Two new things for Cary this week: “tine out” and her big girl bed.  Tonight, she fought going to bed so her Daddy left her in her room crying for a few minutes and came back in and she had crawled out (the first time she’s done that). 

Daddy: Cary, you have to get back in your bed.

Cary: No!

Daddy: Cary it’s night night time.

Cary: NO! Uh uh ni-ni, uh uh bed.  No.

Daddy: Cary, if you don’t go to bed, you have to go to time out.  Do you want to go into time out? [Time out takes place outside her room.]

Cary: Yes.

This has been the Winter of Germs at the Miller Household.  I feel like I’ve been in fever/exhaustion hell for the last three months.  Almost since I came back to work in the beginning of November and Lowe went to school, we have had at least one member of the family sick every single week.  With kids as young as ours, when anyone in the family is sick, everyone else is sleep-deprived and exhausted.    If either Ed or I are sick, the other is waking up at night and getting up early with Squeaky without any reprieve.  If either of the kids are sick, especially Lowe, all of our nights’ sleep are reduced by two or three hours.  And if TWO people are sick (as happened early last month), it’s game over.    

What we have dealt with:

Cary – She has had hand, foot and mouth disease (a mild case, but kept her out of school and one of us out of work for a week); RSV (another week out of school and a midnight trip to the emergency room ); pink eye; an ear infection; and probably half a dozen cold viruses.

Lowe – Cold after cold after cold after cold after cold, with an ear infection and tonsillitis thrown in.  Lowe likes to wake up about every hour and a half when he’s sick.  Not fun for anyone.

Ed – A horrible cold and fever germ that had him flat on his back all of Christmas weekend, and the same exact germ three weeks later. 

Jennie – A cold/fever that flared up into a horrible sinus infection with fever for five days straight.  A clogged tear duct that included surgery and another flare-up of the sinus infection.

This is way worse than last year.  Cary was sick a lot last year, but Ed and I hardly came down with anything.  I read somewhere that the drought in Houston last summer has made the climate so that germs are much worse this winter.  So, for example, what would normally be a sore throat and sniffles has been a flu-like cold.  That’s what Ed’s doctor said anyway.   Plus Cary is a toddler now so the germs don’t just come to her, she goes and finds them.  And then brings them home to Lowe who gets a double wammy – daycare germs and Cary germs. 

Cary’s RSV germ was the scariest.  She came home one day with a note that RSV was going around the toddler classes and she got a fever the same night.  She was really fussy and feverish for a couple of days and then one night she went to bed and her fever spiked to a 104.  We called our pediatrician’s office and the nurse answered and asked if Cary’s breathing was labored, which it was.  So she told us we had to go to the emergency room.  They were worried about pneumonia.  It was about 10:00 at night so we dropped Lowe off at Moppy’s and went down to the Medical Center.  Cary was wide awake by the time we got there and her fever had dropped back down to 100.  She was fine, but the trip lasted four hours! 

Here is a pic of a very sick baby girl:

And here she is at her very first visit to the ER.  This was at about 1:00 in the morning:

The moral of the story is that two kids are exhausting!  So much sleep deprivation. Poor Lowe has had a stuffy nose for about five out of every seven nights of his life, and it is very hard to sleep with a stuffy nose when you’re a baby.  (Tip for moms, though, the baby vapor rub seems to help.)  But, we are very thankful for grandparents this winter who have given us lots of breaks, and lucky that ear infections have been rare in our family so we have not had to have ear tubes or too much amoxicillin. 

The pattern seems to be that every week and a half or so, we’ll have a three day reprieve where everyone is healthy, and then off we go in another germ.  Sure enough, we’ve just come out of our three days of health and good sleep and have just entered Lowe and Cary both have a cold.  Ed took a shift last night and I’ll take the shift tonight.  Praying for germ-season to be over soon! 

Found this cute video of Cary from Memorial Day 2011. I was a little busy at work at that time so didn’t have time to share.  This was pre-Squeaky!  Fourteen months old.

Squeaky turned 7 months this week!  Happy Birthday, Squeaky!!

