Adeline: 1 month

Adeline,

How are you already 1 month old?

It seems like just yesterday you were still in my belly, making your presence known by kicking me in the ribs.

Now, here you are, curled up next to me on the couch, wide-eyed and looking around at your new surroundings.

You have brought so many blessings to us in the last month. With each little sound you make, each brush of your hand on my face while I'm feeding you, you are making your Daddy and I aware of just what a miracle new life is.

You are such a good baby.

You sleep 2-4 hours at a time. Normally I nurse you during the day and prepare bottles for when Daddy is home so he can feed you. He likes to bond with you this way. Nursing was hard for us at first but we got the hang of it after a few weeks and now I think we are seasoned pros. 

You usually have your last feeding around midnight and then Mommy and Daddy goes to bed. You wake us up around 3 and then again at 6. Right now you are eating between 2 and 3 ounces at a time. 

 At first you didn't like your bassinet, but we fixed that by bundling you up really warm and cozy and you are doing just fine.

You cried your first big crocodile tears on April 16th because you were mad that I wouldn't pick you up.  Something about seeing tears rolling down your little cheeks completely broke my heart. 

You are still wearing newborn diapers but I think we are getting pretty close to 1's. You are growing so fast and now weigh close to 8 pounds! Your little face is filling out and you are starting to look so much more mature and less like a newborn. 

On April 18th, you held your head up for almost a minute! Your little muscles are getting stronger everyday and I can tell by the way you grasp my fingers or kick out when you are mad. You also smiled at me for the first time on this day. I was looking over at the computer and turned around to see you smiling up at me. It was the prettiest smile I have ever seen in my entire life. I can't believe that it is just gas, I believe that that pretty little smile was just for me! 

You love when your Daddy comes home from work. Your little eyes light up when you hear his voice. Some of your favorite things are your Soothie paci and cuddling on the couch. You also love it when we dance around the nursery after I change your diaper. You prefer sleeping on your side instead of your back, but I only let you do that when you are napping and not at night. You also love your vibrating chair and you will sit in it the whole time Mommy is taking her shower or working in the kitchen.

You are just like your Mommy when it comes to being bound up in your clothes. You aren't a fan of being swaddled and you will scream until we free your arms and feet. I hate having my feet and hands covered too so it's really hard for me to swaddle you. Daddy does the best swaddling job and he knows  how to do it so that you will like it.

You are changing more and more everyday Miss Adeline. We are starting to see faint traces of a smile more often, and I know that it will only be a matter of time before you are smiling and cooing and showing off all those cute expressions I know you will have. 

I can't wait to see how much you change in the next month. You are growing into a beautiful little girl. When I was a little girl, your Papaw McGee used to tell me that if God lined up all the little girls in the whole world and told him he could have any one he wanted, he would always pick me. Now I know exactly what he meant. You are perfect for us, and we wouldn't trade you for anything in the world.  

We love you so much. Happy 1 month birthday little girl. 

Love, 

 Mommy

Motherhood: Reality

Adeline will soon be 4 weeks old.

Until yesterday, I felt like the rockstar mom.

I feed her, change her, lay her down and we are good to go for a few hours.

Yesterday however, Adeline made a real mom out of me.

You know the kind, spit up all over your shoulder, hair disgusting, house a wreck. 

Yep, that was me.

For some reason when Adeline woke up she decided that she was going to do nothing but hang out on the boob all day (see told ya we say boob now without any reservation. Sorry if you consider that a bad word. Feel free to remove yourself from my blog because I'm sure over the next few months 'boob' will be said a lot. Fair warning has been given). She also decided that hanging out alone was completely out of the question and thus decided to scream at the top of her lungs each and every time she realized that she was by herself. Napping was non-existant which meant that any break I would have had to do anything around the house was also non-existant. All of this meant that by the time Landen walked through the door around 6:30, I was stinky, still in my bathrobe, and had used an entire tube of Lanolin cream. Even the dog was in hiding from all of the screaming and refused to come out until Landen said the magic "potty" word. 

Landen took one look at me, took the screaming babe out of my arms, gave me a hug, and said "Go take some time for yourself and I'll take care of her and start dinner."

