Glad you didn't hold your breath

 If I had posted this six months ago I would have just admitted to being a pitiful excuse for a blogger, apologized, and moved on. But now, after almost a year of silence, I realize that I'm not even a blogger anymore. I'm a girl, who once had a blog where she would drop some nugget of sarcastic wisdom about the mundane life of a stay at home mom and share pictures of her growing minion. Now, I'm just a mom who can rarely find her laptop under the stack of unopened mail, unfolded cloth diapers, unsorted socks, and magazine articles on child slavery and Adderall overuse (which sound more like advertisements to me at this point).

Birthday cake

pancakes

Grandpa's idea of not spoiling is a Coach backpack

About once a week, and generally in the shower for some reason, I think about this blog. I think about how many months of pictures I have missed posting and how the two people that read it must think that our little family perished in a tragic bouncy-house accident. In fact, I have no good reason for not keeping our blog updated other than my seventeen month old toddler who was sixteen months old in May and fifteen months old before that, and so on, and so forth.

See, the truth is that although I always thought that I was incredibly good at multi-tasking, I am actually terrible when it comes to Brooke.

Before Brooke I could bake some graham crackers from scratch while folding laundry, making appointments by phone, marinating dinner, scrubbing the tile, and organizing the junk drawer. Even though I didn't always make it to regular pedicure appointments I had my toenails painted and my husband ate well rounded meals. Today at the indoor playground I was secretly thrilled that everyone was required to wear socks because the mom next to me appeared to live at the spa with her waxed eyebrows and little jeweled toes. Last night for dinner I served meatball sandwiches. Meatballs and sauce and bread. No veggies, no rice, no fruit or grains. I told myself that the organic ingredients and whole wheat buns made it better, but the reality is just that if Brooke isn't sleeping, I'm not getting anything done.

the aquarium

I grew up in a Mormon-centric town, which means that a lot of the girls I was friends with in high school have several kids, the oldest of which is much older than Brooke. They write beautiful posts with pictures of their trips out of town, with all of their children standing in a row and glowing beautifully for the camera. Their clothes match, their hair is combed with coordinating barrettes in place, and they don't have meltdowns before naps or if they aren't in bed promptly at seven p.m. following precisely two books and a litany of lullabies. Then, after the children are all tucked into bed, my friends do yoga, knit scarves from patterns they found on Pinterest, plan date weekends away to bed and breakfasts in the Rocky Mountains, and sell vinyl signs on etsy.

My life is extremely unlike this.

That is not to say that I don't enjoy it. Most days I wouldn't trade lives with anyone short of a shah, czar or Kardashian.

the zoo

Brooke and I hang out all day, every day. We go on outings and read books. We play on the bouncy house in our family room and do puzzles and eat sandwiches cut into stars. We take trips to the Children's Museum and the indoor playgrounds and the splash parks. We watch "Signing Time" and practice the hundreds of signs that Brooke knows. When she goes to bed, Corey and I pick up the stray alphabet blocks, crayons, and game pieces littering the floor, wash dishes, and sometimes I get to wash my hair before we mutter things like, "How was your day?" while drifting off prior to even getting into bed.

water park fun

Brooke is my little sidekick and best friend. But, she's freakin' exhausting.

She is incredibly smart, and I say that knowing that every parent thinks that their kid is a genius. Unfortunately, this kid may be weirdo smart - think sitting in the corner reading a physics book in kindergarten while the other kids are licking paste and playing house. So, she gets frustrated very easily when other kids, her speech therapist, or her idiot mom don't know exactly what she's doing or planning on doing.

She also needs a schedule. And when I say schedule I mean military style. She gets up at 5:30. We do not wake her up at 5:30 but she has programmed her tiny little motherboard to erupt into action sometime between 5:28 and 5:33 every single morning. She takes a nap at 1pm. If you put her down before that, she won't sleep. If you put her down after that she will only sleep for 30 minutes and then wake up early and grouchy just to punish you for your ignorance and tardiness. If she hasn't had two hours of sleep for a nap she will strike during the night and declare herself "overtired" which means that she'll sit up for hours while crying, rubbing her eyes, and generally looking exhausted but stubborn.

I thought that kids grew out of these behaviors, if they ever developed them at all, but my child is living proof that these tiny people can hang on for dear life to habits that don't care if Dr. Sears says that they are too old for.

So, I keep her on her schedule, and we do things together all day. And, I get little else done other than the bare necessities in the way of cooking and cleaning and laundry.

