What's a girl to do in a house full of boys?

My friend Ebonnie is having a baby shower next week for her first baby, a little girl. I wanted to make her something really cute and since I never get to look at girl stuff, I had so much fun figuring out how I wanted to make her little girl a set of tutus and flower headbands! I've made tutus before, but I didn't like how long it took and the elastic I used seemed to stretch out too much. I found another way to make it using crochet headbands and it turned out great!! So much easier and faster. I ended up doing the headbands two different ways with four different types of felt flowers. I definitely got caught up in how cute little girl clothes and accessories can be!!

Once I had them all finished, the only question I had was how long she would be able to use them. The tutorial said that it would fit a baby and can stretch to fit a toddler, but it looked pretty small... As it turns out, I have a baby and a toddler! Who cares if they are both boys :) I had to try it on them to test it out. Rett cried the entire time. His daddy would have been proud:

James flat out refused to try on the tutu and I had to bribe him with fruit snacks to get him to try it on. Once he got it on, he thought it was funny! He even asked me to put on the headband :)

My next project is to make a set of tie onesies for a sister in our ward who is having a little boy around the same time as Ebonnie. I'm planning on making an extra set for Rett, so my little model can wear boy clothes this time :)

Everett is 2 Months Old!

My little bug is 2 months old today! He gave me the best 2 month birthday present ever: sleep!! For the past two nights he has been sleeping for much longer stretches! The first night, I got up with him around 12:30am as usual, but after he got back to sleep around 1am he didn't wake up until 6:15am (usually he is up again around 3am, then again around 5am)!! I woke up with a start around 6am and was so shocked, that I stared at the clock for awhile before getting up to make sure he was still breathing :) I crept into his room, using my phone as a flashlight and walked up to his bassinet. I touched his forehead, silently thinking, "Please don't be cold, please don't be cold". When I felt his warm head and heard him grunt a little, I breathed a big sigh of relief :) I went back to bed and he woke up only a few minutes later.

I was trying not to get my hopes for the next night (last night) in case I would be disappointed, but he did even better! He went to bed for the night around 8:30pm and didn't wake up to eat until 4am! I fell asleep around 10pm, so I got to sleep for 6 hours straight. Seriously heaven.

We have to make a 2 month check up appointment for Rett at Anthony's office sometime this week so I will have to update later with his stats. He was 10lbs a few weeks ago, so I am estimating that he is around 11lbs now. He definitely has some juicy rolls! He still has deep blue eyes, and the funniest tuft of curly hair on the top of his head. There are some times when he will just stare and stare into your eyes, like he is thinking the deepest thoughts and it is so adorable.

He has always hated his car seat and he still absolutely hates it. He will be calm and happy and as soon as I put him in and start to get the straps around his arms he starts screaming! He still really likes to be in the carrier on our chest when we are out and about, but he has starting having a lot more awake time in it, just looking around at everything passing by. I am so used to him just passing out as soon as I get moving, that it still surprises me when I look down at him and I see his eyes open, looking around.

He also seems to really like taking baths. As long as I can ease him gently onto the infant bath seat in the tub, he doesn't cry and just watches everything around him. We try to have both boys in the bath at the same time so that we don't have to do two different nighttime routines and he doesn't even mind if James splashes him a little bit (or throws a toy at his face. oy.). After about 5 or 10 minutes he starts to cry and I take him out while Anthony finishes James' bath. James really doesn't like it when I take him out and always demands that I "put baby brother back!" I have a feeling that these two are going to be inseparable :)

Family Update

There hasn't been anything big or exciting going on with us lately, so it hasn't occurred to me to blog and the time just slips away. Everett is almost 2 months old!! So I wanted to update on what has been going on with us in the past few weeks.

