Naps...

So the kids both slept in this morning. Well, okay, slept in relative to what time they normally get up - meaning I got up at 7:30 instead of 6:00... but still, it was nice.

Unfortunately, that apparently meant that Miss Sunshine was going to boycott her naps today. I sure wish I could get her back on her nap schedule, it would make my life infinitely easier, that is for sure. There is so much stuff that I need to be getting done in the afternoons that I can't when she is awake, especially now that she is mobile. Because she has full on figured out how to crawl and is moving all over the place. She is also a grabby baby, and the first place anything she grabs is headed is her mouth. Monster Boy was not like that, so this is a new experience for me. But you can't turn your head away from her for even a second, she is that fast. And never mind that I vacuum daily, there still always manages to be SOMETHING on the floor for her to put in her mouth. So I really need that two hour afternoon stretch back so I can get stuff done around here! Poor Monster Boy's clean clothes have been in the laundry basket since Monday waiting to be folded, and they still aren't done... One of these years I will get her back on schedule. I have faith...

Ugh

Miss Sunshine decided that 6 am was a good time to get up this morning.... Someone want to tell her it wasn't?

She is currently passed out in Daddy Mac's arms on the couch. Daddy Mac is passed out on the couch too. As soon as I finish pumping I'm going to attempt to put her back to bed... Hahahaha, I just noticed that she's got her bottle in her mouth with her arm laying over the top of it, sound asleep. She looks like a wino! I wish I could take a picture of it for you all, but Daddy Mac has the camera at his office now... we need to get a new one. Maybe if his first commission check is big enough I'll be paying a visit to eBay... anyone have any recommendations on a good quality digital camera? I'd like to start playing around with photography a little bit more and see what I can come up with...

Uh Oh, it's storming and the dog is barking and that just roused Miss Sunshine again... Monster Boy is still passed out asleep. Daddy Mac is passing her off on me to go back to bed... guess that means Mommy Mac isn't getting any sleep this morning.... Keep your fingers crossed that she takes a nap this afternoon so I can get some sleep again...

4 year olds....

are a pain in the neck! Anyone who tells you that it's the "terrible twos" has not had a child who made it to four yet! Monster Boy has become exactly that - a MONSTER! I swear, he used to be this wonderfully well-behaved, polite, great little boy. I don't know where the heck that kid went, but that is NOT what I have anymore. It's getting to the point that sometimes I dread taking him out in public because he's going to be "that kid" in the store - and it used to be that I would have people comment on how wonderfully well-behaved he was. I miss those days like nothing you would believe.

And Miss Sunshine is now in to EVERYTHING since she is crawling (okay, well, sort of crawling. She's mobile, we'll leave it at that!). Her new favorite thing is to head right for any cord she sees and try to get it in her mouth. She's hearing "NO!" a LOT lately - she should have that down in about a month. She's already started ignoring us, or turning and grinning at us when we say it to her. I can tell she's going to be a handful. Monster Boy was so obedient at this age - he didn't get in to stuff or touch things, he didn't put much in his mouth, he was just easy. She is grabby, into everything, and the first place it all heads is - you guessed it - right for the mouth. I hope this means that she will be easier once she gets to the four year old stage, but I have a sneaking suspicion it means she will be even worse...

I really need to get her back on her nap schedule. It got shot all to hell a few weeks ago when we had doctor appointments and errands and such, and I haven't been able to get it back on track since then - lately it's a battle to get her to take a single nap at all during the day, much less sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time. But she is EXHAUSTED all of the time and super cranky as a result. And dammit, I need that hour or so to myself during the day. I want to start working out again, and the only feasible time for me to do that would be while Monster Boy is at school and she would be down for a nap.... So I'm going to spend this week trying to get her back on her schedule with the hopes of being able to start exercising next week... wish me luck!

She crawled!

Little Miss Sunshine CRAWLED last night! Like, REAL crawling, not that crazy head on the floor scooting thing she's been doing. She crawled for probably about ten minutes (one or two little crawls at a time) and then reverted back to the scoot! But she did actually crawl for a few minutes! SO exciting! I just had to share.