Our daily life together is MUCH different than the schedule I hear described at the playtimes we attend, and as much as I yearn for a carefree, go-with-the-flow kind of existence I am slowly coming around to the fact that our cards just don't read that way, and it's okay. Her health and happiness are my primary concern and unfortunately for my dear husband, our dinner menu, my mental health, and sometimes my showering frequency suffers for it.

How's that for honesty about my absence?

Month Eight

What can I say that hasn't been said before in recent months? Life is busy, and I'm late...again. Brooke is turning into a little person with a severe case of ADHD so most of my day is something like: run, run, run, run, clean sweet potato off of every surface in the house, run, run...30 minute nap. We repeat this three times and then she goes to bed and I'm left wandering around the house with Corey trying to figure out why our living room looks like Chernobyl and when the last time I ate something that wasn't pureed was.

In all seriousness, Brooke is really turning into a person. She crawls, she pulls herself up onto every surface in the house, she says "Dada" over and over again, and she eats EVERYTHING. She's tried pears, peaches, peas, broccoli, mango, squash, cantaloupe, apples, pluots, nectarines, blueberries, green beans, chicken, turkey, and plums. She likes all of it, but really prefers just to have a huge mound of cheerios (organic, and fruit juice sweetened, thank you) sitting in front of her while she watches "Baby Signing Time".

We discovered around month seven that although she is rather outgoing at home, once in public she clams up like a mute, so I have been making it a priority to take her to storytime whenever I can. Unfortunately, the local baby times are all inconvenient to her nap schedule so we don't always make it, but I am happy to say that she seems to be understanding that there are other people in the universe other than Mommy and Daddy and Sprocket (who Brooke is still completely in love with (and it remains unrequited)).

We visited another doctor this month, the geneticist that it took four months to get an appointment with. We are so blessed that every doctor we've taken Brooke to has been kind and patient, especially those at Phoenix Children's Hospital. We will be having several genetic tests run on Brooke soon, some for general hearing loss, and some because she shows a few signs of a genetic syndrome called Waardenburg. If you're related to us and you're reading this, rest assured that we will let you know if she tests positive for this syndrome because it could possibly be in either gene pool and could affect future generations, but I'm not stirring up drama without knowing.

Brooke's sleeping has run the gamut from terrible to much improved, and we think that teething is particularly difficult for this one because although she still just has her bottom two teeth, she has been grabbing her ears and jaw and drooling like a mad woman. We are hopeful that when the top ones come in she will have a very short reprieve and we can get an idea of her baseline sleep patterns.

We spent her eighth month birthday celebrating in Pinetop with Grandma and Grandpa, and Brooke will be blessed to spend her ninth month birthday with her other four grandparents in Tennessee, three of which she hasn't met yet.

If I say that we are looking forward to all the headaches that come with traveling with a pint-sized demon I would be lying, but we are excited to be taking a vacation together, see some new parts of the country, and introduce Brooke to more of her family. Also, we will be going to the top rated aquarium in the country, a candy factory (hello, heaven) and playing something called "Hillbilly Golf" which may or may not involve noodling a catfish and taking shots of moonshine. I will update you post-activity.

If you have some extra time on the 2nd and 8th, please say a little prayer for the passengers on our flights. If Brooke gets too rowdy we may not be able to afford the drink tab for all of them, so I may be bringing my gallon sized ziploc to security full of pureed apples, hand sanitizer, and Patron silver.

Again, apologies for the lateness. If any of you would like to volunteer your babysitting services while I type up next months blog please feel free to show up at any time. I would be misguided if I didn't suggest bringing galoshes, a duck call, and two changes of clothes. You never know when terror will strike!

Month Seven

Writing these posts is always harder than I'd imagined they would be, mainly because it is so difficult to remember a time when Brooke hasn't been doing the things she does now.

Brooke army crawls everywhere, and although she will crawl the normal way for a few feet she is still faster on the belly so she resorts to that in order to get to where she's going (Sprocket's food dish, the refrigerator, the dog door) at lightning speed.

She is now pulling herself into a standing position while grabbing onto things, which mostly means that my name has been changed from Christina to "Mommy, the infant jungle-gym". She's not very good at balancing, but once she gets her knees locked out she can do a dance that combines the twist and the robot in a standing position for quite a while, which means that her crib got bumped down this month.

We are working on baby sign language and she now recognizes several signs like "Milk" and "Finished", although it's still too early to expect her to do them back. They say that babies can learn to sign as early as nine months so we're hopeful that she'll be communicating with us in no time.