{Such a stud muffin.}

So what did this mom do? I took a shower. Yep, with all this free time my husband had so generously bestowed upon me, all I wanted was some hot water to wash off the yuck of my first crazy-mom day. 

I am happy to remark however that today we are right back on track. She is back on her regular feeding schedule, which I am happily providing via Medela and a bottle to give me a break, and she actually took a nap earlier which allowed me to dust my living room and fold two loads of laundry that I started yesterday.

I'm sure that I will have many more days like this before Adeline is all grown up. 

I'm thinking my lucky stars that she has been such a good baby so far.

And as for her,

I think she enjoyed giving me a little taste of reality yesterday.

10 Things I'm Learning About Being a Mommy

1. Everything is cute. And I mean everything! Since becoming a mommy I have somehow mutated into some mushy-gushy gaga freak. Show me a picture of a baby in a catalog...oohhhh.  That kid in the wagon rolling down the street? Be still my heart. Oh, and I can't leave out the cutest little puppy just pinned to Pinterest. Look how fuzzy-wuzzy! Don't be fooled though, the cutest thing by FAR is this really adorable brown-headed cutie-pie named Adeline. Coochie-coochie-coo, I wuv you!
(Help, I need an intervention!)

2. Dryers eat baby socks. If I had known that those microscopic socks would disappear as fast as they do I might have taken back all the bottles and bought more socks. At least it's a little bit harder to lose a bottle!

3. Daytime TV sucks. For realz. In between all the infomercials, reality shows, and cartoons, I'm left watching Dateline: Real Life Mysteries for most of the day. Thank God for Netflix! Although I might have found a new career as an attorney. I'm getting pretty good at the whole guilty/not guilty thing. I'm right at least 45% of the time. (That's all it takes to be successful, right?)

4. It is still possible to keep the house 'tidy'. I'll be the first to admit that I am little anal retentive when it comes to my house. A place for everything and everything in its place is what I always say. So I'll be honest that the thought of my house falling to pieces during the "newborn" phase freaked me out a little bit. I'm finding though that I can still manage to pick things up during nap time. I can dust one room one day, load the dishwasher while giving her a bottle, and fold clothes while she looks around from her Boppy.

5. The word 'boob' and 'poop' are daily vocabulary words in our household. It seems like our conversations consist of nothing but "How many times has she pooped today?" "Oh man! That was a big poop!" "She ate off the boob today!" Funny, things that seemed awkward before being a mommy are now just second nature.

6. All the spotlight surrounding being pregnant is now transferred over to the baby.  One of the greatest things about being pregnant is all the attention that you get. People care about how you are feeling, how you look, etc.  Once the belly is gone so is the attention. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There reached a point where I was ready for the conversation to turn away from "pregnancy" all the time. Now I find, the conversation has turned to Adeline. And you know what? I am perfectly okay with that! I can talk about Miss Adeline all. day. long!

7. Shower anyone? Even though Adeline is just 3 weeks old, I have already found that I get in the shower and out in half the time it used to take me. I've perfected the art of washing off while rinsing the conditioner out of my hair. And those days of not leaving the bathroom until my makeup is applied and each hair perfectly in its place? Gone. Makeup gets applied in the car, and hair is done in between feedings and naps. 

8. A breast pump is household decor. What you didn't know that it was perfectly normal to walk into a house and see a breast pump sitting on the side table? Huh. Some things I have found, no matter how anal-retentie I am, have now come down to convenience. So yeah, my breast pump is visible when you walk into my house, and no I don't care. It's such a freeing feeling! Perhaps I'll take a picture and pin it!

9. Life is divided into 2-3 hour increments. Gone are the days of taking a nap or a long shower or a walk around the block. Now I live from one 2-3 hour block of time to the next.  Adeline is also extremely clingy to her mommy so she doesn't like her bassinet unless it's night time, but we are working on that part.

10. I can do this. When Landen went back to work that first week, I spent the entire first day crying like the newborn baby I held in my arms. I was so afraid that I was going to fail without him here to help me. But I did it, day by day, diaper by diaper. At the end of the week I realized that I was completely capable of taking care of my sweet little girl. I got this!