It's Labor Day weekend. Normally tomorrow would be a "day off" for me from work. I don't get "days off" anymore! Oh well. It's going to be a busy couple of days for us. My grandparents are having a barbecue this afternoon, so the "chillens" and I will be heading out there. I don't know if Daddy Mac will be joining us or not - the van STILL is not running and he may be spending his day working on that if our friend can help us out. Luckily we have a LARGE extended family that will be more than happy to take over Miss Sunshine for us, and there are lots of other kids (mostly older, but it still works) for Monster Boy to play with, so hopefully it won't be too stressful of a day. Tomorrow it's over to my other grandmother's (I know, how lucky am I that I have three of my grandparents still living and that my kids get to know them?) for Labor Day festivities and also Birthday celebrations - there are five of us with birthdays in a three week period of time (which is a large number considering that there are only 9 family members on that side!) so we always celebrate all of them on Labor Day. This year, I turned 30 on the 30th, so it was kind of a special birthday for me, and I am looking forward to spending some time with family and getting to eat some cake!

On a side note, Miss Sunshine has FINALLY figured out how to bounce herself in her bouncy seat - now that she's practically too big for it! I have to put her in it while I pump, otherwise she is in to everything, but I keep a close eye on her since she can sit on her own now and you really aren't supposed to put them in there after they can sit on their own. Mostly she just kicks her legs around like crazy, though.

I had to start supplementing this week. It was rather a let down (although Miss Sunshine took right to the formula so that helped) but it happens. It's only a random bottle here or there of no more than 4 oz - usually just to tide her over while I am pumping her next feeding, but still, I was kind of sad. If I reach a point where she is getting more formula than breastmilk, I'll probably stop pumping. For now the balance is more in my favor so we keep going! (Although I must admit that secretly I am ready to pitch this stupid pump out the window. I have yet another friction blister which is radically painful. Don't tell anyone...)

***So sorry if there are any misspellings in here. I've just discovered that my spellcheck button has disappeared! I'll be searching to find out where it went, LOL, but in the meantime, I'll just have to hope I catch any typos on my way through....

Are you ready for some football?

Now on to the fun stuff! It's college football season - WOOHOO! We are Kansas State University Wildcat fans in this household (both Daddy Mac and I went to school there) - even though this is probably going to be a rather rough year. Daddy Mac and I are in our jerseys and the kids are decked out in Wildcat gear as well - Monster Boy has his own little jersey (although he needs a new one - this one is on the verge of being too small - guess we'll be hitting up the stores sometime this week) and Miss Sunshine is in her cheerleader outfit - she is just too cute in it! Too bad the games won't be televised.




On a side note - I am working on figuring out the best way to post pics on here for you all! So you may want to go back through some of my previous posts here in a week or so, as I will be adding pictures that are relevant to the posts for you. I realize that the blog is rather boring right now, and I am going to try and spice things up a bit.... I'm not too horribly computer savvy, so it'll be a work in progress, but I think it will be well worth it in the end... hopefully I can get this thing kicked off and up and running a little bit better. My step mom is a web designer, so I'm hoping to get her to show me some tricks as well. I gotta pimp my site - haha....

Miss Sunshine has become mobile. She is not ACTUALLY crawling yet - still doing the scoot thing - but she moves pretty quickly with it at this point. And she is grabbing everything in sight these days. Her favorites right now are cords - uh-oh. Monster Boy wasn't much of a grabber - I never had to take stuff down or move things around with him, he really didn't mess with stuff. Sunshine, on the other hand, is in to EVERYTHING. I have a feeling we'll be doing some redecorating around our house once she reaches standing capabilities. She is learning NO at a young age, though! And completely ignores it. I know at this age that she really doesn't understand what that means, but she hears it enough she's going to figure it out quickly!

Well, Daddy Mac took Monster to the store and Sunshine is trying to eat the computer cord as we speak, so I'd better get her out of here... I'll try to catch up later on!

Such a relief!