Brooke has had tons of new food this month, including trying out puffs which she absolutely loves. Her pincher grasp and hand-eye coordination is getting better by the day, and I'm finding fewer and fewer puffs surrounding the high chair now, much to Sprocket's dismay. She enjoys almost everything that I've made for her including avocado, peaches, pears, raspberries, apples, bananas, plums and peas and has only made one entertaining face and that was to the mangoes. I love making all of her food from fresh, organic produce as it makes me feel motherly to be steaming and pureeing fruits and veggies in the kitchen while she watches her Baby Signing Time DVD.

This month Brooke and I, along with Gramma, went to see a pediatric opthamologist to take a look at her eyesight and see if there are any concerns that she may have a syndrome that affects both her ears and eyes. He didn't see any cause for worry, so we can check another specialist off of our list. If she had a brain tumor that was pushing on her cochlea it could cause hearing loss and also it would impact her sight, so we were definitely excited to hear the good news. Next month we meet with the genetics team so that is the big, scary appointment that will tell us everything that we can find out medically at this point in her life.

Brooke's one fat, pearly tooth is still all alone, even though she's been gnawing on everything she can get her hands on for a couple weeks now. Every day I think that its twin will come poking through, and I pray for a little relief for her tiny mouth, but it has been stubborn so far.

We also had a fun trip to the aquarium in Tempe with the local AZ Deaf and Blind Academy Outreach. It was so wonderful to see other hearing impaired children and it's nice to be reminded that they are just normal kids. Brooke is always the youngest (by far) around, but I often think that it's more of a benefit for Corey and I right now and that Brooke will have a good time later. She did enjoy the fish though, and really enjoyed picking out furniture with us afterwards since we were a thousand miles away from home near big furniture stores.

Brooke is sleeping better now (for the most part) and often sleeps from 6pm until one or two in the morning before waking to eat. Although I know people who have their six week old babies sleeping all the way through the night, that really doesn't seem to be an option for her at the moment so I will happily get up once or twice to nurse her. We do have problems with her waking up for the day between four-thirty and five a.m. (no matter what time she goes to bed) so Corey and I are slowly becoming morning people (or, more accurately, people who wake up early even though they are grouchy and ill-functioning). Her naps are still thirty minutes long - no shorter, and no longer. Despite following the advice from every sleep training 'expert' we can find, her naps don't deviate from this, so we're guessing that she's just one of those kids that doesn't nap. She wakes up with boundless energy, so our pediatrician says she gets what she needs.

Both her Daddy's and her furry brother's birthdays are this month so Brooke is in a present buying mood lately. I'm off to find her a part-time bib modeling gig so we can afford her taste in gifts.

'til next month!

Result #1

There is no time for a real post because (like always) I'm running behind on my to-do list, but I did feel the need to write about some awesome news we received today: Brooke's EKG came back normal!

Hearing loss can sometimes come as part of a syndrome that affects multiple systems including eyes, heart and brain. We still have an opthamology appointment, a brain MRI, and a genetics testing appointment, but her heart is off to a good start and doesn't seem to be impaired in any way!

So far she's just a normal (almost) seven month old who can't hear very well.

Also, it is worth noting that Dr. Marc Boggy at Luke Air Force Base is the best pediatrician I can imagine having. Yes, those are too many details for most of you, but in the off chance that my blog comes up when someone is googling his name for reviews I wanted to make sure that everyone knows he is amazing!

Month Six

There is constantly a song playing in my head. Sometimes it is something I heard on the radio, a special ringtone from my phone, or recently it is a tune Brooke's magic singing kitchen plays because I hear it roughly 230 times a day. But almost always the background music to my life is the little ditty that the white rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" mutters: "I'm late...I'm late...for a very important date..."

Although normally it's not something uniquely important I'm rushing off to do, unless you consider making beds and folding laundry important. However, I can't help but rush about in a semi-state of panic that I'm just too far behind.

Case in point: Brooke's month six post. Brooke naps for EXACTLY thirty minutes in length, four times a day. That means that four times a day I sit down and figure that THIS time I will write her blog. And then I glance down at my to-do list and realize that I need to make an appointment with a pediatric opthamologist, research hearing aid accessories, order more baby wipes, and look up the recipe for organic baby banana oatmeal. As soon as I get those done I start to type in our blog address and I hear the familiar cries echoing through the monitor. Once in a blue moon I check the video portion and she simply looks around, rolls over, and goes back to sleep, so each time I hear her squeals I cross my fingers, say a quick prayer and hope that when I see her she is in the process of resuming her nap. But, each time lately she is staring straight into the camera threatening that if I don't get upstairs in 8.2 seconds flat she is going to let out a wail the likes of which I haven't heard before. We have repeated this pattern at least a dozen times in the past two weeks.

