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: 

5 Months

Quinn turned 5 months old over a week ago, it's taken me awhile to get around to writing this update. Both her and I got a cold two weeks ago, it lasted about a week but we are both still a little congested from it. Combine that with her not so great sleeping habits, and I could barely do anything for awhile. 

She weighs 14.5 lbs in this picture, taken one month ago. She started wearing 6 month clothes. She wore her 0-3 size for three months, but now I think she's going to grow out of her 6 month size really fast! As of last week, she weighs 16 lbs. this morning I tried to put some shoes on her that she wore for the first time two weeks ago, and I couldn't get them on. 

She got her ears pierced! She cried pretty hard for a minute, and I may have teared up. I felt really bad but she was happy two minutes after it happened. 

We practice sitting up in we boppy pillow. She is getting close to doing it on her own, but she tips backward a lot. 

She also found her toes a few weeks ago! She grabs them every time she is on the changing table. She is only halfway doing it in this picture, I wish I had a better one but it is getting harder to capture her doing stuff because she sees me get my phone out and she just watches me. 

This picture is blurry, but Quinn figured out how to stand up for a few seconds in her bouncer and she would get so excited! She throws her arms out to the side and balances on her tip toes and it's adorable. 

There's also this gem that I captured at Costco the other day. She has been a scowler since she was born. 

I am pretty sure she gets it from her dad. Sometimes I feel like she is judging me when she lifts up one eyebrow at me, I can't do that and neither can her dad. 

When she goes to sleep she likes to touch her binki. It's like she is protecting it. Another thing she does when she is trying to settle down is run her hand across my fingers. When she wakes up I can sometimes get her to go back to sleep by giving her her binki and letting her hold my fingers. I also discovered that she likes to sleep on her side. I wish I would have figured that out a long time ago, but her sleep has definitely been improving since I realized that. 

We took her up to Scout Mountain. We didn't end up camping but we had a fire and cooked dinner up there one evening and then drove back the next day and we hiked. She did really good in the front carrier. She definitely preferred facing outwards, we had her facing me at first and she started to get mad after 20 minutes, then we turned her around and she was totally happy for the full two hours we were hiking. She really likes trees. Actually she likes plants in general. One time, she smiled at a tree when I took her outside. 

I got a kiddie pool for her and I to play in. She has a little baby inner tube thing that she sits in and yesterday, she was in it and she flipped forward so she was on her stomach. She could reach the ground with her toes so she scooted around the pool for awhile. Then she scooted to the edge and caught sight of the grass and she just stayed there and stared at it. I wish I had pictures but I didn't have my phone with me. 

Glistening from rice cereal all over her face! 

She really likes water bottles of all types. Sorry it's upside down. I'm too tired to rotate it. (She seriously wakes up every 2-3 hours at night still. It's hard to think straight.) 

Ignore my adorable pajama pants in those pictures. 

She has started teething this month too. I'm pretty sure it's her canines and the teeth beneath them that are coming in. I know that's not the norm, but it's what's happening. Teething takes forever, holy cow. She has had some rough days with it. Last week in particular, she was screaming and crying a lot, and she would be up for hours in the middle of the night and after a few days of it I took her to the doctor because I thought he might have an ear infection. I hoped she would have one, because then I could just give her some anti - biotics and solve the problem. They looked at her and said nothing was wrong with her. Then I realized that I had started giving her a little bit of applesauce around the same time, and that she had been farting a lot lol. Apparently applesauce makes her gassy! Bad parenting moment for me. 

