All In A Days Work

I haven’t done an update post for a few days.. It has been a pretty busy week. On Wednesday we had a session with Sally. It went well. Holly has been grumpy and cranky all week because she is teething, so everything we do has been colored by that. We cut down her eating back to once a day because she has been resistant; I think because her gums are so swollen she doesn’t want to let anyone near her mouth unless it is her knowing on something. So in Sally’s session she was trying to stand and climb as usual. We played on the large ball a bit which she seemed to like.

She was a bit clingy and wanted to stay near her mommy. One notable thing was that Sally warned that it was OK if Holly is trying to pull herself up and walk, but we should not overly encourage it, like for example walk around the house holding her hands. The reason is because she is a little young for it still and not yet bouncing on her legs. If she learns to walk before she is ready she will walk stiff legged and then Sally will have to spend the next year of therapy re-teaching her how to walk correctly, but if we let he ease into it slowly and try to get her to bounce on her legs then she will be a better stronger walker when she learns how.

Wednesday afternoon we went to pick up the veggie box and then I went to Tumble and tea for like 2 hours and then picked up Joel from work at 7:00 ISH.. I was sick of being in the house and wanted to get out.

On Thursday I tried to get up early for my Mother’s group. I thought it was at 9:30 and it was almost 10:00 when I arrived, as we are pretty slow moving in the morning, but then I realized that it actually starts at 9:00 and I was simply not paying attention. So it was ok, but I hate coming in during the middle when everyone is already in a conversation. Holly didn’t mind and had a ton of fun, I plopped her in the middle of the circle and she played with all of the new toys and had a blast. Most of the other toddlers were actually pretty subdued, so they didn’t really interact with her much, but she looked at and watched them.

Then at 11:00 when the little baby momma’s started coming in Jack who is 11 months and his mom came, so I decided to stay and overlap the session. The theme was talking about your birth stories. I found out that two of the other mom’s had done IVF, and one of them actually did it twice, first with her 3 year old and then with the 8 week old twins she just had. Both moms said that it took them three tries for the eggs to stick. In one case the mom tried twice with a “fresh cycle” Which I think means new eggs that were just extracted, and it didn’t take, so the third time she used frozen eggs and it took.

Whereas the other mom said she used frozen eggs twice (she had left over’s from her first daughter) but they didn’t take so she used a fresh cycle. But since she was 44 the egg quality was low and they actually implanted 5 eggs, over at UCSF and I guess two stuck and so now she has the twin girls. They talked a little bit about the procedures, and one thing that I didn’t know which I am not pleased about is that after the eggs are implanted you have to take progesterone shots.

I thought you had to do the hormone therapy prior to egg retrieval, that is a shot you have to give yourself in the stomach, daily, but it is like an insulin shot, and then one the eggs were implanted you were done it’s like a normal pregnancy, but apparently that is not the case, and the shots you do after implantation have to go into deep muscle tissue, so you do the upper thigh with a super long needle, for the first 3 months.

They were telling stories about how they were black and blue from the shots, ect. It did not sound pleasant. They also say all of the typical pregnancy 1 trimester symptoms are like 10 fold on the hormones, so you are nauseous and vomiting the whole time. Perhaps since I am doing IVF for reasons other than infertility I won’t have to go through this same regimen, but I think that is just wishful thinking. It sorta sounds like a nightmare and I suppose I can live through anything, and that is only a few months of endurance required, but I am not sure if I know what I am getting myself into thinking about going down the IVF road. It will require much more research on my part in the months to come.

We snuck out of the 2nd mother’s group about ½ way through at noon, Holly was super sleepy and ready for a nap. She promptly fell asleep once I put her in the carseat. So I headed over to Wendy’s for some drive-through lunch and hung out. I ate in the car and took a breather to flip through some of the parent’s magazines that have been stacking up. This was nice. I had called Joel and asked him to look for a place for me to go for a flu shot. See… I used to be on awesome insurance with only a 5 dollar co-pay, I was going to get the flu shot at my Dr. office, but they apparently only give them at 8:30 in the morning, otherwise you might wait over an hour, I figured for a free flu shot, I could wait and hang out, but then they said, oh no, you have to pay a co-pay we run it through your insurance like a regular visit. Well my new co-pay was 20$ and I was like, I don’t want to pay 20$ for a flu shot I hear they are giving them away for free. So I call Walgreen’s and other such places and they say, oh we already did our flu shot clinic.