So, I am late, but here goes anyway:

Brooke is six months old. She weighs 16 pounds and one ounce (65th percentile), is 26 inches long (74th percentile) and her head is somewhere in the mid-sixtieth percentile too, but I can't remember the exact measurement. Essentially, the kid is still big, but not quite as ogre big as she was before. My family is reasonably tall so we're hoping she got some of their height genes, but it's not very likely considering the fact that God took Corey and made him a tiny girl twin to come up with Brooke. Every morning I scoop her up from her crib and look right into his eyes and grin right back at his smile. It is uncanny!

She sits up like she's been doing it for years, and now she army crawls all over the house at approximately 200 miles per hour. She attempts to regular crawl, but it ends up with face plants so she resumes her belly dragging since it gets her everywhere she wants to go anyway. And where she wants to go is towards anything electric, sharp, poisonous or just simply not allowed. Her own personal toy department has been cast aside hundreds of times in favor of the entertainment center, the dog bone, or the electric sockets in various locations. Don't worry - childproofing is in full effect, and she's not left alone EVER so she hasn't hurt herself, but I'm afraid Sprocket is going to coax her into his water dish if she doesn't start leaving his stuff alone.

We spent her half-birthday in Pinetop as is our usual fourth of July tradition. Although this year was sans fireworks because the entire mountain was burning down, we still had a lovely time at the parade and then just enjoying the fact that we weren't at home in the 118 degree heat.

Shortly after arriving home from that trip we headed back to San Diego for the second time in as many months to celebrate my best friend's wedding. She did remarkably well during the day on both trips, but sleeping in a strange environment is not my girl's cup of tea and all progress we made with sleep training went out the window.

Which leads me to thanking the anonymous commenter last month who suggested we check out a certain sleep training website/message board that did prove to be helpful. Although our trips seriously screwed things up, there was a point in time where Brooke slept eight hours straight before needing to get up to eat! We are hovering right around five hours (followed by three and three more) of sleep for her currently, so it is an improvement from last month.

Rice cereal results in a three day drought and then a massive diaper buster blowout, so we have forgone that option in favor of tummy-friendlier oatmeal, and she has now eaten apples, peaches, peas, green beans, squash and sweet potatoes. Because she is a fat girl, all of these options appeal to her and we have yet to run into any problems with her not eating a certain food.

Her belly is still quite finicky though, and I am still unable to eat any dairy without Brooke's gassiness trying to rival her Daddys and her colic-type crying returning. I hope that this does not mean she will be lactose intolerant later in life, but my research tells me that most babies grow out of this so I am hopeful that she will too.

Her doctor says that she is advanced in all ways, except for speaking issues which are obvious in cause. But, she now turns towards all sounds and we're pretty sure she recognizes her name (and recognizes the word NO since she tunes it out so well) so we are happy with her progress. We still have yet to see consistent consonant sounds, but we're doing all of our exercises so she'll catch up sooner or later.

And last, but not least, the little munchkin popped her first tooth through last week while chomping on the leather strap of my purse. I cringed that in all of my efforts to keep her environment green and organic she decided to latch onto a piece of chemically treated cow hide and munch on it with vigor, but she left me little choice so I figured that babies have survived through worse. I'm hoping the rest of her teeth are to follow shortly because she has been moodier than normal lately, but I have yet to resort to procuring her a belt or another handbag to nom. Hopefully nature will run its course.

And hopefully that voice inside my head will help me to become more efficient and I will manage to update again before seven months hits!

The rocking chair

We rocked this morning, the girl and I.

Restless because her belly was making terrible noises, she couldn't figure out how to get herself into a good sleep. So we rocked.

I bundled her up in her fuzzy, pink, swaddle blanket and pulled her close against my chest. One little fist tightly clenched her small teddy bear and the other hand rested calmly just above my heart. She was so warm and so close that it almost felt like she was a part of me again, and to my surprise I found myself missing those days - the days where I could feel her squirm and roll and hiccup. The days where I didn't need a video monitor to see that she was safe at night; I could feel that she was.