Cooking Fails & Other Things

So the other day I liked the Crockpot Girl on Facebook so that I could get awesome recipes right on my homepage. The next day she posted about slow cooker roasted vegetables. I thought it sounded awesome, I love roasted veggies. You just dump whatever veggies you want in the crockpot, drizzle some olive oil and seasonings on them, and then leave it on low for four hours and it's supposed to be just like you roasted then in the oven. How simple. So I thought id try it today with some red potatoes, but then I was too lazy to chop them up so I thought I would just throw in the Normandy blend of frozen vegetables you can buy at Costco. I did that and then I took a nap with Quinn. When I woke up, a very strong broccoli scent assaulted my nose. I went downstairs to look at it, and all the vegetables were super wilted and limp and dis- colored. They definitely didn't look oven roasted. It had been less than two hours. I tasted some and it wasn't good. I thought that maybe Kelly would like it so I left them in the crockpot on warm so that the broccoli smell could seep into the walls. I eventually realized that he probably would not like it, since it was disgusting, and I turned off the crockpot. I told him what happened when he got home and he said "well, it probably would have been good with fresh vegetables. Not frozen ones." Oh. Haha.

Meanwhile, I decided to just boil some red potatoes to go with dinner. Only, every time I've boiled them it takes forever to get them soft. So I thought I should boil them for a good hour, since 30 minutes wasn't doing the trick. I put them on the stove on high and then ran upstairs to go put Quinn down for another nap. She fell asleep pretty fast and I decided to fold laundry before Kelly got home. I ran downstairs and brought it all back up to our room and I was jamming out to some music when the most awful sound attacked my eardrums. 

What is that?!...  The smoke alarm! It's gonna wake up Quinn! What is burning?? The potatoes!!  

Those were the thoughts running through my head. I booked it down the stairs and saw a smoking pan of red potatoes on the stove with no water. I checked the potatoes and they weren't burned too bad and they still weren't done so I got a new pot and filled it with water then put it on medium and went back upstairs. I listened at Quinn's door and I didn't hear anything. How is she still asleep? That child wakes up when my ankle pops as I'm walking out of her room. Maybe she's dead... So I check on her and her eyes are closed, I make sure her chest is rising and falling, and sure enough, she is alive. She slept through the smoke alarm. Good job Quinn. 

I also burned the oil I was heating up to fry fish for dinner, but nothing bad really happened. I just dumped it out and started over. The fish and the potatoes were good. I'm probably an unfit mother though. Thank goodness for smoke alarms. 

Basically the only other thing I have to talk about besides my cooking fails is holy cow, I get really lonely sometimes! I love staying home with Quinn. It's exhausting a lot of times but I don't want a break from it or anything. I just miss people! I feel like I've had this problem since I had her, where now when I actually get to talk to people, whether it's visiting teachers or the people at the kids klub at the gym, I just over share. It's like I can't stop myself from talking because I'm so excited to finally talk to someone during the day. I get to talk to Kelly, obviously, but I need girl talk. He doesn't really get girl talk... I probably over share on this blog sometimes too. I call my mom a lot and I can tell that after awhile she gets bored and she starts coming up with reasons to get off the phone so I try to think of something interesting to say. Anyways, now that I sound pathetic as ever, I'll end this post. 

4 Months

Quincy Grace turned four months old yesterday! I can hardly believe how much she has grown. She has had a lot of firsts within the last week. We were visiting Washington last week when my mom got her to giggle for the first time! It was adorable, of course. After the first time she did it, I kept trying to get her to laugh and I finally did a few days later. It's so funny to me what will make her laugh. She likes being tossed in the air, and she laughs if you look at her suddenly and say hi or boo or pretty much anything. 

She talks all the time. In the mornings, she likes to stand or sit up and tell me all about her dreams. She's also started yelling a lot. She yells before she cries most of the time. 

She rolled over for the first time at my mom's house. She hates tummy time but she slowly rolled over and found her way out of it. We were all gathered around her cheering her on while she kind of cried until she landed on her back. Then we all clapped for her, lol. 

We were sitting in church and I had Quinn in my lap. She was tired so I was holding her on her side, facing towards me. She usually turns her head into me when she's tired and she wants her binki. She did this, so I tried to give her her binki but then she looked up at me and smiled. Then she hid again when I looked at her.  She kept turning away smiling when I looked down at her and then she'd look back up at me until I looked at her again. She did this like 20 times! She was playing her own form of peek a boo with me. I kind of thought she didn't really ever know what she was doing, but she does! I feel like she's getting so smart. My baby is a genius. 