So Joel finds a place online and sends me to a Safeway in Oakland near the Wendy’s where I was eating, so all is good. So Holly wakes from her nap and we go inside to get my shot. We then she decides she is hungry and I am at the pharmacy filling out all this paperwork and she is crying, so then I finally finish the first round and make her a bottle and just give it to her, she can hold it herself right… Well she is eager and she does, see a little independence never hurt anyone. So then the woman tells me it will be 30$ and I am like what?? It was supposed to be free, the Dr. Said the shot only costs then 25$ and I didn’t go there because I didn’t want to pay the 20$ copay. At this point Holly is crying and still hungry and seems to have guzzled down her bottle in like 2 minutes. So the lady was really nice and gave me this family discount and the shot cost me 16.88$ I was happy for that, thought at this point I would have paid the 30$ to not have to go somewhere else, wait another day, or get up at 8:00 AM.

So we go and sit to wait for the pharmacist to give me the shot and I notice Holly’s shirt is soaking wet. I take the bottle from her and it is dripping, and it seems she had somehow loosened the top (or her neglectful mother didn’t tighten it all the way) and something like half the bottle dripped and spilled out all over her, I mean she was wearing a long sleeved onezie, and a sleeveless summer shirt on top to be fashionable and they are both sopping wet. So I get her out of the carseat and get her wet clothes off of her and dig through the diaper bag and find a cute pink dress and attempt to dress her in that. Of course now the pharmacist is waiting for me and she is fussing and I am trying to dry her off and dress her and also cover the carseat with her blanket because it has a damp spot on it. So I finally get her dressed and down and she starts to cry because she is still hungry. I run over and give him my shoulder, he pricks me… OUCH.. and then I go and make her a new bottle, which I hold this time and she guzzles it all down.

So now we both need to pee… Well Holly has peed and needs to be changed, the bathroom is of course on the opposite side of the store, so I finally get there and the door doesn’t stay shut so I use the stroller as a lock and go, but then see there is no changing table anywhere in sight, and the bathroom is not very clean. So I decide to wait and change her until we get to Tumble and Tea.

Luckily for me I waited, though I again feel neglectful, as it was a poopie diaper and it was very messy, so I was so grateful for the wonderful changing table with little plastic bags to dispose of your mess in neatly and we got her all cleaned up and ready to play. So she is playing and I decide to snap a picture of her and send it to my mom.

So this is what she says when she gets it.. Her pants don’t match the dress she is wearing…

--Sigh—No they don’t, they matched the cute brown top with the green butterfly summer shirt she had on before, but no, in fact the pink flowered dress very much clashes with the brown flowered pants she is wearing. I have pink pants, which I eventually put on her, about an hour later, when I am changing another diaper, but at that point I just wanted to sit down and drink my lemonade.

There were some cute little babies for her to play with, her age and size. Well actually Solgura was 11 months, but she was about the size of Holly and Audrey was 9 months. I snapped a lovely picture of the three of them lined up all looking in my direction. Today I noticed some horrid red marks on Holly’s hand, at first I thought she was gnawing on it, but now I am wondering if she got them from playing with the girls. The three of them were a little rough, but us mom’s didn’t mind and decided to let them work it out, except when Solgura was trying to put Holly or Audrey’s Pacifier in her mouth, then her mom would step in and tell her no. Holly is super social, she immediately tries to engage any other baby she sees, she goes up to them and tries to play with whatever toy they have, she is almost a bully that way, as she gets older I might need to school her, right now it isn’t a problem, and it is good for her to be so social, she might take a toy, but then she gives it back, and when the other babies take her toys she doesn’t mind it.

She really wants to stand, and spent a good deal of the time we were there playing trying to stand. Also something new, she crawled up the little slide to sit on the edge of the border, wonderful, something else I have to watch her from falling off of, but I was very impressed with her new crawling skills, and it seems like I am not going to be able to get away with her getting in free as a “pre-crawler” for much longer. Since she stays contained in the walled confines of the baby area it has been ok, but I bet by the time we get back from Florida, she won’t be doing that any more.