We are home from Shriners. They are going to do her surgery! I can't tell you how thrilled I am about this. If ever we needed a boost, now was the time. They said they may do the surgery as early as 9 months because of how narrow her cleft is - now we are just waiting on a call from the nurse who handles the scheduling to find out when it will be. Honestly, part of me is hoping they will wait until she is closer to a year before they do it - she's still so tiny and I worry about them putting her under anesthesia - I'd like for her to be a bit bigger before doing something like that. But I guess we shall see what happens.

It was a pretty overwhelming 48 hours, I'll be honest. We had a three hour drive to the airport, which Miss Sunshine mainly slept through. The first plane ride went well - she was happy and played most of the way. When we got in, we waited about 40 minutes for the cab company to come pick us up (Shriner's was paying for the cab so we had to use a particular company) and then the driver didn't know where our hotel was so he had to GPS it - but we made it. Took a while to get there because we were going through at the tail end of rush hour, but oh well. Check in at the hotel was amazingly easy - and my cousin and his girlfriend came in from right outside Chicago to have dinner with us, which was really nice. We ate at Gino's East, which is like the ORIGINAL Chicago pizzeria - and it was FANTASTIC! We all ate way too much. Then it was back to the hotel to sleep - well, Shane slept anyways. Miss Sunshine tossed and turned all night - being in a strange bed, in a strange place she just didn't seem to get comfortable. I am sure Daddy's snoring didn't help matters either! So Miss Sunshine and Mommy were pretty tired come Wednesday morning. But we got up and got loaded up and over to Shriners and spent the day meeting with 8 different doctors. We met with a social worker, a psychologist, a speech pathologist, an orthodontist (he didn't really do much since she doesn't have any teeth yet, ha), a nurse practitioner, an ENT and two plastic surgeons. There is also a pediatric dentist that will monitor her as her teeth come in that we didn't actually meet with because we ran out of time. Then, after you meet with all those doctors individually, you go into a room with ALL of them (and there are two or three in each specialty except for the orthodontist and dentist) for a round table about the plan of care. But they are going to do her surgery and all her follow up care from now until she no longer needs it or is an adult. I am so exceedingly grateful that there just aren't words. With everything else that has been going on, knowing that I am not ever going to have to worry about anything with regards to her cleft not being covered by insurance is such a huge weight off of my shoulders, I can't even begin to describe it. I am rather nervous about having to travel so far to have the surgery done, and then traveling with an infant who just had surgery, but tons of Mommy's do it all the time, so I know I can do it too.

On another note, I got my bracelets from CCA today! Super exciting. AND a bunch of my friends have told me they want some too, so I am actually going to have to order more. I think it's great that I have such supportive friends. I wrote to the local news stations and newspaper wanting them to possibly run stories or an ad about it, but haven't heard anything back yet. My husband's cousin works at the newspaper so we may try to pull in his connections if we don't hear anything back by next week, because I think this is something that really needs to be recognized, and there isn't much of a basis for assistance in our area that I have been able to find. Maybe I'll have to start something up myself. Who knows. It would be nice to actually physically meet with other parents who have gone through what we are going through, though. Maybe someday...

Nerves

We leave today for our appointment at Shriner's hospital in Chicago. I am finding myself extremely nervous about this. I HATE traveling with her. Not that I don't like taking her - but it's just so stressful traveling with an infant to begin with, and then you add in that whole special equipment (I know, it's just bottles, but still...) thing and it's just so much worse. My husband just doesn't understand. I told him it's not like traveling with us or Monster Boy, where if we forget something we can just run to the store and buy what we need. If I forget or lose her bottles, we can't just go out and buy a new one. Add to that the whole pumping thing, so I have be sure I have all my stuff for that too. There are just so many things to take care of. I hope that she does well on the plane too - it's not like I can give her a pacifier if she gets fussy. I know when I flew with Monster Boy when he was nine months old, that was the easiest plane trip I took. He fell asleep before we even took off and slept the entire flight. I can only hope we get so lucky with her too.

And I am also nervous about her getting approved for the surgery. It's going to be a full day of doctors tomorrow and I know I am probably going to be extremely overwhelmed by all of it. Thank God my husband is going with me so that he can take in what information I can't. And I don't know how long it will take for us to get a decision from them about whether or not they will do her surgery or what other assistance they might provide for us if they don't do it. So much to think about. I just hope that everything goes well.