chains that she loves to shake and sometimes she has red marks on her head at the end of the day from hitting herself during her vigorous arm flapping while holding the chain. She likes to sit in front of her basket of toys and pull them all out. She gets kind of bored with her toys so inside her basket there are random things like crumpled up paper and water bottles. 

She eats baby food every night. She likes most kinds except bananas. She likes apple but she can't eat it because it upsets her tummy and keeps her up at night. She likes peas but I don't buy them for her because for some reason puréed peas smell like fart. I'm going to start making our own this week anyways because the stuff you buy is so watered down and over priced. I did buy some of the puréed meat food like chicken but they smell so bad. I bought "ham with gravy" but I am terrified to even open the jar for fear of how it might smell. Ugh. Also, I don't know why but no matter what food I give her, she always makes a horrified face when she has the first bite. Then she usually gobbles down a whole jar but it's like she doesn't understand what I'm putting in her mouth at first even though she has had it every day. 

We took Quinn camping at Flathead Lake in Montana last week for 8 days. I was pretty nervous that I would undo all of the progress we had made as far as her sleep habits go. We slept in a tent, but my parents have a trailer so we got to give her a bath in it every night. The first day we got there, she took a nap in her pack n play, and she fell asleep on her own. She started out sleeping well that night too. I thought that I had worried for nothing. But then it got cold in the middle of the night. And her pack n play was at a slant because there was no flat ground so she ended up sleeping with me on a cot. So the rest of the week wasn't that great. Actually, at first, I was like oh my gosh I love snuggling her all night! But then neither of us slept great squished together on a cot and she kept crying when I put her in the pack n play so I just kept her with me so she wouldn't wake up other campers. She pretty much woke up every hour and a half and I had to nurse her back to sleep. By the end of the week, she had started throwing her binki off of the cot so I had to search for it in the cold dark tent a bunch of times and I was getting pretty irritated. Then we came home and she is sleeping better then she was when we left. She wakes up twice at night still, which is not awesome but a hundred times better than where we used to be. And she consistently takes 90 minute naps. So she is happy and I am happy. She loved camping though! The lake water was pretty cold since it is glacier fed, so she took awhile to get used to it. I would just carry her in and let the waves hit her feet. She would gasp and try to climb up me and hold onto me really tight. The second time I took her in she was a little more brave and kept leaning towards the water, wanting to touch it. She would go back and forth between me and the water but pretty soon she just wanted to be held parallel to it so that she could splash her hands in it. She kept splashing water on her face. I wish I had pictures of that but I don't. She also would suck the water off of her hands. The second half of our week there the weather was super cold and rainy so then we spent the next few days in my parents trailer, wishing it was warm. All in all, I would do it again. Camping with a six month old isn't too hard. We just had to bring a lot more stuff. 

Quinn is not crawling, when she wants something that is out of her reach she just kinda rolls back and forth from tummy to back and wiggles towards it until she can reach it. I remember before she was really rolling, she hated tummy time and she would get really mad before finally rolling out of it. But then I would go in her room and she would be playing after her nap on her crib and she would be on her stomach and moving around. Then one day she rolled all the way across our living room floor. So I am pretty sure that she practices stuff when she's alone in her crib and we can't watch her. It's like she doesn't want to do stuff just because we want her to do it. I won't be surprised if she just starts crawling one day. 

She has mastered the art of putting her binki in her mouth the right way. One night, she kept crying even though I knew she wasn't hungry, so I went in to give her her binki because she usually goes to sleep if I let her cry for a few minutes and then go in and do that. Well, she was crying with her binki in her mouth. What was I supposed to do with that? That was when I realized apples upset her tummy. She also started sucking her index finger last week. Speaking of fingers, I remember when she was a newborn and her hands and feet seemed so big and her fingers were so long and skinny compared to the rest of her. Now her fingers are shaped more like bugles. And she has small feet, she's not even into size 2 yet, although she wears 9 month clothes. 

