Day two, feels like an eternity

The first two days in the new house have not gone especially smoothly. Evelyn has moved away from her awesome sleeping schedule of waking once or zero times at night back to the two or three (or four) wakings she was doing a while ago. I'm sure it is the craziness of moving and being in a new place. We haven't quite figured out the temperature regulation in her room yet either so she is usually pretty warm. But hopefully she'll get back in a nice sleeping rhythm again soon. She has also been little miss crankypants, which is just draining. She will no longer play by herself for even a few minutes. You put her down and she gets upset. You leave her alone for a few minutes and the screaming starts. Exhausting.

Then yesterday I awoke to find it had snowed like 5 inches unexpectedly and I had to go to work. The roads were so bad that I got half-way there and decided to turn around. I had visions of Jon and Evelyn being stuck in the house with no food, or even worse, venturing out to get food and getting stuck in the snow. So I stopped at Safeway, got a few things, and went home, slipping and sliding along the way. I was able to steal someone's wireless long enough to attend a staff meeting, but other than that I wasn't able to work. C'est la vie. I was able to unpack a few more things.

Oh and it gets better. This morning I couldn't start my car! Or, to be more specific, I couldn't turn the key in the ignition. It has been sticking a little but has gotten significantly worse over the past week. Today I just couldn't get it to turn. So Jon's mom let me drive her car to work because Jon had run to our old house because he forgot to bring the cable box home, and the cable guy is coming at 8am today to set up the TV and internet. It took me 40 minutes to get to work, even though I estimate it should only take 15, because of contruction on the main road I took. Yeah, I need a new route. But that is easy to fix. Today is just going to be crazy. As soon as the internet is set up I have to go back home, swap cars with my mother-in-law, help Jon take my car to the shop to get the ignition thingy fixed (oh yay), and then work from home this afternoon and probably tomorrow. My grandparents will also be there doing something to the garage so it will be a lovely full house. Not to mention we still need to go shopping for a couch, the number of unpacked boxes seems to multiply every day, and that our lease in the old place isn't up until APRIL instead of FEBRUARY, the stress is piling up. (Our old landlord has agreed to release us from our lease as soon as she can rent the apartment, but still...if she can't rent it, we're on the hook.) And for some reason my new phone stopped ringing or making noises for anything and I can't figure out why.

The stress of this quickie move and all the things unrelated to it that have happened in the past few days are getting to be overwhelming. I haven't slept well since Friday night and with everything going on I'm just exhausted. So is Jon. But we really like the new house. The space, the storage, the lay-out, the light, the openness, the all-mine washer and dryer. But until things get settled, it is going to be hard to relax.

We moved!

Saturday morning I called my grandparents to see if they needed any help clearing out their house or finishing up projects. Sunday night we were all moved into the new house. Saturday morning we had nothing packed yet. Sunday night we had packed everything, rented a truck, found people to help us move, and moved. It was a crazy 36 hours!

There are a few odds and ends at the old house (bicycles, camping gear, refrigerator stuff, misc. other), but that is it. We really moved EVERYTHING. Now we just have to clean the place...

So we are in a new house a little farther south of our old house. If you want out address and I actually know you, leave me a comment and I'll send it to you. We'll be in this new place for at least a few years. It is nice already. Natural sunlight. A pantry. Kitchen counter space. A linen closet! Really a lot more room. Delightful.

The weekend was insane, though, and I'm exhausted. Evelyn is doing well in the new place. The dogs are still a little confused. But all in all everything is great.

Hooray!

Amazing

The MOST amazing thing happened last night...Evelyn slept through the night! The whole night! 7:30pm to 7:30am. I had to go check on her twice to make sure she was still alive. And then I woke up at 6:30am to express some breastmilk because I was dying. But she slept through the night!

I don't think this is a new thing, more like a one-time thing. She has been fighting a nasty cold and it seems to have moved from her head to her chest so she's been extra tired. But still, one night of solid sleep was fantastic. I was sick myself last night and I really needed to sleep. I feel much better this morning, if not 100%. My sweet little babe!

Matching hats!

I love my baby

Giant Baby!

It is confirmed: Evelyn is a healthy, growing, enormous baby girl!

As I'm sure you all recall, at her two-month check-up Evelyn weighed in at 11 pounds 5 oz, which was the 60th percentile. Her height was the 50th percentile and her head was 55th. All very average.

Well this month she weighs in at a whopping 15 pounds, 8.5 oz! No wonder my elbows hurt from carrying her around! That is one big baby! She's now in the 95th percentile for weight, but she also got tall, coming in at the 90th percentil for length. Her head is 75th percentile. I guess she's getting enough to eat!

The doc didn't say anything about teething. Evie has a cold but it hasn't moved to her chest so she just has to suffer, or we can pour salt water up her nostrils to clear things out (yeah...I'm sure she'd love that). And we should wait to start her on solid foods until 5.5 months. We also need to get better about tummy time. We've been trying. I don't know why we are such slackers on that one! She is developmentally on track or ahead in everything else but pushing her chest up off the ground when laying on her stomach. That is total parent laziness. But we will get better! Maybe it will be easier once we move, have room to put her down and don't live on the grossest carpets in the world. But we'll do better, starting today!

