There Goes My Baby..

Who is this little guy I've been hanging out with the last few days? Because I'm pretty sure last week I had a BABY and now I have a much different child. Within a week he has started crawling, and today speed crawled.. so cute, starting pulling himself up to standing on toys and his bed, tried swinging from his mobile, and is as of today eating small pieces of food.

Lowering his crib was especially difficult. One night he woke up at 1:30 (what on earth!?) and when I went to check on him he was standing on his knees holding on to the side of the crib. I had to turn his bedroom light on just to be sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. That night I suggested that Jeff lower the crib just in case he decided to pull himself all the way up. Jeff went ahead and lowered it all the way to the lowest level just to be efficient. No! Way! He refused to raise it up a level despite my lying that I couldn't reach Reilly in the crib and crying that I wasn't emotionally ready for such a low crib, so I pulled out the tools and raised it myself! Now it is the perfect height for Reilly to stand and hold on, but do nothing more, like.. climb out of?..

Today it just went a step further when, while standing, he realized his mobile was now in reach after 8 months of hanging over him and went for it. He held on with two hands and, naturally as it's not very stable nor meant for hanging, he fell.. so down came the mobile. Oh.. and if anyone has great ideas on how to store all of this random stuff that they grow out of SO fast for the next child, in hopes of having another boy, I would love to hear it.

When they say don't blink they mean it! Last time the 1st of a month fell on a Tuesday I was sitting in a hospital bed, emotions jumping from excited to nervous to anxious.. and now my little guy will be 8 months old and I need to start thinking about first birthday ideas! Ahhh!!!!

The Four B's

The other night Reilly lead his bedtime routine for the first time. It's so incredible to watch babies develop cognitively, I love watching him figure things out.. like just letting the shower run while he is in the bath and he gets so inquisitive about the water, and touches it, or puts his hands under the bath water to feel the pressure from the shower, the entire time just looking so curious. But the other night he did something that was one of those baby light bulb moments.

When Reilly was two months old we implemented a bedtime routine in order to help him sleep through the night and know his bedtime cues.. Jeff called them the "Four B's".. Bath, Book, Bed, and Boob. The routine starts with bath time, it used to be about ten minutes long and increased as he got older and wanted to play with toys, bubbles, etc, and now when he is ready he tries to climb out of the tub. We're learning cues too. Then he gets a few stories, always ending with Goodnight Moon, nursed or bottle fed if Jeff is putting him down, and put in bed still awake. The other night he got his bath as usual (has recently not been wanting to spend too much time in it), then I placed him on his changing table to lotion him up and put his pajamas on and he grabbed the lotion himself. Once he was in his pajamas I was carrying him around his room, throwing his towel in the laundry, turning on the humidifier, and he was diving out of my arms for Goodnight Moon, just staring at it on the rocker. I sat down to read him his stories and with finishing each one, he would lean forward and reach for the next one in the small pile, and once Goodnight Moon was complete he just turned himself around the nurse!

It was just really excited to see that he knew what to expect and knows his routine, and enjoys his routine.. that is the most important thing, for him to be comfortable and confident and having a bedtime routine and knowing what to expect definitely supports that.

Mover and a Shaker!

Oh my goodness, what a day! No photos to go with it yet, but we'll get those.. don't you worry, I just wanted to hurry and type it out while it's still fresh.

Reilly has just been exceptional lately! I mean.. he is exceptional, but it has just been a tiny extra dose of awesome lately, well.. some parts. He is really just becoming the sweetest little mama's boy who can melt your heart and make you laugh from one second to the next. Today was a fun day, he woke up an hour early so we got to have some extra play time before I left for work. I worked 10:30-1:00 today.. tedious, I know. When I got home from work Reilly's Mamma, Rhonda, was holding him and he just reached out at me kicking and smiling, and as I took him he just wrapped his chubby little arms around my head and kept hugging me, then gave me a big wet baby kiss on the mouth! Melted. My. Heart! Dang I love that boy. At this time, Rhonda was warming up his bottle, and.. he is a large child, so I was holding him while he sat on the counter and I just put his bottle down for a minute, he picked it up like it was no big deal and popped that bottle right into his mouth! Hold the phone!! Now.. I know what you're thinking, especially if you're not a mom-whoop de do! No really.. WHOOP DE DO! He gets, on a big week 3 bottles at most, he just doesn't get them, so he has really had the opportunity to develop that skill, also we use a brand of bottles that is extra.. wide.. so it's hard to get his tiny hands on, but no.. he did it like it was just another day. He is sippie cup training right now, so that has probably been good practice. So at that moment I'm just jumping around in excitement for him, continuously taking the bottle away from him and putting it back on the counter just to see it over and over. But then it got better...

