Saturday, November 16, 2013

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!

No comments: