13 Month Update

I want to keep updating this blog at least once a month, but now that Quinn is one, I need to come up with titles for my posts because I think it'd be annoying if I kept doing what I was doing and named this one "13 months." 

Quincy is so funny. I love playing with her every day. She loves books lately. She will come over to me many times throughout the day carrying a book because she wants me to read it to her. Or she just wants to sit and turn the pages. Sometimes she lets me read it in the order it's supposed to go, but she always tries to turn the pages before I'm done reading each page. Other times she will just flip to a page and she wants me to read what's on it. I end up reading the same pages over and over again. 

It seems she always wants me to be involved in what she is doing. If she's reading she is sitting on my lap most of the time. Today I was laying on the ground on my stomach and she came over with a book and she wanted to be on my lap but I didn't have a lap so she sat on my arm. And then she kept trying to sit on my back but she would tip over and fall off, it was so funny. 

She says the word "no" sometimes. And that's about the only word she says other than "mama." I know she knows what I'm saying sometimes. If I tell her to get in the bath she knows that we are going upstairs. If I tell her we are going outside she walks over to the door. She loves to go outside. She likes to walk up and down the sidewalk in front of our apartment. She likes the slides at the park, but she doesn't know how to get up to the them so I end up just picking her up and putting her on them over and over again until I get tired of it and then I take her somewhere else in the park. 

She is pretty good at communicating what she wants. She points to things and she has her own little words for certain things. I feel like her and I have our own little inside jokes. Sometimes she'll look at me with her lips pursed and she breathes really fast in and out of her nose. And I'll do the same thing back to her. Or I can start and she'll copy me and we both laugh. She dances by shaking her head back and forth to music. 

She used to love blueberries. We would buy a frozen bag of blueberries at Costco just for her and she would eat them every morning with breakfast. Last week she decided she didn't want any more blueberries. I've cut them up and put them in her Kodiak Power Cakes (if you haven't tried these you should get them, they are healthy protein waffle/pancake mix). I think I may try to sneak other fruit in her by putting them in her pancakes because I have a hard time getting her to eat enough fruits and veggies. She'll try any food but she doesn't always like it. 

If you are a guy probably don't read this next part. She has been weaned from nursing for about a month now. I know that just a few months ago I wrote about how sad I would be when she was no longer nursing, and I thought I would be. I thought I would keep doing it through the spring at least. Then the week that she turned one I got a plugged duct, twice. She was only nursing twice a day and I was surprised and annoyed that I got a block. I've had mastitis like four times and suddenly I just decided I was done. I didn't want to nurse anymore. I wrestled with it for a couple of days, I knew how good it was for her and how it helps her immune system. I did want to lose a few more pounds though and I worried that breastfeeding was keeping me from losing the last couple. I have been doing the 12 week challenge at the gym since January. I now weigh 3-4 pounds less than I did when I got pregnant. I think it is possible to lose all the weight when you're breastfeeding I just didn't decide to be disciplined enough to make it happen. There was a little voice in my head that kept telling me I could eat extra calories because I was nursing. Anyways, I cut back from two feedings a day to one and we did that for a couple of days. At first I thought my boobs would explode for a day or two but then it was fine so I cut back to nursing once every other day. We did that for four days. Again it was painful for a day but then it got better. So I did every two days for a week and then I just stopped nursing completely. My boobs did ache for awhile after I quit but they weren't getting full of milk like they had been. I am STILL making milk... but hardly any. Apparently it takes forever for your body to stop producing. I had to get a new bra. Let me just say, they are way different than before I got pregnant. None of my old bras fit. Which sucks because I had just gotten some nice ones right before I got pregnant. I went and got fitted and I went from a 34 to a 36. Pregnancy made my ribcage wider. I really did love nursing though, and I'm grateful I was able to do it. 

Squatting is the best position for reading.

 Um yes, her room is a disaster. I hate cleaning it because she goes in there and just takes everything out of its place. She takes the dirty clothes out, pulls all her cubbies out, etc. I bought her this bikini at Target and it is SO CUTE! No, I don't think it's immodest for babies to wear bikinis. She is a baby. She could be in a diaper and no one would care. 

 Her belly!! 

 She has chocolate on her face.

 We had stake conference last week, and regional conference two weeks before that, so we just go straight into the multi-purpose room at church and turn on the speaker. We can't get through a Sacrament meeting unless we get a bench to keep her contained. If we're in the back on metal chairs, forget it. It's not happening. 

She's sitting in her stroller, which was obviously made for her to sit in. You can't tell, but her baby is underneath her. Smh.

 She was trying to climb in it and the stroller rolled away from her somehow.

She got stuck like this, her leg was hooked on part of it and it was rolling away from her pulling her into the splits, hahaha. 