Quinn is such a happy baby. She is social now, I always see her trying to get people's attention when we go to church and there are people right behind us. She is very smiley. When she's not being social, she is usually very focused on a certain task. She is quite determined and sometimes it can be hard to get her attention if she's right in the middle of working on something. She yells a lot though. Especially when it is quiet. She talks the most when she is in her crib or in her car seat. And then she flat out yells when she is mad no matter where she is. She is wonderful. I can't believe how amazing she is. I love watching her grow and learn. I am so lucky to be able to be with her all day every day. 

Sitting with grandpa :) 

Uncle Hayden being weird with his awkward mustache 

I would highly recommend bringing one of these if you camp with a baby. 

Notice the water bottle close by. 

Getting sleepy! She pretty much yawned all day every day while we were there since she didn't exactly get quality sleep. 

The beautiful lake the morning after a storm. 

She got really excited when we put these life jackets on her before our trip. These are the smallest ones they make that I am aware of. I guess life jacket makers probably think that most babies don't need life jackets. They are rated for under 30 pounds though, so I guess it's safe!! 

Crying and sleeping and mostly crying

Last Sunday I was at church, standing in the hallway waiting for Sunday school to be over so I could go to relief society. I had skipped Sunday school because Quinn desperately needed a nap so I took her into the mothers room and nursed her to sleep. Like clockwork, she woke up after 30 minutes. The longest nap I could get her to take was 45 minutes, but that was a rare occurrence. I would even wait inside her room, on the floor next to the crib, and I would put her binki back in her mouth as soon as she started to stir. It didn't work. She couldn't go back to sleep. I tried nursing, even though I wanted to break the nursing to sleep association. It didn't  work either. That particular Sunday morning, Quinn woke up early and so I tried to get her to nap before church, so that I could maybe stay almost the whole three hours. We ended up being 20 minutes late and no nap was taken. 

So there I was, standing with my overtired baby in the hall. A lady I had talked to a couple of times came and stood by me. Her one year old started to play with Quinn and we started talking. I told her how Quinn would never nap. I told her that I've read so many sleep books and they aren't helping. I did not want to let her cry it out, that is bad! I had had a headache for over a month. It was a tension headache, and I was super tense in my upper back and neck. I had been sleeping on a camping pad in her room, when she would wake up and I was too tired to rock her back to sleep, I would just sleep next to her. But it wasn't helping anymore. I told her that Quinn would just roll around in the middle of the night, like she couldn't get comfortable. And I would resort to nursing, but that stopped working after awhile. I was practically crying while I told her all these things. I hated everyone who was sleeping at night, and who got to take naps whenever they wanted. I hated that my baby was grumpy all day from being tired, and that I seemed to spend all day every day rocking her to sleep for her to nap only 30 minutes, and that I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to give her what she needed. I don't think it was safe for me to be driving at all. I read somewhere that if you get less than six hours of sleep for so many nights in a row it was like driving drunk. Well, I had gotten less than six for like 200 nights in a row, and I could definitely feel it. It was hard to react to things while I was driving, things like red lights. I didn't run any, that I know of, but I definitely had some close calls over the last few months. I cried so many times after laying her down, just to have her wake up again. And people would say super helpful things like, why don't you sleep when she sleeps?! Oh, why didn't I think of that? Wait, I did. And I tried all the time. How am I supposed to fall asleep when I am this overtired, with that 30 minute clock ticking in the back of my mind?! Yeah, I was not that fun to hang out with. Maybe I'm still not, I don't know. 

Anyways, she listened and she knew exactly what I was talking about. Sometimes I would try to talk to people about her sleep habits and they would be like, oh "she is teething/growing." And I'd be like "yeah, she has been teething/growing since the day she left my belly. Thanks for your useless tip." I can't blame them though, I think most babies sleep pretty well. Or maybe their moms just don't talk about it, because they feel like if they tell people they can't get their baby to sleep, maybe they will think she is a bad mom. That's how I felt at least. Quinn was not the greatest newborn, but when she was about eight weeks old, she started sleeping in a four hour stretch at night. I felt awesome. I remember telling myself that I had this whole mom thing figured out. Other moms just weren't as intuitive as I was, or else their baby would be happy, too. Right?! WRONG!!! That lasted a few short weeks and then for almost three months it was awful. Neither of us were happy because neither of us could sleep. 