So On Thursday, I was tired and didn’t want to battle with Holly to eat, so I let Joel feed her. She was eating some carrots, she had Carrots and Oatmeal the night before, and tonight I added some rice cereal, they were sorta runny and needed to be a little thicker. It was quite cute getting to sit back and let Joel give it a try, she is a clever girl, and in observation, he hadn’t realized just how clever she is at not eating. He got through maybe a third of her food and I had a rest and was amused so I finished up. He was impressed with my feeding skills, and how I sneak in those bites when she least expects it.

We started a new Study through UC Berkeley on Infant Development. We are required to fill out a parenting philosophy questionnaire, some baby developmental demographics, and keep a journal for 7 days. They ask questions about feeding, sleep, crawling/walking mostly. It was difficult to fill out because a lot of it didn’t seem to apply, like questions about whether or not she sooths herself if she is upset for more than 2 minutes… Well that has never happened, if she is crying for that long and hasn’t soothed herself after like 1 minute, we go to her and calm her down. Or how long it takes for her to go to sleep after we put her down, well it takes her no time, because we don’t put her down until she is already asleep. So we will see. But after the 7 day journal, which is basically a series of questions as well, for each day they do a 1 hour phone interview. So it should be fun and interesting to see what they find out. So we started that on Thursday.

Friday we had to get up early. As we were doing a make-up session with Katie, since we will miss a week when we are in Florida. She arrived at 9:30, and Holly had only been up like 20 minutes. She stayed until about 11:15 ish and it was an OK session. Holly rocked on the bolster, did some stretches and climbing, and Katie wanted to see how she was with a teething biscuit, which I happen to have, so I gave her a barely one. She sucked it up, but didn’t really chew on it which is what I think Katie was looking for. She seemed to like it and it certainly kept her occupied for a good 15 minutes before she made a mess and got bored with it. Mommy was very tired and Holly was fussy and yawning so I decided to lay down with her. She wasn’t quite ready for a nap and decided to crawl around and stand up against my headboard and play for about 30 minutes but then fell asleep and we both napped for about 2 hours. Just in time to wake up and get ready for swim class.

It has been about 5 weeks since we have been to the pool, Holly was excited when we first arrived and she did splash a little bit in the water and was very curious about it, but then I think she started to miss her pacifier as she had nothing to chew on, which is her current favorite pastime, so she got very into rubbing her tongue against her gums which causes her to keep her lips closed tight and her cheeks puffed out. She looks like she is pouting when she makes this face. She doesn’t look unhappy, but she isn’t her smiling self either. So this is how she spent most of swim class, she looked around and had a fine time, but it wasn’t her normal cheerful, definitely having fun self.

And I guess she tired herself out, because after we rinsed off (mommy forgot her towel in the car – so this was not fun) and got dressed I fed her a bottle and she fell asleep. I drove to babies-r-us as I needed to pick up some more travel formula packets put hung out in the car chatting on the phone while she napped. She when woke up we went into the store and shopped for a few minutes, getting the formula, resisting all the cute Christmas outfits and babies first Christmas ornaments, I figure my mom can get these for us while we are visiting, she will like that, and then headed home.

Tonight for dinner we had Banana, Peach, and Granola which she loved. She ate like 2/3 of the container and even sorta opened her mouth for it. I had gotten her a few new spoons at the store, so I have extra to keep in the diaper bag and we tried those out. I don’t like them as much as our regular ones but they work ok. She decided that tonight she wanted to play the climb the mommy and reach the bookcase behind her game, which she did for about 30 minutes, as she kept “tumbling” down. It was very cute how determined she is. Also we got a package from Threadless, I ordered way too many t-shirts at their 5$ sale and we went through all those. When we were done I let her play in the box they came in and she really seemed to like that, she likes flapping things open and shut so she did so with the box top.

She was asleep by 9:45, and I should be off to bed soon myself as we have a playdate at 10 tomorrow morning.