Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Happy Birthday to my Baby

It is your birth day little one and that day will ALWAYS be as special to me as it is to you :)

I relive the days/hours before my babies' births as their birthdays approach. Ask me in a year what I did each hour of today and I will not be able to tell you but the end of each of my pregnancies is seared into my memory and hopefully always will be. I like looking back at myself at a time right before life changed. In the days before Jack was born, I just had no idea. In the days before Cora was born, I had no idea how simple life was with just one child. Same with life before Luke. Looking back at those weeks, everything seems simpler.

These last few days, I've just marveled though that one year ago I DID NOT KNOW this child. Tonight, as I put Luke to bed, I was lingering. Singing him all my favorite lullabies: Edelweiss (changing Edelweiss to Baby Luke), You are My Sunshine, and Stay with me, Lord Jesus. Now I have known him for a whole year and, of course, cannot imagine my life without him.  

If you ever want to just talk and talk and talk, get me started on the subject of having babies. It is likely we are done, we definitely probably should be done, but I have found the experience to be magical and miraculous and it makes me sad to think I'm through that time in my life. So I've been all kinds of sentimental recently.

But what keeps me at a place of contentment is that I feel I have drunk in this past year and enjoyed it so much. I have been crazy busy and can't say I haven't missed a lot because of the warp speed our life is running at these days. BUT I have appreciated and savored and lingered.

LUKE

He's still the baby to beat all babies at 12 months :) Will he one day be challenging? It's hard to imagine. He's still the magical sleeper - 12 hours no matter what. And we still find him in his crib in the morning, usually awake, just quietly sucking his thumb, patiently waiting for someone to come get him.

He's lovable and now is loved to the point that we are having fights and tears about who gets to sit by him at meals. Argh. !#%!%  
21 lbs 13 oz of loving

12 month photo shoot went something like this
Best shot!
He is matter of fact. Put a food in front of him he's not interested in? No mind. Without a sound of protest, he'll just swipe it right off his tray. It doesn't matter if he ate it yesterday; if he doesn't want it now, he doesn't give it a second glance. This makes packing his lunch hard as you never know when he's going to be "over" a certain food. And he won't let you put food in his mouth unless it's something on a spoon. So it's hard to get him to try something. If he doesn't like the look of that plum slice, there's no way of getting him to know what it tastes like.

Current favorite foods: bananas!!, blueberries, oranges, oatmeal, bread, warm roasted vegetables (but not cold!).  

He's still a great nurser. He may be moving from 6 to 5 feedings a day and that one dropped feeding is all my baby-mommy heart can take right now. Let's keep taking baby steps on that one Luke!

As for baby steps, he's still very laid back in this area. He is starting to pull up more regularly, but doesn't cruise. He crawls to get around and he's fast. We have been standing him up behind a wagon or push toy and he can take steps that way, though he looks like an old man barely able to handle his walker :) So precious.

Old Man Luke with his walker

Luke's favorite facial expression - scrunched up nose :) :)
He's a handful for sure as crawling babies are. Always a new place to explore and oblivious to the word no. He can pop out outlet covers and loves to put them in his mouth. We keep discovering him with small things in his mouth, thankfully always right away. He loves to eat shoes (so, so gross). He hates to be contained. He acts like it's the ultimate betrayal when we put him in the exersaucer now.  

He has become more attached to me and cries pitifully when left in the church nursery or when someone else besides Momma wants to hold him. He also sometimes cries now when I leave his classroom, but he loves his teachers and is so comfortable there that those cries are short lived.

He clearly says "mama," "da-da," "dja-dja" for his brother, and "nana" for his favorite food.  He can sign "more" and he loves to clap and wave.

Time go slowly please.

Thursday, March 10, 2016

Things of note

There have been countless reasons to blog lately but just not enough hours in the day.  Here are some things of note to capture:

After six months of Cora sleeping on the floor of Jack's room because, well, I'm not entirely sure...


we bought a loft!  Night one saw two children giddy with the excitement of it all.  Night two saw Jacob and me trying to reconfigure Jack's room to make the new furniture work.  Despite our best efforts, we have too much stuff.  Do you hear that grandparents?  Too much stuff!


Monopoly.  Jack can frequently be found playing two hands of Monopoly since he always wants to play and we don't have much free time on our hands.  He's got a natural knack for numbers and it's giving him great practice with addition and subtraction (as well as ruthless property acquisition.)


The Minivan.  Horrible gas mileage.  But I can open any door with a button, it's roomy, it came clean and with a free satellite radio subscription (On Broadway!), so basically I love it.

Urban South Brewery. I don't know how anyone successfully starts a business in this city because it's complicated, stressful, expensive - a dance with many hoops.  But Jacob is hanging in there and within arm's reach.  I'm so proud of how hard he is working and so impressed with all he's learned and figured out.  Plan to have a beer with us soon.

Siblings. If only these two always got along like this. 


They do play well together sometimes, but there is also so much fighting, so much whining, so much teasing. It's becoming clearer to me lately how a lot of this is a result of them jockeying for position. At times, it's almost visible to see how Cora fights for air when Jack comes home or how he tries to gain dominance by putting her down.  It's a lot to have all three of them at once and to try to spread attention around evenly.  Inevitably someone isn't getting their (attention) needs met, and then I get to see the myriad ways that can play out. 

And this is all harder to manage because we are stretched thin right now.  The pace of our life is not sustainable so we are working to figure out ways to slow things down.  I'm looking forward to June and both my and the kids' vacation!  


 More to come on this guy :)  He somehow has a major birthday next week!