April Videos

Here are a few videos of our lives during the last month.  Enjoy!







This one was taken on one of our family walks before dinner.  The guys (Brian and Nathan) almost always end up having some sort of competition!

Andrew: 14 Weeks

This past week as brought lots of little changes to our lives!  Andrew can fairly reliably get fingers in his mouth... but no thumb.  Maybe he'll be a finger sucker (or not!)

After a long and difficult evening of trying to get Andrew to sleep last week, we flipped him onto his tummy and unswaddled him... and he made it through the night without going ballistic about the change.  So Brian and I decided it was time to break Andrew from the swaddle.  We're a few days into this experiment and actually it hasn't seemed to affect his night sleeping much (not like the magic that happened when we did this with Nathan at 5 months).  He's still waking twice per night... I am so eager for that to drop reliably to once per night (please God?!?!).  Daytime naps have been mainly shorter, since his instinct is to pop his head up rather then settle back into a second phase of sleep.

Today I "cheated" and swaddled him for his second nap since it was his only chance for a long nap with today's schedule.  It only partway worked - he woke up after an hour but I was able to nurse him back down for another bit of sleep.

And we have started Baby Bootcamp: Bottle Edition.  Brian have our ten year anniversary coming up next month (that number seems impossibly large yet somehow here we are!), and my goal is for Andrew to take a bottle so Brian and I can go out to eat on our own.  We have had a few date nights and lunches with Andrew in tow and he really has been easy, but I'd really like to be able to leave him behind for that night.  The problem?  He WILL NOT TAKE A BOTTLE.  Just like with the other two siblings, he took one around 4-6 weeks, but I'm lazy and don't regularly pump and offer him a bottle so now he pitches a fit when we try and give him one.  So I'm going to be much more disciplined about offering him one (I'm shooting for every day or at least every other), and hopefully sometime before May 14th he will drink from it.  In conjunction, I've pulled out the pacis again and am giving those to Andrew as well.  My thought process is that they will help him get used to having plastic in his mouth and sucking on it without freaking out.  Also, its a lot easier to whip out a paci when I think of it then to always try and have a bottle ready and warmed.  And today... success!! 

Speaking of lunch dates, this week Brian and I (and Andrew) had our second lunch date The Brown Bag in Hardin Valley (the big kids were in preschool) and man they have some great food!  Fish tacos, salmon burgers, steak sandwiches, asparagus, berry spinach salad with poppyseed dressing - all so yummy!  Its just open for lunch so we gotta do it when we get the chance!  (Note the resemblance between father and son... in wide eyed expressions at least!)

And I thought this picture from a few days ago was just too cute not to share, all the kids gathered around the Old McDonald play gym. 

It reminds me of this old picture when Nathan and Sarah would stare at it together (originally posted here).

 

Andrew: 12 Weeks

I realized that I wrote this post but never actually posted it to the blog!  Andrew hasn't actually been spending as much time in the jumper as his big bro and sis... partly because we just aren't at home as much but also because he has big siblings that can entertain him on the floor, but I do love that its a option now!

Twelve weeks old! I'm shocked!

My goodness - is that baby in a jumper at twelve weeks?!?

Heck yeah I'm a baby in a jumper!

I'm cool.  Just chillin'.

And just for fun, a video of Andrew's first experience in the jumper.

Andrew: 3 Months / 13 Weeks

This sweet baby boy of mine is already three months old!  Hooray, we made it out of the newborn stage!!  And this kid... I'm just so thankful for an easy, go-with-the-flow baby!

This past weekend was Granddaddy's funeral, which turned into basically three full days of being on the go from morning until bedtime, and Andrew was just a champ!  He would cat-nap in other people's arms (Pawpaw had the magic touch multiple times) and if I brought the swaddle blanket he would take longer naps on other peoples' beds.  Though if you try and move him after he's fallen asleep, he'll wake up and be DONE with the nap.  He even amazingly slept through the 21 gun salute at Granddaddy's military memorial service!  And even with all the crazyness and getting passed around to lots of people, he never got fussy or angry.  I'm so thankful because he really made it easy for us to spend lots of time with family.

As far as his "schedule" goes, here's basically what our days are like if we're at home all day (which is rare!).  Andrew usually wakes up around 7 and is up for 1-2 hours before going down for his first nap.  He usually sleeps for an hour, then is up again for an hour and a half.  Then nap #2 for another hour, and then up again for about an hour and a half.  This gets us to about 1:00 when I hopefully put Andrew and Sarah down for simultaneous naps (#3 for Andrew), Nathan has his quiet time, and I have the option to nap or putter.  Also this is when Andrew (hopefully) has his longer nap of the day, somewhere between 2-3 hours in length. From then on he has a longer stretch of awake time, sometimes with a catnap to get him through until bedtime between 7:00 and 8:00.  Dream feed at 10:30ish, then nighttime wakings are sporadic - one or two wakings from 3:30 on.  But the other night when he woke up at 4:00ish, he just half-heartedly nursed, so I'm hopeful that we are getting to the point where he's getting enough calories during the day to phase out his night wakings (I can dream...).  

Easter Festival

We took the kids to the Hardin Valley Easter Festival the week before Easter and we all had a really fun afternoon. Gran came along as our designated "Andrew carrier". 

The egg hunt was fast and ferocious.  I only got this picture of Nathan's arm, and after getting two more terrible ones of Sarah, I just gave up and helped her hunt eggs.  I'm typically a stand-back-and-let-the-kid-do-it kind of Mom, but Sarah was taking her sweet time, stopping to shake each egg and decide whether she wanted to put it in her basket or not (yes, she put at least one back down on the ground when she wasn't impressed with what she heard).  So I intervened to prevent a meltdown later on when all the eggs were gone and she had just a few.  Nathan however knew exactly how cut-throat the hunt was going to be and booked it around with Daddy collecting eggs and other toys.  At one point I looked up and realized that the kids were like a swarm of locust - in front of the wave of children was a colorful, treat-filled lawn and behind them was just a swath of desolation.  The kids counted eggs after they got home - Nathan's grand total was 22 and Sarah's was 17 ("Sarah lacks five more eggs to have as many as I do" said Nathan).  Nathan also picked up two bracelets, one was a purple one for Sarah (so sweet!). 

No one wanted to pose for me after the hunt with their spoils.

After that it was on to the cupcake decorating station where Nana was posted.  A fun and delicious activity!

Then on to the inflatables!  The giant slide was once again the kids' favorite, especially since we steered them away from the bounce houses where we were afraid they would be trampled (unintentionally) by the bigger kids. 

The kids spent a long, long time on the slide, but finally we moved on to other activities.  Nathan was excited to dye an egg...

... but Sarah really wanted to get her face painted!!  She loved it... until the paint dried and it started "bothering me". 

Towards the end of the evening the kids wanted to head inside the building where Gran was entertaining Andrew.  We ended up in the church library where Holly B. bonded with Sarah over three Bearenstain Bears books and Andrew was passed between Jennifer and Sarah Frances L. We were some of the last ones to leave the festival, but we all certainly had a fabulous time!

Until We Meet Again...

My Granddaddy died on Sunday.  He was 89 years old, father to five children, grandfather to eleven, and great-grandfather to twenty!  He and my grandmother were married for 63 years!!  (Here is his obituary.)  We will miss him, though we know he was more then ready to move onto the next life.  Goodbye Granddaddy!

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

(Daddy is on call today, but I was able to get everyone dressed, picture taken and out the door almost on time.  And I only had to apologize once to a child for yelling at them!)