Sometimes she gets mad that she is trapped in the family room and I am in the kitchen, and she yells and also presses her mouth and nose against the bar. 

She is just silly. She loves to color. She found a pen one day and she kept trying to write on a piece of paper she had found, I didn't even know she knew that pens write on paper. We will have to get her a coloring book and some crayons. 

I can't think of a title for this post. Is it more dumb if I call it "The Last Month and a Half" or "13 months?" 

One

My baby turned one yesterday! It's so strange to think about how much she has changed in one year. I can so clearly remember the days leading up to her birth, and the days just after. She was so so tiny when she was born and now she is walking and into just about everything she can get her hands on. 

She is 29" tall, 45th percentile. She weighs 21 lbs 7 oz, 74th percentile. I was surprised to see that weight today at the doctor's office because we were just in last week to check on her ears and she was 20 lbs 13 oz. She is about to outgrow her carseat! Her head circumference is 47.2 cm, 95th percentile. Her head just keeps getting bigger, the percentile keeps increasing. I'm sure her body will catch up with it one day. 

She loves string cheese, teddy grahams, and fruit. She loves frozen blueberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, honey dew, and grapes.  I know you aren't supposed to give them grapes because they can choke but we only gave her tiny ones and she seriously has a mouth full of teeth. She's got her front four on top and bottom and she has four molars that have come in with I think a couple more cutting through. It is so hard to brush those dang teeth though. She hates it. It takes both Kelly and I to hold her down. They get pretty gross though because I forget to do it more often than I remember. I need to get on it though or else this girl will have a mouthful of cavities! And gross teeth, which is just embarrassing. She wants to eat whatever we are eating. If she has something on her tray and it's not the same thing we have on our plates, she yells at us because she wants what we have. If she doesn't like something she tries, she spits it out and then hands it to me. So nice. I love chewed up food. 

When she is done eating she puts her food in the cup holder spot and then yells at us. Yes, those are boy pajamas she is wearing in that picture. My mom had some in her size at her house that were brand new, and the more pajamas she has, the less laundry I have to do so I put them on her regularly. 

She likes to play outside. I took her to the park a couple of times because the weather has been really warm lately. The first time I took her she wouldn't get off of my lap for the first twenty minutes. I tried putting her in the swings, because she loved them when she was 8 months old, and she screamed. So we just sat until she finally decided she was ready to venture off my lap. She found a stick and then brought it back to me and sat on my lap to play with it. Eventually she was roaming all over the park and when we had to leave she got pretty mad. The next time I took her there she was happy to get off of my lap much quicker than the first time. 

Lately she has loved containers. Cardboard boxes, tupperware, totes, you name it. She loves to put things in them. She cleaned up our whole living room the other day because there was a cardboard box from Costco. She put all of her toys in it. Sometimes she takes her toys back out and then puts them back in. 

This is a box she filled up last night with some cool stuff like my shoe and Kelly's belt. A lot of times she tries to pick up her boxes full of things but they are usually about as big as she is and so she gets mad and screams because she's frustrated that she can't pick them up. 

She always brings us things. Today at the doctor's office she brought me all the books and magazines in the waiting room one by one. I said "thank you" each time she brought me one. When she had brought them all to me she took some back and then brought them back to me again. Then when the doctor came in she brought the doctor all of the books. Sometimes she brings me her toys and then looks at me like she's expecting me to do something and I don't know what she wants so I just throw it across the room and she goes and gets it and brings it back. Maybe that's what she wants?? I do not know. 

Another thing she loves to do is turn the pages of books. Before bedtime we read a story and she loves to turn each page. Luckily there aren't very many words on the pages of the books we read because she gets in a real hurry to turn each page. She brings us books and we just hold them up for her so she can turn each page. She does it over and over again, multiple times a day. 

She likes to "help" with things. Yesterday I was moving the laundry and she started putting all the clean clothes back into the dryer while I was throwing the wet ones in. I tell her thanks because I want her to keep trying to help me even when it's not helping. She loves the dishwasher but I don't let her help with that at all. 

Her favorite show is called "The Notekins." It's from a baby channel. When I have to leave her so I can shower or something I put that show on for her. She still gets mad at me for leaving though. She never really sits and watches anything for more than 20 minutes unless she has just woken up or she is about to go to sleep. She is usually on the move! She loves dancing. She shakes her head back and forth or sometimes she bounces her knees up and down if a song comes on. It's so cute. Sometimes she just bangs her head on stuff though. It's kind of weird. At church last week she was sitting on the ground and she kept banging her head against the back of the pew on purpose. She does it against the wall sometimes or the back of the couch. She doesn't do it super hard or anything, but I don't get it. 

Last night I was in my bedroom when I heard a loud noise coming from her room. I went to go see what she was doing and she had grabbed the lamp off of her little table and was carrying it around. Then today she was still fascinated by it and she sat and played with it.

This last year has been the best year of our lives! We love our little family so much. When I think back on those days right after she was born, it's crazy to think of how much personality she has now. She is so silly and she makes me laugh every day. I love spending my days with her.

11 Months

Quincy turned 11 months old a couple days ago. All I can think about it how I am about to have a one year old! It was around this time last year that I can vividly remember being pregnant and counting down to the day I would finally have my baby. Anyways, it goes by fast, everyone already knows that. It goes by in a blur too, I hardly remember anything clearly other than the first few weeks after we brought her home. Time just flew by in a sleep-deprived blur of events. I'm glad I've taken the time to write things down at least once a month because you think you will remember, but you won't!!!

She started walking on January 6th. One month after she took her first steps. That day she wouldn't let me sit her down she had to stay standing and she kept taking steps over and over. She's gotten better every day since! I think it was that same day that she refused to let me feed her. Not even from her beloved baby food pouches. I just bought some of the reusable ones a month ago and I was pretty pleased with myself, thinking how handy they would be. They were pretty nice to have for about three weeks. So then I had to try to figure out how to get her to eat healthy things that she could feed herself, because mostly she just wanted teddy grahams. I make her smoothies with soy milk and frozen fruit. We've also discovered that she likes toast, grilled cheese, scrambled eggs, and she LOVES vanilla soy milk. I tasted it, I don't think it's very good, but she gulps it down fast. She insists on eating whatever mom and dad are eating. If we have something different than she does on her tray, then she yells at us until we give her some of our food. She doesn't always like it, but she has to be given the option of tasting it I guess. I have a cute picture of her eating lasagna but my pictures are having trouble uploading so I may have to come back and add them to this post later. When do babies start using a spoon? I give her one, and she just moves it out of her way. 

Quinn loves to play peek-a-boo. She'll start playing it multiple times throughout the day. She ducks her head down with a little smirk on her face, and then pops her head up with a huge smile. I love it. I always try to stop what I'm doing if she wants to play peek-a-boo for a minute. She's become much more cuddly. She lays her head on my shoulder often throughout the day. I have to sit on the floor if I'm going to be in the same room with her, because she always comes over to sit on my lap for about two seconds before going off to play again. She gets kind of mad if I'm on the couch where she can't get to me. She always tries to bring her toys over to me so she can sit on my lap and play with them, no matter how big they are. She'll drag a laundry basket across the room to be closer to me while she plays with it. She clicks her tongue all the time, and loves if you do it back to her.

She's getting so silly. The other night she was taking a bath and she always wants to play with my big shampoo and conditioner bottles. They are almost as big as she is, but she likes to lift them up and then she lowers one over the side of the tub until it just touches the floor, and then she pulls it back in. I don't know why. 

It's been terrible trying to change her diaper most of the time. Or get her dressed. She hates laying down on the changing table. I have to find things for her to play with or else I end up sitting on her on the floor while she kicks her legs and I try to strap her diaper on straight. It's a workout. 

She has been sleeping through the night pretty consistently since we got back from Washington. Her schedule totally changed after we went there, she goes to bed around 9:00 and wakes up around 8:30. I like it better than waking up at 7:00, that's for sure. She still wakes up around 7:00 in the morning but I go in she nurses and then falls back to sleep for awhile longer. I can actually get up and get things done before she is up. I could have done that before but I didn't want to. We were playing downstairs a couple of days ago and she crawled over to the gate at the bottom of the stairs and started whining. So I opened it and she crawled up the stairs and right into her bedroom and she grabbed a binki. So I put her in her crib and when I closed the door she was just sitting in her crib, but she took a nap! I couldn't believe it. Maybe she has more of me in her than we thought. I loved sleep as a child, and I still do. Since then she's been napping without nursing first, and she goes down pretty easily. It's nice. Speaking of nursing though, I'm having mixed feelings about weaning her. She really only nurses about 2-3 times in a 24 hour period now. I really love nursing, there is something so sweet about it. I also love that it helps her immune system right now when there are so many things going around. However, she has had eight teeth for a couple of months now and they are pretty long so it's not always that comfortable anymore. I don't know when exactly I'll wean her. I know that I will miss it though when I do. She just got four molars this week too. I try to brush her teeth but I forget a lot and also she hates it. 

She loves going to the Kid's Klub at Gold's. She gets really excited when we walk up to the door. She whines at me when I leave but she's always happy when I come and pick her up. I was watching the video monitor today while I was working out and I saw another little girl hugging her and bringing her toys, it was so cute!! I got hired to teach PiYo at Gold's. I start this coming Monday. I'll be teaching at 6:15 am. Time to become a morning person!! I'm really excited to be teaching again, and to get to work with some people that I know will make me better at what I love doing! 

We feel very blessed! I don't know how life could get much better than this. :) 

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.