She finally let her eyes drift closed, but she periodically opened them to search frantically in the darkness for my face. Once she settled on it, she let her eyelids droop again, content for another minute that I was still there holding her and protecting her. Eventually, with one long sigh, she settled down and began to get some true rest and I knew at that point that I could have, should have, put her down in her crib and tiptoed out to do the dishes or the laundry or one of the other eighty-seven things that are on my to-do list for today.

Instead, I stayed and we rocked.

Now I know why people do this all over again.

Five months down...one MILLION to go.

So my little seven pound munchkin is now five months old and over SIXTEEN pounds. It is amazing how the days can feel so unimaginably long, but yet the weeks and months scream by.

Brooke’s fifth month had her growing by leaps and bounds, which is wonderful to watch and frustrating for her (and us) at the same time.

She wants so badly to crawl, and can get her legs under her, but she can’t coordinate with her push-ups, so she just does a face plant. She rolls immediately from her back to her tummy if you put her on a playmat, but she doesn’t like rolling the other way so much. She’s done it a couple dozen times so we know she’s able to, but we think the fact that she’s been diagnosed with reflux, and also that she can’t get around from her back, keep her right side up.

And speaking of the reflux, the poor little princess has had quite the month of medical interventions, much to our dismay. One of her brand new hearing aids had a malfunction, and then when it was repaired it completely died again so she was without amplification in one ear for a good part of the month. Then we got a bum ear mold so you can hear her ears screeching from a few rooms away (luckily, she can’t hear it). My broken bladder caused an uprising and I had to go on antibiotics for a time which caused havoc with her digestive system, and although we both took some probiotics I’m still unsure as to whether that made it better or worse. Oh, and the reflux. The reflux itself is much better, but they somehow manufacture infant Zantac to come in liquid form and taste like a mixture of melted candy canes and rotten sardines. If any of you want to come and help me cram a syringe of that stuff down her throat twice a day, you are more than welcome.

Every day Brooke is learning something new – she now sits up on her own, a trait that she appeared to learn overnight. She sometimes still sits with her hand(s) on the ground to hold herself up, and she still often topples over like a broken Weeble, but for the most part she’s got the balance down.

She had rice cereal for the first time right around five months, which I was holding out for her sixth month to do, but with the reflux, her crappy sleeping issues, and her Daddy’s pouty eyes whenever she grabbed for my spoon at the table I caved. She usually likes it fine, but doesn’t always seem to understand that it’s food, so it hasn’t affected her nursing at all. I will admit that it is hilarious to watch her mouth the mushy substance and decide whether she wants to swallow it or spit it fountain style right back at her Daddy. I’d say the ratio is pretty much 1:1 right now.

She also made her first consonant sounds the other day (ma-ma, I’m proud to say), so we were thrilled with that because her language skills are behind due to her three first months without hearing aids. Obviously I know that she didn’t say it in reference to me, but it’s a good sign that she’s starting to explore sounds, and we continue to work with her all day on hearing and speaking exercises.

Last, but not least, her sleeping habits are nothing short of a night shift flight controller: sporatic and generally when you need her to be awake for something. She sometimes sleeps 2-3 hours straight at night, but that’s with a whole lot of grunting, twisting, crying out and squirming, and mostly she prefers to wake every hour or so and have a little snack. While I appreciate that she’s doing the health-conscious thing and avoiding big meals, the sleep deprivation has taken a toll on both of us. Corey can sleep in a train station, so when I woke up with her first whimper I would nurse her while staring at my slumbering spouse with such resentment that I still can’t believe he didn’t wake up from the sheer telepathic power. Then, to avoid what seemed imminent: divorce or murder-suicide, he started getting up with us. But, he does need minimal brain function to teach his students, and therefore that wasn’t working either. So, we decided to sleep train.

Thirteen books, five message boards, nine mothers with word-of-mouth advice and two television shows later I still have no idea what sleep training is. I know that we should do it; I know that it’s great, and I know that it will work. I just wish someone would tell me how to do it.

You can be sure that the one method of sleep training that is thoroughly described is Ferberizing, or crying it out. This is for the parents with much bigger cajones than I have, because I spent too many weeks listening to her scream her little face off to willingly subject myself, my husband and my dog to it again.

So here we remain, in sleep training purgatory until either our lovely daughter decides she’s human or we drink the Kool-Aid and let Family Services deliver her to her newly appointed guardians (which we have chosen, we aren’t animals).

I have every confidence that they too will be sucked in by her baby blues and her ability to sit up, and will spend a very long time giving her kisses and hugs and blowing raspberries on her chubby belly. Or at least around five months.