My good friend that shared my baby shower and had almost the same due date as me had her baby a few weeks after I had Rett. She came over for a visit one morning and my mom got to hold both babies at the same time! They were really similar in size and it was a small taste of what twins would be like. It is so funny to me that she has a little boy that is only a month younger than James and then we got pregnant at the same time with little boys that are only a few weeks apart! It is like we were meant to be friends and have play dates :)

I've had two things on my to-do list for ages: refinance our condo (it is currently at an adjustable rate), and combine our cell phone plans into one family plan. Well I finally can cross them both off! The cell phone plans only took a few minutes on the phone to take care of and it was so great to finally have it done. Now we have unlimited talk and text and we share our data and it is all a few dollars cheaper than what we were paying before. We started the process of refinancing the condo a few weeks ago and so far it has been pretty painless. There is just some final paperwork to take care of and we will hopefully be closing soon. Our monthly payments are going to go up (unfortunately), but it will be a great peace of mind to have a fixed interest rate for the future.

Anthony's parents drove up for a visit last week and his mom and I went shopping with Rett, while his dad and James stayed home and played. It was a nice outing! After Anthony got home, we had dinner and at the last minute decided to go out and get ice cream while the grandparents watched both kids. It was a nice little break, but I'm definitely not at the point where I can leave Rett for long. After about 20 minutes I start getting antsy and want to come home to make sure he is okay. After we got back, James helped Anthony and his dad put together a shelf they brought to help organize our laundry room. James loves to help put things together. He gets so focused and into it!

The next day I put the shelf in the laundry room and organized everything and I love how it turned out! It is so much nicer in there, it almost makes me want to do laundry :)

Potty training has been going pretty well. James definitely hasn't gotten the hang of telling us that he needs to go before he goes. He has stopped even really telling us right when it happens and usually I just discover that his pants and underwear are wet. He also really doesn't want to go #2 in the potty. One afternoon I smelled something and asked him if he went #2 in his underwear. He said, "No, I go poo poo on the floor!". Yep. It was on the floor and all over his hands and legs. So gross. Anthony took James with him to run some errands one day and he had an accident while he was waiting for someone and Anthony had to take him straight home. I'm not sure when exactly it will all click with him as far as realizing he needs to go, communicating it to us, and making it to the bathroom before he does. Hopefully it will fall into place soon. The travel potty seat we bought online has worked great for us when we are out and about. He used it to go to the bathroom twice last Sunday at church and he spent the entire time at church in big boy underwear and had no accidents! As long as we are diligent about taking him to the bathroom regularly he does well, but if we rely on him to stop playing and tell us it doesn't work.

Rett has started smiling every once in awhile and cooing. Whenever he seems to be in a smiley mood, all three of us crowd around him and compete to see who he will end up smiling at. For some reason it is usually Anthony! Man, both of my kids are traitors :) One morning I caught a few pictures of it. The best one is blurry, but I am going to put it up anyway because I love seeing him smile!

We have been on such a nursing roller coaster lately. Off and on for over three weeks now Rett has refused to nurse. At first he would nurse for a few minutes and then pull off screaming and be done but now he basically refuses to even try. I've asked everyone I could think of about it, and talked to two different lactation consultants. We finally decided it was due to an overactive letdown and she gave me some things to try and literally that night he started acting like he was going through a growth spurt and wanted to nurse all the time for at least 30 minutes at a time. It was a complete reversal of everything we had been going through! I barely had a chance to try any of the techniques the lactation consultant recommended to get him nursing again. So we had a few days of everything good and today he started doing it again. So aggravating!! I seriously considering just throwing in the towel and moving to pumping like I did with James but I keep hoping that it will get better as he gets older and that he will grow out of whatever is the problem. A couple of the times he did it today I got him to nurse by putting him the exact position with a pacifier (which he doesn't mind at all) and then quickly doing a switch-er-roo. He would start nursing almost immediately with no complaints! So we are going to keep at it. Hopefully he grows out of whatever this is and we can get back to nursing without me wanted to have a breakdown every time.

There has been more turnover at Anthony's work and (surprise, surprise) his schedule has changed again. It seems like at least once a month they ask him to change the hours that he works. Now he rarely gets home before 4pm and works a full day every other Saturday. Some days he gets to go in later in the morning, but it doesn't really seem worth it to me. The biggest difference to me is that he used to get home right as James went down for a nap, so we would have a few hours to relax and catch up with each other before I had to make dinner and we did our nighttime routine. Now he comes home right before I need to make dinner and Rett is usually really fussy at this time and James is going crazy wanting Anthony's attention as soon as he walks in the door. We used to have so much time together that I never really thought about needing a date night, but now I see why everyone recommends it so much!