We went up to his room to play, and I'm sitting in the rocking chair just watching him explore for a few minutes and can't figure out if what he is doing is crawling. He was going for those.. door stopper things built into the wall, and watching them bounce when he hit them. Strange things babies are into.. so I moved him away from it again and low and behold-HE IS CRAWLING! It's not very graceful, this being unsure, which quite a few belly flops along the way. So awesome, so of course I keep moving him further and using different toys to make him crawl in circles around his room, and literally, by the end of the night (despite a horrific restaurant experience because he was exhausted), the kid was crawling with his belly off the floor. I am so proud of him, and so sad at the same time because my little baby is growing up, and so not thrilled that now begins a whole new world of chasing him around and keeping him from getting into things, but hey.. maybe I'll lose that extra baby weight that I've been keeping as a souvenir.

On a sad note, I am sharing this because it breaks my heart and I have a picture of it, so why not, he has realized that his bedroom exists outside of his crib. Reilly is sleeping 10 hours now, but everyone now and then he'll wake up and whine for a few minutes and fall back asleep. I usually wait for him to fall asleep and then go check on him, make sure he is in a safe position, etc. So I had been finding him turned sideways in his crib sleeping on his stomach for a couple of days, and then one morning I go into his room and he has the crib padding pulled down and is looking through the crib bars crying like a little prisoner, it broke my heart. And now every nap, every bed time, everything he looks through that thing, and sleeping training rules aside, I just can't see that, so that's usually my weak spot to swoop him up and cuddle him. Today I managed an extra second to get a picture of it, it would be more sad if he weren't flipping me off, but can't say I blame him. ;)

Sex Party.

One of my favorite memories of being pregnant, and honestly my entire life was finding out the sex of my baby! It's one of those miraculous moments in life where everything changes. Pregnancy is 9 months of amazement (hopefully!), but giving it reality.. giving it the "I have a daughter/son" moment is just beyond incredible. For me, it wasn't at first, it broke my heart!

Jeff had always wanted a son named Carter Louis. Carter from ER, so lame, and Louis being a family middle name passed down. I didn't like the name, but more I didn't like that it was a name we didn't pick together, so from day one I went through lists of boy names in my head. Naming a boy, in my opinion, is much more difficult than naming a girl. From there people kept convincing me that I was having a daughter and I was always quick to cringe at the idea. I'm not a girly person, so having a daughter just seemed weird to me.. but then the idea started growing on me. I had the nursery, lavender, creamy white, and pink, all decorated in my mind with patchwork and flowers and glitter and.. seriously, girly explosion! Her name was Jensen, we had favorite songs that we danced to, she had a personality.. she EXISTED! Pretty weird.. I know, but I just fell in love with the idea of this little princess.

We found out the gender of our baby on January 13th, but we weren't the first to know.. Amy was. Our appointment was at 8:30 in the morning, but we wanted to share the moment with our closest family and friends so Jeff and I decided to look away from the screen while Amy looked. That was the longest day of my life and I was sure I was having a girl. The ultrasound tech, whom I could go back and slap dropped a "she" while we were talking about the baby.. she probably needs to rethink the tricky game. Also after my appointment Amy and I went to Belly Bliss (pretty much Heaven if you're pregnant!) and shopped around and Amy picked up not only a pink outfit, but kept bringing my attention to this adorable lavender piggy bank with polka dots wearing a tutu, really glad I didn't just go with my gut and buy that stupid bank right then.



8:30am-6:30pm was probably the most obnoxious day for my sister, between my dad threatening her life if she didn't spill and me wanting to know but not wanting to know from one minute to the next. She had a cake made that was completely gender neutral on the outside, but the inside either blue or pink. That night we had our family and a few friends over for pizza with this cake just staring at us, waiting for me to jump across the counter and tear it open, or drop it, or.. whatever I could do to get to the inside of it. Jeff cut the cake, because I couldn't do it.. he had said before that if it were a girl, he was going to a bar to get drunk, because a life of worrying about a little girl was more than he could handle. The 3 seconds it took to cut the cake felt like 3 hours, and as soon as I saw the blue peering through I told him to put the cake back together and tried to hold back my tears. CRUSHED! After everyone left that night I just sat on the couch and cried, at one point I had finally calmed down when a Disneyland commercial came on and the sobbing started again with "I won't get to dress him like a princess at Disneyland", but then Jeff said I could dress him like Mickey Mouse or Peter Pan, and I felt a little better.







The next day I didn't even want to get out of bed, and then started feeling so guilty that I was being so ridiculous about this baby that was in me, and still depended on me for everything and still needed me, and even more so that he could have been affected by my selfish emotions and I began to fall in love with him all over again. Today I am so thankful for my son. So thankful doesn't even begin to describe it.. I am head over heals times infinity in love with my little boy, he is by far the most amazing thing that has ever, and at this point I feel, will ever, happen to me. He is why I'm excited to wake up in the morning and why I have to look through photo albums of him at night when he goes to bed because I miss him. And when we go to have another child, I have my fingers crossed for a second boy.. or a girl. Ha!

Anyway.. it's crazy to think that was a year ago. Time FLIES!! I just wanted to share this story because it's one of my favorite, although I have every intention of deleted the video of it just to make sure Reilly never sees it! The next day I did realize the upside of having a boy when I tried to shop for baby clothes for the first time.. pretty sure Jeff would divorce me if we had a girl because I would spend way too much on dresses and "grandma sweaters" as he calls them!