Therapy Olympics

I am on fire recently...back to blogging with a vengeance.  It must be because poor Stephen is in the office until 10 o'clock every night doing tax returns.  Perron had another therapy session today and he is doing so awesome!  I know he is on the verge of crawling.  It makes me so excited, but a little sad at the same time.  I look at him all the time and wonder where the time has gone.  Nancy worked on lots of stuff with him today and left us with a list of homework assignments.  He is starting to get a lot better at sitting up and can really hold his torso up so much better.  We are working on him shifting his weight from side to side.  He needs help doing what they call "load transfer", which is shifting his weight from one side of his body in order to free up his other hand to do activity.  This is an essential step in getting him to crawl.  Nancy said that a lot of pieces were coming in and it was just a matter of getting him to pull every thing together.  I always ask where she thinks he is in comparison to his actual and his adjusted age.  She said he is still a little behind his adjusted age (which is almost 7 months) because of some of the issues he still has with sitting up.  She was however very pleased with how much he had improved in just two weeks.  He wasn't able to pull up to kneeling last time because his upper body wasn't strong enough, but this week he could do it with relative ease.  He also was able to sit on one hip and and hold his weight with one hand while playing with his music table. 

I looked at Nancy this afternoon and I asked her "how do normal babies do all of this".  It makes me a little sad, because I feel like I will never get to experience the way things are normally done.  I told Nancy that I have become fascinated with normal pregnancy and birth experiences.  It is almost impossible for me to imagine just going into the hospital, pushing out a baby, keeping it in the room with me, and then leaving with a baby after my two day stay is over.  I most likely will never experience a true labor contraction in my entire life.  i will never have another pregnancy when I don't spend every day worrying that something could go wrong at any moment.  Certainly I am not the only woman who is scared that something could go wrong in a pregnancy.  I think all women live with a least some degree of fear.  I think the difference with me is I have experienced a lot of what can go wrong and so my fear will be in both the known and the unknown.  I don't know what it is like to have a baby that just "does" the things he is supposed to, when he is supposed to do them.  when I asked Nancy how normal babies did all the things they are supposed to do, she said they just did them.  That is such a foreign concept to me.  That a baby is just able to figure it all out on their own.  It really is a miracle I guess.

However, all is not doom and gloom.  We are so blessed to have so many people that care about Perron and help us make sure that he is okay and help him learn all of the things he needs to learn.  We have wonderful doctors and wonderful therapists that want to help us and make sure that Perron is given all the skills he needs to succeed.  And in a way it is a blessing to have a professional to talk to all the time about what he is and isn't doing and what should and should not be expected.  I really consider Nancy a friend....like a really knowledgeable aunt.  And I have been given the blessing of seeing my little miracle unfold right before my very eyes.  I am so proud of how far he has come and what all he has accomplished.  He has worked for every one of his milestones, but it makes us appreciate each one of them so much more.  It might have taken him over four months to look at me in the eye for the first time, but I'll tell you what, each time I see him look at me I realize what a blessing and a gift it is and I do not take it for granted at all.  Each time he reaches for me or a toy I remember that he couldn't/wouldn't reach for anything for over five months.  And I realize what a blessing the simple things are.  When I see his little face light up with a smile when he sees me, I remember the 3 and a half months or more that it took him to smile at anything, and it makes my heart smile.  He is a miracle, a joy, a delight, and the best thing that has ever happened to Stephen and I.  We might not do things the normal way, but we make it work!

What's Cookin'?

In general, I really like to cook.  Before Perron came along, I would usually cook every night that I didn't have an after work commitment.  I would make pretty elaborate meals and tell myself what a little Suzie Homemaker I was.  Now that Perron is here, I still need to cook dinner every night, it's not like we have stopped eating since his arrival.  The only wrench in my plans is that my time is now severely limited.  I basically get to spend an hour and a half with my son every day that I work.  By the time I get him home for the day and he has to get ready for bed, we have about an hour to spare.  I was hating it that I was having to spend a minimum of a half hour of my precious time with him in the kitchen making dinner.  So I started searching the Internet for solutions and I found this.  Basically you prepare either two or four weeks worth of meals all in one day and then you freeze them and pull them out the night before.  I tried a two week cycle and it worked awesome.  It is so nice to come home from work and just put something on the stove or in the oven and be done with it.  It took me five hours to cook 13 meals (I didn't cook one of them) and then clean up the kitchen.  It definitely made the kitchen look like a food bomb had dropped in it and I had to run the dishwasher in the middle of cooking because I was running out of mixing bowls, but in the end it was all worth it.  I have so much more time with Perron and I have the added bonus of not having to stress about what I am going to make each night.  The plan calls for a major grocery shopping, so that takes some time, but my in between trips to the grocery are much shorter.  It also is saving me money because I am buying in bulk and not throwing away food that never gets used.  So, to all of my working mama friends...or even those who don't, but are sick of the nightly dinner night...go out and buy this book.  I promise you will not be disappointed.