My baby is also a terrible napper. She wakes up after 45 minutes. Then she gets cranky because she's still tired but most of the time, I can't get her to go back to sleep. I do not believe in crying it out. I have been reading Elizabeth Pantley's book about no cry sleeping, and it has some really good tips so we have been slowly making some progress. I did try letting her cry it out once or twice after being super exhausted, but I just ended up sobbing too and I won't do it again. Babies don't cry just to cry, they cry because they need your help. Their brain is going through huge developments and eventually they will want to be more independent. For now though, she needs to know that I am there for her when she needs me. She will learn to sleep on her own someday. I did start giving her a little bit of rice cereal before bedtime and that has made a huge difference. I don't believe that she wasn't getting what she needed from my milk, I just think that the slower digesting rice cereal compared to my breastmilk that is 90% water keeps her fuller for longer. There is nothing that meets my baby's nutritional needs better than my own milk though. Studies have shown that babies don't wake up from hunger, they just wake up sometimes. All I know is that the first night I gave her cereal, she didn't wake up until 2:00 in the morning. After that she didn't sleep that great but it's so much better than she used to be. It also doesn't help that she is super squirmy as she falls asleep and pulls her binki out all the time. We will get there. 

Here are some pictures from the last month! 

Is there anything cuter than a baby wrapped up in their baby towel?! 

She loves the bumbo seat! And she's getting really chunky, haha. That shiny part on her chest is drool. She drools all the time, and she always has her fingers in her mouth. I keep checking to see if she is teething, but she's just a drooler. 

She is still in the rock n play. I try to switch her over to a flat mattress, but no luck so far. I guess we will get there someday, she won't fit in that thing forever. 

 I love these pictures! Thanks to grandpa Scott for taking them :) 

Looking up at great grandma Darlene! 

Quinn never snuggles, unless she has just woken up. But she sat in grandpa's lap just like this for over an hour! She just looked around. My dad was happier about it than he looks in the picture. Also, she does own pajamas, but I think she peed on them. Or maybe it was my mom, who kept taking them off of her while we were there because she thought Quinn looked so cute in just her diaper. 

I love being her mommy! She doesn't let me sleep very often, but I know she doesn't do it on purpose. Also, she could be way worse. She could be better, too, but I think she will always be perfect the way she is!! 

Fat

This is not a post about learning to love your post- baby body. While I get that stretch marks and wider hips come with a baby sometimes, I don't like how women use their pregnancy/baby as an excuse for being unhealthy. My baby comes first, and she needs a good example of how to be healthy and happy. 

I can't count how many times I've said the phrase "I'm fat" since I was pregnant. I gained around 40 lbs when all was said and done. Before I got pregnant, I always thought that I would exercise throughout my entire pregnancies. I didn't know how tired I would feel. My thyroid was out of wack during my whole first trimester and that made me even more tired than normal. People told me that during the second trimester you get a burst of energy. That happened for like a day and a half at 15 weeks. Then I was tired again. I thought it was wrong to burn more calories when I was hardly eating anything except for popcorn and baked potatoes. I didn't know that my tiny baby would just leach whatever she needed from wherever she could find it in my body. My muscles atrophied quickly, I think around 6 or 7 weeks I noticed that I could hardly lift half the weight I had lifted after taking a week off. I couldn't stand the taste/smell of protein. Disgusting. So I felt like there was no point, and that it would be easy enough to lose the weight afterwards.

How wrong I was. I never felt so squishy in my life as I did those weeks after she was born. My butt got huge during pregnancy and then it just got saggy afterwards. I had a mom butt. I typically store fat around my thighs and arms, it goes to my stomach last but I suddenly had this blob of fat that I was constantly trying to stuff into my stretchy pants. I had a huge muffin top. Because of my long labor followed by a c-section, I couldn't walk normally for the first three weeks. And then I still couldn't walk fast at all until 1 month pp. With all that said, the first 25 lbs came off very easily within the first 5 weeks. The last 15 have decided they won't go away without a fight. 