Everett Newborn Photos

When Rett was about 3 weeks old, a friend from church who is a professional photographer took some newborn photos for us! I just got the CD from her and they are great! (I actually got them a week ago, her husband gave them to Anthony and I discovered in a bag a week later...men.). I used the photos she sent as a preview to make up his newborn announcements, so those are in the mail already. The day she took them, she got to our house literally a few minutes after James fell out of his crib and hurt his collar bone, so it was a big surprise that my favorite picture ended up being one of James and Rett. James really wasn't in the mood for taking pictures, especially one that involved moving his shoulder and taking his shirt off but she got the shot!

 This is the build-a-bear hat James wore in his newborn pictures!

He is 7 weeks now, about a month older than when these pictures were taken and he already looks so different! He is still a really happy baby for the most part, but we have been struggling lately with him not wanting to nurse. He seems hungry and latches on really well, but then while he is eating he will all of a sudden start to cry and scream and not want to eat anymore. He did this a few weeks ago for a three or four days and we thought it was because he was constipated. It seemed to get better, but now all of a sudden he is doing it again...so confusing. He takes a bottle just fine and seems totally content otherwise, he just doesn't like nursing at the moment. 

On the bright side, he has started napping much better during the day and for the past two weeks has consistently been waking up only around 1am and 5:30am to eat at night. I am hoping this keeps up and only gets better as he gets older. I miss my nighttime sleep!

Potty Training, here we go!

We are officially potty training James and so far it has been going well! He has seemed ready for awhile, but I kept putting it off because I didn't have the energy for it and I thought it would be too much change with the arrival of Rett. The turning point came the night before Halloween. I had put James and Rett in the bath right before bedtime. Rett was getting fussy, so I got him out of the bathtub, got him dressed and sat down to nurse him in the other room. I could hear James playing in the bathtub and he usually does well in there as long as he knows that we are close by. After a few minutes, he decided he was done and he climbed out and started wandering the house completely naked :) I was almost done nursing Rett, so I wasn't concerned about what he was doing, thinking I would get him in a minute. After some suspiciously quiet minutes alone in our laundry room, James came running up to me excitedly yelling, "I peed! I pooped!". I asked him where and he proudly showed me to the floor of our laundry room...yeah. gross. He was just so excited! The next morning we were in big boy underwear :)

The first day was great, with only one accident. Then the next morning he was crying and sobbing and telling me he didn't want to sit on the potty and that he wanted a diaper. So we took a break for the weekend and tried again on Monday. Monday morning he went on the potty over 15 times throughout the day and we only had one accident! We even took a trip to the store to pick out his reward for filling up his potty chart with stickers and he kept his underwear dry the entire trip! He was so cute picking out his reward :) I have never seen him so engrossed in the task of choosing the exact right toy that he wanted. Then when he finally made a decision and we got to the cashier, he handed her his potty chart and told her he could get a toy because he went "pee pee on the potty!" She was a good sport and made a big fuss over him being a big boy.

Tuesday morning he told me again that he wanted a diaper and this time I just told him that diapers were for naptime and bedtime and that he could have a diaper, but he would have to get back into his crib. He immediately changed his mind and was happy to put on his "underwears" :) Tuesday we went the entire day with zero accidents!! He even requested to go a few times without us prompting him, which was great.

Today has been okay. The novelty/fun of going on the potty seems to be wearing off and he definitely doesn't like us asking him if he has to go. (He usually yells "NO!" every time we ask him). He likes it when I set the timer and then when it goes off it is time to sit on the potty, but it is hard for me to remember to set the timer with everything else we have going on during the day. We went to story time at the library this morning in his big boy underwear and I could tell that he wasn't acting like himself. He wouldn't sing along with the songs and seemed uncomfortable but he didn't want to go to the bathroom. I asked him if he wanted to go home and he said yes, so I am thinking that he wanted to go home to use the potty. He held it in until we got home, so that was good. We just have to work on going to the bathroom when we go places (I ordered a cars travel seat online that goes on the regular toilets so I am hoping that will make them less scary for him). Today was also day 3 without a number 2, so we didn't know what would happen. Sure enough, he went out onto the back porch by himself in the afternoon and then came in to tell us he needed his "diaper changed". He really doesn't want to go #2 on the potty! Any suggestions on getting him there?