Squeaky is our second child.  And he’s an angel baby.  (Blond hair and blue eyes – who’s baby is this??) As such, he hasn’t gotten quite the same level of attention that his sister got at his age.  When he was born Cary was only 15 months old so we had to be very careful about the way we treated him around her and vice versa or else she might hate him, lash out at him, revert to baby things, act out, any number of things that the pediatrician warned us about.  So, for example, if both kids were crying (which happened a LOT at the beginning), we’d leave Squeaky to cry and tend to Cary first.  If one of us was holding Squeaky when Cary walked in the room, we’d put him down and pick her up.  If he needed a diaper change and she wanted to play, we’d play with her while changing his diaper.  This is just how it’s been for Squeaky. 

It sounds sad, but actually it has worked out ok for Squeaks.  We are still crazy in love with Squeaky and he is be no means neglected, but possibly because he does not get all of our attention at all times (like his sister did), and possibly just because it’s his personality, he’s kind of an easy-going little chap.  He hardly ever fusses.   I like to say he has three cries: feed me, change me or put me down.  That’s really it.  

But one downside has been that we simply have not done a good job of documenting his every move like we did Pippen because it turns out his sister is quite the attention-grabber.  So, here we are at seven months and this is his very first update post.  Here he is at seven months.  (I can’t believe he’s seven months!)

He’s really into his hands right now, loves to hold onto things and maneuver them.  LOVES to be talked to.  He is an extremely social baby.  His whole face just lights up when somebody comes over and talks to him and he immediately joins in the conversation and babbles and gurgles away. 

He is absolutely the sweetest baby there is.  I love spending one-on-one time with Squeaky.  He’s my cuddle baby.  (So NOT Cary.)  He was basically attached to me for the first four months of his life because he was a premie so he loves to cuddle.  We cuddle and sing songs.  He loves to be sung to and even tries to join in.  (Again, SO not Cary - Cary shushes me whenever I try to sing around her.)  He loves to see funny faces and to touch hair.  And lately, he has been really into his jumperoo. 

He loves his big sister, when she takes time out of her day to speak to him.  She is really sweet to him too.  Rocks him when he’s in his swing, kisses his forehead, gives him his passy when it falls out.  Recently she’s taken to feeding him his bottle and helping out while he’s in the bath.  She’s a good mommy actually, and he gets such a kick out of her. 

Developmentally, Lowe has learned to scoot along on his belly.  He’s not quite sitting up yet without falling over but getting better.  He hit a huge growth spurt a couple of months ago.  At his six month appointment, he’d grown all the way up to the 25^th percentile from I think the 3^rd at his four month appointment, and his head is all the way to 40%.  All this new weight, particularly in the head area, probably has made it difficult for him to manage his macro coordination but he’ll get there.  You can see what I mean in these pictures taken six weeks apart - it looks like the Santa baby ate the Red Stick baby. 

Along with this growth spurt came an insatiable appetite so we started Squeaks on solid foods at about 5 ½ months, right before Christmas.  Squeaks is a great eater.  He’s on a four-hour schedule with his bottles (we started this at six months) and he has three meals a day of vegetables - squash, green beans, peas, carrots, sweet potato, spinach or broccoli, and so far he’s pretty much eaten everything.  We puree fresh veggies and freeze them in ice cube trays.  He’s also eaten banana, but we’re not in a rush to get him on fruits right now.  Here he is eating one of his first real meals, some rice cereal.  (I apologize for the bib, future Lowe.  You were, as I said, the second child…)

Here’s his schedule:

6:00 (or whenever he wakes up) - 6 oz bottle

8:30 – rice cereal with a scoop of veggie like sweet potato or carrots

9-10:00 – nap

10:00 – 6 oz bottle

12:30 – lunch

1:30-2:30 – nap

2:30 – 6 oz bottle

4:30-5:00 – nap

5:30 – dinner

6:00 – bath

6:30 – 6 oz bottle

7:00 – bed

Here he is after his bath a few nights ago.  He’s just starting to learn how to hold his own bottle.