I just can't believe how big she has gotten. She was less than 6 pounds when we brought her home from the hospital. Now she's almost 16 pounds. That is amazing. What a great baby!

China

Do you know how hard it is to find baby items NOT made in China? I was reading about this book where a woman chronicled her life buying only items made outside China. It included everything from food to clothes to toys and beyond, including items for her kids. Bottom line: it's hard, almost impossible. So I decided to see how hard that experiment would be with one purchase I need to make for Evelyn. She needs a teether, and while I know you can freeze applesauce in a cheesecloth wrapper and stuff like that, it seems awfully messy. So I started to look for a teether with the following requirements:

• Phthalate free (meaning no PVC)
• BPA free
• Non-toxic plastic
• No arsenic, when the information is available
• Not made in China
• The freezy kind you put in the refrigerator, not the rubber kind that is chewed
• Something that looks easy to hold

It took some searching, but I found two: one made in France, the other in Germany. In general Europe has much higher safety standards for toxins included in children's toys. These teethers they are probably twice (or more) as expensive as a comperable American model sold at Target and made in China, but for me the price is worth it. I don't want Little Miss Babypants sucking on something with arsenic in it! Or Phthalates! Seriously, those are terrible toxins, especially for something she'll have in her mouth a lot.

I might try this "Not Made in China" thing a bit more...

Ho ho ho...I'm exhausted

I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. Oy. Now here's the long post.

Don't get me wrong, the holidays are great. But this year in particular they were just exhausting. I love seeing my family, and even though we didn't travel anywhere but around town, it was SO MUCH HARDER with a four-month old in tow. It was scheduling around her naps and feedings and bedtime. When can we go to dinner if Evie needs be home around 7pm to start her bedtime routine? Where can we go to dinner since Evie is kind of crankypants tonight? Sorry I can't go see a movie because Evelyn is not a nap-and-be-still kind of baby. Worst of all, really, was that we could not invite anyone to our house. It is tiny and overstuffed and dirty and not at all a place capable of entertaining. So we'd have to pack up the baby and all the baby stuff and trek over to my aunt's house to spend time with the family. I guess I didn't anticipate how much harder all that would be with an infant on board. With all the travel and disruption of her normal schedule, Evelyn was not her bright shining self, either. She was cranky and crazy for much of the holiday.

But, that said, the holidays were infinitely more fun with a baby! I only got pictures from christmas morning with Jon's mom and sister because Jon's mom took them. I was such a slacker with the camera. It never even occured to me to take it out of the diaper bag. I was on auto-pilot throughout the holidays.

In this picture we are in the sun, but you can see Evelyn's AWESOME new stuffed dog on the couch (it's as big as she is) and you can kind of tell she is eating a little penguin toy. She really really REALLY started to put everything in her mouth over the last couple weeks... more on that later.

Here is Jon showing Evelyn her new bath mitt from his favorite new store, Gimme Gimme Pillow Toast. They import crazy asian pop culture things, particularly from Japan.

And then the lovely family photo in front of the little tree. I like this picture because it looks like Evelyn is really happy, but she is in fact screaming her head off. Good times...

Christmas Eve and Christmas morning we spent with Jon's family doing traditional things. Pink and White Sandwiches with his mom and aunt on Christmas Eve Day, seafood dinner on Christmas eve night with his whole family together, and opening gifts Christmas morning. Evelyn tried to eat all the wrapping paper. She has been drooly drooly drooly the past couple weeks and started putting everything in her mouth. My mom is convinced she is teething already. I am hoping that isn't so. She also has developed a cold in the last two days, which my mom says is what happened the few days before every tooth I had came in. Yikes. I'll report in a few days if we have a new tooth!

Our families gave us such thoughtful gifts. And they spoiled Evelyn. She is so loved...

The other big news of the holidays, and what added to the stress and craziness of everything, is that my grandparents asked Jon and I if we'd like live in their house for a couple years while they sell a different house and move in with their daughter. I guess for tax reasons you can only sell one house every two years or else you get severely penalized by the IRS. So we started helping them move out of a house they have lived in on-and-off for 50 years. It is a chore, and not one that is very pleasant. But it must be done, and they need a lot of help. Plus, our lease is up at the end of February so we kinda have to get the ball rolling. Craig was Mr. Helpful getting most of the really big stuff out of their house before he went back to California. I ended up taking one extra vacation day to paint the bedrooms. (They kindly offered to let us paint if we wanted to freshen things up and make it our own.) There are three bedrooms. Ours is a lovely light lavender-grey color, Evelyn's is a soft peachy-pink, and the guest room/office is a light butter yellow. It took a lot of work to paint them, but it will be so nice to move in to rooms that are OURS. We've both rented for so long that the idea of painting got us all excited.

So to recap, the holidays were lovely but exhausting, Evelyn might be teething, we'll be moving into a new house in a month or less, and it was wonderful to see all of our family members, especially those that came in from out-of-town.

We also opened a college savings 529 plan for Evelyn! How adult are we?

I hope everyone had a lovely and relaxing holiday. Happy new year to all!