Overall I am really happy with how things have been going even though potty training with a 6 week old hasn't been the most pleasant of experiences :) I will be happy to have only one kid in diapers though!

All things Halloween

We did a lot of fun Halloween activities this year! I looked up what was going on around town and made a plan to go to as many as we could :) Even though we did a lot of festivals, I still feel a little let down that I didn't have the time/brain energy to get as into it as I usually do. Oh well, next year!

I had a bunch of costumes in James' closet for him that I bought at 90% (!) off at target last year. One morning we pulled them out and tried on different ones to see which one was the winner:

Showing me his muscles in a transformer costume:

 Then we tried on the batman costume. He liked it because of the mask and when we took it off, he insisted he keep the mask on for the rest of the day:

The batman costume was a little big, so I tried to steer him towards the transformer costume when we had a festival to go to. The first one was at the library. Last year I did the balloon animals for them and it was packed, so I made sure to get there early. For some reason there was barely anyone there this year! It turned out to be a good thing for James because they let him do his favorite games (like the fishing game) over and over and over :)

He would also go up to the popcorn machine and get a new bag of popcorn...then bring it to me and hand it to me and go back for more! This was one of the first outings that I had with just me and James since Rett was born. James was loving having me all to himself! He was so happy.

The next festival was a fundraiser at a local saddle club. We spent wayyy too much money on tickets. We overestimated how many we would need and ended up giving over $5 away to other people coming in as we were leaving. We got there really early so avoid the lines and the first thing James wanted to do was the hay ride of course! We thought he would be scared, but he loved every minute of it.

Here he is waving at us:

 He decided to go with a superman costume this time, since he can fly with his cape! :)

 We decided to see if he would go on a pony ride. The last time I tried to put him on one, he cried and screamed and I had to get my money back, so I wasn't sure. He loved the helmet, so that was a good sign!

 When it was his turn, they started to take him over to a small, miniature horse that they had for littler kids. James immediately protested and pointed to the other horses and said, "No, big one!". We were so proud of him! He wasn't scared at all:

 Waving at us:

 Then we went into the petting zoo area:

 His absolute favorite of all the animals were these baby chicks and ducklings. He kept going back there over and over:

 Petting a chicken:

 Of course, we had to do another train ride!

The next day was our ward's Halloween party and trunk and treat. Once again, the hayride was the favorite! They also had a bouncy house that James loved. Anthony and I took turns holding Rett in the sling while I took care of some primary stuff for the sacrament program the next day. Everywhere we went, as long as Rett was being carried in the sling, he was a happy baby, no tears at all! James was a little overwhelmed by all the people once the trick or treating started but he loved getting all the candy. On the way home, he had a lollipop in his hand and got it all over him. Anthony was so grossed out! :)

Before we knew it, it was Halloween day! Anthony dressed up for work. Every year they do a theme and this year they had the doctors and nurse practitioners dress up as prison guards, and the support staff as prisoners. I got Anthony's shirt from goodwill and his police accessories from the dollar tree. The fake glasses came in the policeman package...I guess policemen wear nerdy glasses? I didn't get it :)

While Anthony was at work I took some pictures of Rett in his Halloween onesie that I got at my baby shower. He is starting to look so cute!!

After Anthony got home from work, we got ready to go trick or treating downtown. We did it last year and had a blast! They block off the main road and the kids can trick or treat up and down the street at the different stores. Anthony didn't dress up, but a friend lent us a monkey costume for Rett, so I dressed up as the (wo)Man in the Yellow Hat and Rett was Curious George (James is obsessed with Curious George right now). James was a transformer again :)

The trick or treating was fun, but was over pretty quickly. Since it was about time for Rett to eat again once we were finished, we decided to head home. After we got home, James pretty much forgot about his Halloween candy until right before bedtime. I suggested that as a special treat he get to eat a popsicle (sugar-free) in the bathtub. He was so excited!! Man I love it when you can find ways to trick them into not eating/doing something that isn't as good for them.

All in all, we had a great Halloween. Hopefully next year we will have the energy to go all out and have matching costumes and everything!