At bedtime, we literally just walk him in his room and put him down.  No rocking, no pacifier, nothing.  It’s almost weird, he’s so easy.  His night sleeping has not been nearly as good as Cary’s was.  Partly because he nursed exclusively for much longer (until he was over three months old) and had to eat every two hours back then (I had a terrible milk supply), and partly because he’s been so constantly sick since he started daycare (that will be another post), he’s really had a hard time learning how to sleep all the way through the night.  But, when he’s healthy, he usually does a pretty good job.  I’d say on average he’ll wake up once or twice and want his pacifier but goes right back to sleep until 5:30 or 6.  Once last week, though, he woke up at 5:30 and took his noony instead of his bottle and he went back to sleep until 7:30!  That would be wonderful. 

Here’s my sweet angel taking a snooze on the couch.

That’s pretty much it for Squeaks.  I’m anxious for him to start crawling and interacting some more with his sister but then again I’m in no rush.  Love you my baby boy! 

That’s what Miss Cary Dashiell has been saying all morning, because that’s what she did!!!  22 months and 11 days old, Pip has decided that SHE is ready to try the potty. 

We’ve been talking about the potty for a long time.  She has her own potty, she knows what happens in the potty and all the steps that go along with going in the potty, but until today, potties were NOT for Cary.  A couple of weeks ago we had a long talk about how big girls go in the potty and then they get to wear beautiful princess panties instead of diapers.  We even went out to Target and made a big trip out of it and bought her her OWN set of princess panties, and we got home and put on her panties and pulled out her potty.  And while we waited we talked all about how pretty her big girl panties were and how as soon as she needed to go she was to tell Mama and then sit down on the potty and go.  And she would nod and get real excited about wearing big girl panties but as soon as we got the part about the potty, she would stop me and shake her head and say, “No!  No Mama.  Uh uh potty.”  And sure enough after a few minutes she teeteed on the furniture and not the potty. 

So we retired the potty for the time being and decided to just keep talking about how one day she will go on the potty like big girls and it will be a great day.  Well, today, just as we were trying to get out the door to go to school we made a stop at the potty (for mama) and afterwards she got really interested in the potty and looked at me and said “Teetee potty.”  “Oh!” I said, “You want to teetee on the potty before we go to school?”  “Huh,” she said, which means “Yes.”  So I picked her up and sat her on the big potty (because her potty was in the back of the house) and left her pants on and she sat there for a minute and thought about it and then she said, “Mama, uh uh pants.”  And she hopped down.  “Oh,” I said, “You want Mama to take your pants off so you can teetee in the potty?”  “Huh,” she said, so I did.  And we hopped back on the potty and sat a minute more and then, it happened!  She went teetee in the potty all by herself!!! 

We were so excited we ran to the back of the house and found some chocolate that is probably a few months old and opened it up on the changing table while I put another diaper on her and we celebrated her very first teetee in the potty!  And then we called Daddy and said “Teetee potty!”   And then we got to school and told all her teachers, “Teetee potty!”  And everyone got so happy and proud and we just knew we had done something very very special.

Yay, “Teetee potty!!”

Continued from here.

One thing that was funny was I started pointing out airplanes to Cary because there were so many that came right over the house, and after that, every time she heard a helicopter or airplane engine overhead she would stop what she was doing and give us this face:

Then we would realize that sure enough, there was a plane engine overhead and we would grab her and run out to find where the airplane was!  Here she is with Moppy looking at an airplane:

Now, the face comes up anytime she hears anything that she can’t see and wants to know what it is.  As I said, she has her own language.    

Squeaks didn’t really know he was at the beach but he had a great time too because, for the first time in his life, people spoke directly to him!  This shocked him.

And made him smile.  This may be his very first smile ever, caught on film thanks to Aunt Jiji!

And, I bought this wrap right before we left called a Moby.  It was fantastic!  This baby – maybe because he was a premie, I’m not sure – must be held at all times.  The Moby allowed me to bring him out to the beach, nurse him discreetly , and even do things like eat or hug Cary without having to put him down.  I love it and recommend it to ALL nursing mothers!  (If you are handy with a sewing machine you can easily just make one yourself.  I can’t even sew a button.)