Kelly and I got gym memberships when Quinn was 7 weeks old. I am fortunate to be so close to such a nice gym and it has a kids klub where I can drop off Quinn. She does really well in there, but I sort of hate dropping her off in there every time I go. At first, it was difficult to get to the gym because I had to do it right after she ate, since she was still nursing every two hours and wouldn't take a bottle. I was also terrified that she would get sick while she was so tiny. I realized though, that I was a better mom and wife on the days I got to the gym. I was more productive and I felt better about myself. 

As I write this, I am holding Quinn in my lap while she sleeps. It's noon, I got ready to go to the gym over an hour ago but she was really grumpy because she has a hard time napping longer than 45 minutes most of the time. I don't want to take her there, have her stay awake the whole time (because I know she won't sleep there), and then have her grumpy when I get her home and I'm trying to shower and stuff. People say not to schedule your day around your baby, but since this is something I can easily push back and if she doesn't sleep well early in the day her naps will just get worse and lead to a bad night of sleep. It does suck though that it's noon and I haven't gotten anything done other than unloading the dishwasher. I still need to do laundry and clean up the house today. 

Anyways, when I first started going to the gym, I would just go to group fitness classes. It was easier for me to push myself if I was in front of others. I was so weak though that I could hardly do anything. The first class I went to after signing up was a spin class. At two full rotations of the tension knob thing, I was maxed out. I had to stand up and put my full weight on whichever side I was trying to pedal downwards. Yikes. I think you can turn that thing like ten times at least. I went to a step class a few days later, and I was so sore that when each song ended, I had a really hard time picking my feet back up to get on the step again. I also couldn't jump on it with only one riser underneath. There was like a 60 year old lady next to me doing it though. Awesome. I tried running again after a week or two of going to classes. I set the treadmill to 5 mph and ran for two minutes and then walked for like five. It was hard. I think I did that for like half an hour. The next day my hips were so sore and so was my incision. It was kind of swollen. It sucks having your abs cut clear through. 

I kept going to classes for a few weeks until I got antsy to get out on the floor and lift again. I was tired of being so flabby. I found a program on this girl's blog and I liked her split routine. There's leg day, chest/shoulder/tricep day, back/bicep, and butt blaster day. You also do cardio every day along with abs. I started out following her program but I've tweaked it along the way. I also don't get to do as much cardio as she does because I only pay for Quinn to stay in the kids klub for an hour at a time. I'm hoping to get a jogging stroller sometime. Quinn likes the stroller so it would be nice to be able to get a workout in while Quinn enjoys a ride in the sunshine. So I started lifting four days a week about two months ago. The first month, my weight stated exactly the same but I was able to fit into a pair of my old jeans and my wedding ring fits again. So I was losing fat at least. The second month I've slowly lost three pounds. Thank goodness. I'm 11-12 pounds away from my pre- pregnancy weight now. I'm sure if I ate better I would lose faster, but I honestly have no idea how many calories to eat in a day while breast feeding. I cannot find any definitive information on it. Some people say that they can't lose the last 10-15 lbs until they quit nursing, others say it's the only way they can lose the weight. When I first started lifting again, my milk supply went down so I ate more and it went back up. I think slowly cutting calories out is the key. Women in a state of famine can produce perfectly nutritional breast milk though, so I'm sure I'll find the balance eventually. Right now I just eat when I'm hungry, and I eat mostly whole foods. I try to eat protein with every meal to control my blood sugar and also because nursing takes around 13g of protein a day. Gotta have protein to build muscle, I drink a protein shake, too.

Anyways, next pregnancy I plan on being a lot better. I know now how hard it will be but I also know how hard it is when you don't stay active. I think I would have had less aches and pains throughout had I remained active. Maybe I wouldn't have had gestational hypertension. Also, it's nice to wear clothes that fit.