I'm Back

So I have been totally unmotivated to blog these last several weeks.  I have not been able to find any inspiration, nor have I had the energy to try and be witty.  I do however, feel extreme guilt for not posting (that is the good Catholic girl in me) and feel like I should at least string a bunch of random thoughts together.  So  what have we been up to?  Nothing and a lot of things all at the same time.  Stephen's work is really cranking up so he has been busy.  While his tax season is absolutely nothing like what we experienced when he was in public accounting, he still is pretty busy.  He does tax returns as a side business, so he pretty much locks himself in the office as soon as the baby is in bed each night.  I'm not going to lie...it is sometimes nice to have the remote to myself.  Between Perron's fascination with it and Stephen's possiveness over it, it is very rare that I get a chance to hold it. Perron is such a big boy in training, that we have had to give him one of our old remotes as one of his very own.  Don't tell daddy...but sometimes I still let him old the fancy computerized remote.  My work has been relatively busy and I have been a bit burned out recently so I am hopeful that I will come out of my funk soon.

Perron starts daycare in one week.  His first day is the Monday after Easter and he will be going three days a week.  I am a little nervous, but I think that once we both get adjusted to it we will settle in nicely.  I just hope that he will nap while there.  He is doing much better on that front, but still not great.  While I can lay him in his bed and he will put himself to sleep at night, he still needs to be rocked completely to sleep to go down for a nap.  I know...I know...this is a situation of my own creation, but I don't have the energy to change it.  He will at least take one nap a day that is an hour to an hour and a half long.  We are still on a three nap a day schedule though.  We have had major interruptions in his night time sleep thanks to his second tooth coming through.  It finally broke the surface last weekend, so he finally slept through the night again all this week.  AMEN!

Other than that nothing much, we are still doing swim lessons and those are going great.  He had his Easter pictures taken last week and he looked so cute.  We ended up having to do two sessions because it was so cold the first session he REFUSED to smile the entire session.  I decided I definitely did not spend that much money for him to look pissed beyond belief in every picture, so we went ahead and had then re-taken.  He did much better the second time around and would even play with the bunnies that Kim had.  By playing with them, I basically mean grabbing their ears and squeezing the you-know-what out of their little heads.  Hopefully the rabbits will forgive him. 

We have also been able to take him to church for the past two weeks, which has been so nice.  He did awesome the first week and did pretty good this time.  He was a little fidgety and fussy, so I ended up trying to listen to the sermon in the narthex.  I am not 100% sure how much I got out of the situation, but it was still good to be back in church.  I am not going to lie, they had been sending us mailings that bordered on harrassment :) trying to persuade us to come back to church.  Between my difficult pregnancy and Perron not being able to be out in public, it had been almost a year since we had been in church.  I had really missed it.  I also want Perron to understand the importance of going to church and I want us to go regularly just like Stephen and I did when we were growing up.

I know this post is missing a key element...pictures...but with Stephen working on returns every night, my time on the home computer is limited and I don't keep pictures on my work computer.  I promise I will get some new ones up here soon!

8 Months

Dearest Perron,

How can you already be 2/3 of a year old?  Whenever someone ask me how old my baby is, I am shocked when I reply 8 months old.  You are getting so big and strong and we are so proud of you.  You have had a great month and are such a cute, sweet baby.  You weigh 14 lbs. 9.5 ozs.  You are wearing 6 month clothes in your pajamas and you have officially grown out of all of your 0-3 months clothes.  Mommy is going to have to go shopping this weekend because you barely have any clothes that fits you.  And you definitely need clothes because...you start daycare on April 5th.  I can't believe it is already time for you to start school.  Mommy is nervous, but I am hopeful that you will like it.  I am hoping that you will like being around all of the other babies.  I am also hoping that you will decide that you like napping at daycare too.  You are doing a tiny bit better in that department and will take at least two one hour naps a day.  Still not great but it is better than 35 minute naps.  You definitely sleep better for Grandma than you do for mommy.

You are a great eater and have not turned your nose up at a single thing we have given you.  You have gotten great at the sippy cup and can now hold it, tip it up high enough, and figure out how to suck all at one time.  We are really proud of you.  You are sleeping about 10 hours at night.  We put you down in bed at night and you are able to put yourself to sleep without crying.  You usually stay up for at least 30 minutes, talking to yourself and playing.  You are still waking up some nights between 4 and 5, but we hope you will grow out of that soon.  I think you are doing that because you have cut your second tooth.  I finally got a glimpse of it tonight when you were in the bath.  Hopefully now that it has broken through your little gum, it will not hurt as bad.

You have started swim classes and you absolutely love them.  You love to splash around and look at all the other babies in your class.  You can sit up so well all by yourself now.  Your new favorite toy is your musical table that your daddy's cousin's family got you for Christmas.  You love to make the music play and then shake your head like you are dancing.  You are still obssessed with your jump-a-roo and will bounce around in there forever.  You LOVE your doggie, McKenzie, and will do just about anything you can think of to try and get her attention.  Whenever she is in the room you laugh and shriek and throw yourself all around.  Unfortunately, she is not ready to reciprocate those feelings yet, but I know that one day she will.

You are such a precious little boy and we love you so much.  It gets harder and harder each day to leave you when I have to go to work.  You continue to be the light of our lives.

We love you very much,

Mommy and Daddy 

The Next Michael Phelps

Perron had his first swim lesson this morning.  He absolutely loved it, looked adorable, and was such a good swimmer.  Stephen had been a little afraid that he would cry, but I knew that he loved bath time way to much to not like the pool.  Luckily I was right and he enjoyed every second of it.  In fact, there were 11 babies in our class and not a single one cried.  You might be catching glimpses of the future Olympic swimming team!  Enjoy a sampling of some of the 90+ pictures that Stephen took of us this morning.

PS  I am sure Perron will be mortified when he looks back at these pictures and realizes I was the only mom in a bikini at his swim class.  Oh well!  I don't own anything else.