The last thing about this trip that was neat was the storm brought in all kinds of interesting marine life that I have never seen before.  We saw several live starfish, huge jellyfish about a foot in diameter, and several sharks. That’s right, sharks.  The sharks were up to about four feet long and looked like tiger sharks.  Ed got a picture of one that swam almost a foot from the shore where he was standing.  (No, Cary did not go swimming with any of them.)

Also, the sandbar was either very shallow or dry the entire time and big enough that one day we pulled a chair and umbrella out there and sat right there in the ocean.  It was perfect for Cary because we had a shallow tide pool between the shore and the sandbar, and then a nice firm sandbar for her to walk in and look at the fishies.  In this picture, she has actually caught a fish! 

We had an awesome time and I really hope this becomes an annual vacation because it was my first in three years!  Special thanks goes to Moppy for being the “House Nanny” and allowing Mom to get some beachtime in between nursings and even one entire afternoon of nothing but sand, ocean and a cooler full of beer.  Aaaahhh!

Just finished our first ever family vacation!!! We had a blast. Went to Pensacola to visit my brother and sister-in-law via Baton Rouge to visit other family. The trip was fantastic. We got there the day after Tropical Storm Lee had rolled through and the weather was a gorgeous 70-something with blue skies all week long!  (A welcome relief from the Texas drought with an entire month of 100+ degree weather!)  It was Pip’s first time to the beach so that was an adventure, and we all spent some quality time with Squeaky too!

[Sidebar: Since I haven’t updated this blog in awhile, some background. Michael Lowe is being called Lowe, but more often he is referred to as Squeaky. He was given this name in the hospital when his little cry was SO TINY it was no more than a squeak! Still is, really. So now we have a “Pip” and a “Squeaks”!]

Pip had gone to visit her Mimi and Gramps on the Monday before we left.  This was her first ever trip away from home without us and she did great.  We got there on Friday and learned she had picked up a new word: Allie!  (Mimi and Gramps’ boxer.)  She says, “A-eee”!  She said this word for the entire trip and giggled every time she said it.

[Sidebar2:  This is a big deal because even though Pip is almost 18 months old, she is still not talking!  She has never once said “Mama,” to my heartbreak.  She does say “Daddy” but not very often.  And she has said a few other words on rare occasions, but only once or twice, and then she decides she’s done with them.  Instead, she has elaborate gestures and sounds that she has mostly made up that mean a myriad of different things.  For example, shaking her hands means “hot” or “cold,” as the case may be.  Shaking her head means “no” and a quick grunting “huh” means “yes.”  Her finger on her nose means “sleeping” (as in, “Shhh! The baby’s sleeping!”)  Throwing her hand towards the ground and saying “ish-daaaaa” in a moaning kind of voice means anything from, I-have-a-bobo to made-a-mess to something-is-dirty-please-clean-it.]

We left for the beach on Monday, Labor Day and stayed on Pensacola Beach in a house with my Mom and brother McLean, and of course Uncle Chevis and Aunt Jiji came to visit every day.  Here is the view from our house, showing the tail end of the storm blowing through:

At first, Pip would not touch either sand or water.  She hates dirt on her hands or feet, so her aversion to sand probably should not have been as surprising to us as it was.  But little by little she got used to both and loved it.  Now she’s got a beautiful golden tan and blond highlights and is a beach bunny!  Here are some of many pics we got of her on the beach:

chasing a bird:

with Uncle Chevis:

with Moppy and my bottle (twirling my hair):

“surfing” with Jiji:

and with my Daddy:

(Somehow, we didn’t get any pics of Cary with Uncle McLean.  We’ll need to fix that next year.  Sorry McLean!)

Click here to continue.

Just got a smile!!  I had put Lowe in his carseat and went to take care of something before getting in the car and he started fussing because he couldn’t see me.  Then I went back over to him and said hello and he gave me a big toothless grin!  What a cutie! 

Six weeks ago today we welcomed Michael Lowe into the Miller Family! He surprised everyone by arriving five weeks early. Mama was so caught off guard, it took me twelve hours to realize that pain in my belly was labor! Here is how it went down:

Working late on the Thursday before Fourth of July weekend, I called Ed to complain that I was so uncomfortable sitting at my desk that I just wanted to go home and lie down. A couple of hours later I finally did go home and get in bed but I remember thinking, gee, these cramps just won’t go away! Weird. When I noticed the same discomfort the next morning on my way to work, I finally realized it was contractions that I was feeling. Duh!

I called the doctor when I got to work, thinking they would have me pay them a visit sometime that day or tell me to go home and put my feet up.  Instead they told me to go to the hospital. This shocked me, as I was still very much in denial that I was in labor. But I called Ed and we went, and I was shocked again to learn that even though I was only one centimeter dilated, I was not only having contractions, but they were four minutes apart! This was at about 10 am on Friday morning.

The doctor on call prescribed some shots of something that was able to stop the contractions. Once they stopped, I told the nurse that I still felt kind of crampy, but better. They told me to go home, get in bed for the weekend and return to my usual schedule after the holiday.  I was thirty-five weeks and five days pregnant.

That evening, I was in bed playing with Pip (who was actually jumping on my pregnant belly – smart, very smart). I had already contacted work to tell them that everything was ok and I would be back in the office on Tuesday. Suddenly I realized that the “crampiness” was getting worse, and was coming about every 3-4 minutes. Again, way to be observant, Mom.  I kicked everyone out of my room, tried to be still and rest, but the next thing I knew there was a gush of blood that indicated to me that we better get back to the hospital IMMEDIATELY! So we did. This time, I was in full force labor and the doc was powerless to stop it.  It was 9 pm and I was four centimeters.

Let’s pause here to discuss how nervous we were to be birthing a five week premature baby.  Actually, we weren’t that nervous.  We had just had our final ultrasound a few days before and had learned the baby was over 5 lbs and was perfectly healthy.  However, this was so unexpected that we only had a few hours to compose ourselves and get used to the fact that we could have any number of problems in front of us.  We asked all the nurses what the concerns were at this stage of development and they told us the primary concern is lung development, and that the baby may need to stay a few days in the NICU getting help breathing.  It is also worth mentioning that we had absolutely NOTHING done at home for the baby.  No bed, no changing station, no clothes, nothing except what we already had for Pip.  But, none of that concerned us at that point.

Ok, fast forward a few horrendous hours when the hospital took their sweet time getting my room cleaned and ready, despite the fact that was now in ENORMOUS pain, the nurse screwed up my IV and the epidural only worked on one side, and I was finally comfortable enough to stop screaming at everyone and dose off a bit. 2:30 in the morning. Pip was home with our amazing, wonderful babysitter, Maria, who rushed over the moment we called.  My Mom was on the first morning flight back from Pensacola and Ed’s parents would drive in from BR then as well.  I asked the nurse how long she thought the labor would be, and she indicated we would maybe start pitocin in the morning sometime and I would have the baby midday. Michael Lowe had other plans.

45 minutes later, I woke up to the gush of my water breaking. I woke up poor, exhausted Ed and had him go get the nurse. With the next contraction, I felt like I needed to push. The nurse didn’t believe me (I was having trouble believing it myself) but checked me anyway and was shocked to discover I was fully effaced, fully dilated and the baby had practically shot out of me with the water bag.  She asked if I could cross my legs until the doctor came!

Michael Lowe made his way into the world at 3:44 in the morning after four pushes.  He had the sweetest, saddest little cry and a full head of blond, fuzzy hair.  He was precious!  I only got to hold him for a minute before the neonatology team swept him up to the NICU for a six-hour observation.  Ed and I were still in total shock.  All we kept saying was, What just happened??  How do we already have a baby right now??  We texted all of our family, and despite the ungodly hour, most of them texted back!  We were elated but truly exhausted, so, with nothing left to do, we actually both lay back down and caught some zzzs. 

The next morning, Ed trotted up to visit ML in the NICU and came back down to report that he was perfectly healthy!  It is truly a blessing, but he had absolutely no health problems despite his early arrival.  I finally got to hold him and feed him when he was released from the NICU.  He was already exhausted and slept like a little angel almost the whole time we were at the hospital.  That’s what he is to me – my little angel boy.

Welcome to the world, Michael Lowe!  Early or not, we are so glad you are here!