So, back to me and my friend in the hallway, she tells me that her baby was the same, and that I need to go rent a good movie, put her to bed, and let her cry it out. I did not want to do that. I told her I couldn't. What if Quinn hated me after that? What if she just felt abandoned and she just gave up on life? What if it went on and on and didn't work? She told me that her baby was around six months old (same as Quinn) and it took her an hour. Then she slept through the night and started napping better right away. Then, her baby was way happier.

 Now, I had talked to other people who had tried crying it out and heard horror stories. One lady told me that she did it with her eight month old, and she cried for three hours and never have up and she didn't sleep well until she was over a year old. Another lady told me that she did it with her 18 month old, because she was pregnant an could no longer gently set him in his crib after he fell asleep. She let him cry and after an hour and a half, he threw up from it. She said it was a six month process. So, these stories made me feel like if I was going to do it, I had to do it now. We were planning on going camping three weeks from that day and I couldn't wait another month to start it. I had to do it. 

I cried off and on that whole day. I did not want to do it. But I was at my wit's end. I could not take any more. The constant headache and the dangerous driving... Yikes. I had tried the no cry sleep training methods and they helped a little, but it had been two months of that with no success. I called my mom and cried. I cried when Kelly came home and I told him what I was going to do. He told me that he'd been trying to get me to do it forever and he asked "why now?" I have him my reasons and told him that I was going to sit outside after I put her to bed and he said he would stay inside with her. I went and got the camp chair out of the garage and I was ready. I just didn't want to hear the crying. So, that night I fe her baby food with rice cereal, gave her her bath, read a story, then she nursed. And she went right to sleep. I went downstairs prepared to leave when she woke up after 45 minutes or whatever. She woke up once after 30 minutes and I gave her her binki. But then I told Kelly, I'm not going in there again. I won't go back in her room until 11:00-12:00 to feed her because she will be hungry. (I wasn't trying to wean her from night feedings, I don't mind getting up to feed her if she goes right back to sleep). After that, she slept like a champ! She didn't wake up until 12:30. I fed her and she went back to sleep. She woke up at 2:00 and cried for a minute and went back to sleep. She woke up at 4:00 and cried for a long time, when she started to get out of control after 25 minutes I went in and gave her her binki and she went back to sleep until 6:30. I went in her room and she was just laying there, awake. I felt awful. Maybe she didn't cry because she felt like no one would hear her! But once I got her up and fed her, she seemed happier. Her naps were better than before that day, two short 45 minute naps in the morning and then she took a longer one that afternoon. That's a huge step up from 5-6 30 minute naps a day. It got better each day. She is still inconsistent. I decided to feed her when she wakes up around 4 in the morning because she cried one time for an hour and a half, she was hungry. I don't want my baby to go hungry, and even though the books day she doesn't need to eat more than once a night, I don't care. Some nights she only wakes up once. One night, she slept until 5 in the morning, then she ate and went back to sleep. I slept almost seven hours straight for the first time since she had been born! It was awesome. I wanted to keep sleeping. Her naps are still inconsistent, but they are always at least 45 minutes. A lot of the time I can lay her in the crib without rocking her and she will roll over and go to sleep. Yesterday, she napper for more than two hours and so did I. I feel so good. We are both so much happier. When she wakes up at night, and it hasn't been more than four hours since she last ate, I let her cry for a minute or two and then she goes back to sleep on her own most of the time. Maybe she would have done this all along if I hadn't rushed in there at every little noise she made. I was just always afraid that if I didn't get her back to sleep right away, then she wouldn't go back to sleep. I also think that the methods I used from Elizabeth Pantley's book helped her be more prepared to fall asleep on her own. Now she knows that she can do it, and she does it most of the time. She wakes up between 7 and 8:00 most mornings, and it is so nice to have a baby that's a little bit predictable. I feel like I have a little more control over my life again. She has had two teeth pop through in the last few days, so that has made nap time a little harder, but it is still way better than it was! Looking back, I wouldn't have done it much earlier than I did. I still believe that letting your baby cry it out is wrong when they are teeny tiny. Apparently people say that 6 months is the age where it's ok. It was okay for us at five and a half months. She seems to have developed so much more since I started doing this, she doesn't get frustrated as easily and she is learning so fast! Also, she doesn't hate me. :) 

This morning: