Week in review

On Sunday after I fed Eric his last bottle of the night he passed out while I was holding him. So I threw caution to the wind and decided to tackle getting him to sleep in his crib instead of his car seat. That night he got up several times. I think he thought it was nap time so he'd be wide awake in his crib wanting to hang out. I have my three day rule so I told myself I would try it for three days and see what happens. By day number three we were both dillusionally tired. I wanted to keep plugging away because it seemed to be getting a little better. Night number 4 he only woke up I think twice. I stopped going in to check on him because I know that he knows how to sleep through the night. I did enjoy seeing him sleep in his crib because he would generally turn on his side and sleep all snuggled up with his silky. It was very cute. So yesterday around 6:15pm I decided to take the baby for a walk. I put him in his car seat and snapped it into his stroller. He fell asleep on the walk but normally he'll wake up once I bring him in the house. He didn't wake up at all which I was surprised about so I was able to relax. I figured he'd wake up for his last bottle which was at 8 (the last one he had had previous to that was around 4pm). 8 O'clock came and went and he was still sleeping. I didn't know what to do because he hadn't had his medicine yet that day and his last bottle but he wasn't waking up. I picked his carseat up off the floor in our room and brought it into his room to see if he would stir.. nothing. I put him in the car seat in the crib, not even a finger moved. Would you believe he didn't wake up until 7:30am this morning??? I guess he was exhausted from trying to sleep in his crib all week and was so happy to be in his car seat! He went so long without a bottle I was shocked! So then the connundrum was whether to have him sleep in his car seat tonight or the crib. I chose the car seat because frankly I'm tired and so is he. On Monday I'm going to tackle cereal again and once he is comfortable with getting cereal and vegetables in him I will try again.

On Thursday we went to visit my Gramma McNeil and then we went to my parents house as usual. My mom had brought out the excersaucer that she has and Eric tried it out for the first time. He did ok. The only thing is that the toys on it are attached and toys like that make him very mad and he just starts yelling at them so he didn't stay in long.

Today Eric is 20 weeks old which in my mind makes him 5 months old. However, I get very confused by this because he was born on the the 13th so do I go by that date or the weeks old he is because it doesn't add up? If you ask my dad about it he gives this big mathematical explanation. I've decided that from now on I will go by the 13th. So technically he won't be 5 months old for another almost 2 weeks. At that point I will post his 5 month pictures.

Picture time!

Eric in the saucer:

cousins!

Eric's tickling Dylan's toes. More like trying to eat them!


Buddies :)

Eric is very fascinated by what Dylan has to say:

By the way, yes Eric can sit on his own. If he's steady enough he'll sit for a few minutes but I make sure my hands are ready for when he tips over!!

Another trip to Dean Park and Thumbs Up

It was such a beautiful summer day today! We met the Trautermans at Dean Park and had a cookout. It took a little while to get the food cooked because Eric didn't complete know how to use the charcoal grill but after today we are experts. Marissa and Will brought steaks and corn on the cob and onions and peppers. We cooked all of it on the grill and had a feast. We also had brownies for dessert :). After we finally finished eating, it took about 2 hours because of the slowness of cooking, we went for a walk around the park. Then of course we had to go get ice cream so off we went back to Thumbs Up Creamery. They have a big rocking chair there. Here's Marissa and Sydney rocking away:



aww cute family :)



Teeny tiny chair for a teeny tiny baby :)

Still a peanut...

The baby had his four month doctors appointment today. It was the first time I took him to the doctors without Eric. I survived but definitely missed having Eric there. He would always get very excited about the appointments and we would make guesses on how big the baby is. The result is that he is 13 lbs. 11 oz and 24 and 3/4 inches. He is still a peanut! My mom looked it up and when I was his age I was 16 lbs and 27 inches. I was a long one! I'm sure he'll catch up. There's not a huge chance that he will be short but we will see!

The nurse practitioner was very happy with his progress. When she was talking to me he was sitting on my lap smiling away at her. She was impressed by how social he is. She was also very impressed by his motor skills. He's a strong one! He's been able to sit on his own for a month or two but he's mainly completely bent over trying to eat his toes. However, lately he will sit up taller for a few seconds or so on his own.
She talked about starting him on cereal and baby food in the next few weeks. I had stopped doing cereal three days after I started because it just wasn't going well. He was spitting up a lot and I think he was still getting used to being on his antibiotic. So I don't know when I'll start. I guess whenever I have the urge. Frankly feeding him bottles is so much easier but I guess he has to eat solids someday!
She also confirmed that he is getting teeth. He's got two teeth coming in on the bottom, almost through the gum. They are the tiniest teeth! He seems to be taking it well. He's not unusually fussy or uncomfortable.
He got two shots today again. He screamed of course but this nurse was quick and good at them. He calmed down as we were leaving. I put him in his stroller and gave him his binky and told him he had to hold it in his mouth because I couldn't hold it for him. The secretary was pretty impressed when he actually did hold it haha. He does that all the time... well we hardly give him his binky but when we do he always holds it in! By the time we were at the elevator which is right outside the door he was smiling away at me (the binky stayed in for about 5 seconds even with him holding it). I gave him some tylenol anyway this afternoon because I figured with his teeth coming in and the shots I wanted to make him comfortable.

So the next big thing will be cereal and having him sleep at night in his crib instead of his car seat, dun dun dun! I am in no hurry for this but it has to happen eventually. He sleeps so well in his carseat at night, about 11 hours a night, so the last thing I want is to start getting up in the middle of the night again! My thought process is that he doesn't sleep great in his carseat during the day so it's not the end all be all but he does seem much cozier in it than any other place. Whenever we put him in it during the day he does seem to calm down and half the time he'll just pass out in it before we even leave the house. I just feel bad because I feel like he is always in his car seat! One of these days when I'm feeling daring I will try. Maybe next week I won't plan too much during the day so if he doesn't sleep during the night I can nap with him during the day... for the 20 minutes he naps at a time. Or maybe I'll try cereal first before all of this, I don't know!

beautiful day, beautiful place, beautiful family

Eric has always talked about this park that he wanted to go to. Late Friday afternoon, we drove out to it and when we got there I realized it was Dean Park in Shrewsbury which I had heard a lot about. It was a beautiful, big park. We walked around and sat by the pond and were going to feed the baby when I realized that the bottle I had put together was sitting at home. That was the end of our trip!
We decided to head back to the park the next day for a picnic and to walk around. We went later in the day when the weather cleared up. I'll narrate the rest of this through the pictures:

This is the baby sleeping through the picnic:


This is where we ate our lunch/dinner. There were a few of these little areas with picnic tables under them.


Ok so disregard the dates on some of these pictures. I'm going to look back at this one day and say "geez it was a really nice day in Janaury of 2005!"

The baby was very distracted by people walking by in these pictures:

Wonder what's so interesting on the ground!:

Erics by the Dean Park sign:

The baby slept most of the day away. He loves being outside and it was so nice and peaceful! This is him sleeping on our hour and a half walk:

There's a little brook that runs through the park:

Ok this is by far the best part of this park. There are these fountains in the middle of the pond and they shoot up along with music at certain times of the day. You have to either bring a radio or sit in your car to listen to the radio station and get the full effect of the fountains. They have lights in them too which we want to go back at night so we can see the lights at night. Here's the times that the fountains sync to the station so we always know!:

Here's the fountains:

The Canadian geese that live in the park:

The pond from the other side:

A bad shot of the gigantic playground. The exciting part is that there is a little playground for little kids too. We are excited to take the baby there next summer and he can enjoy the little playground:

So of course what would make a day like this complete without ice cream?? There is this ice cream place on Rt 9 that I've wanted to go to so we stopped there. It's called Thumbs Up Creamery and it's at the Green Thumb. We sat on the side away from Rt. 9 and all you could smell were all the pretty flowers that were around us and in the green houses in the back. It was a perfect ending to a perfect day. We went inside and discovered that they also sold fresh fruit and veggies. Outside there was a "petting zoo" that only consisted of 3 goats and a donkey but it was still cute!

I love going on little adventures like we did on Saturday. It's so nice to be able to do it with our new family. It's also nice to explore the area around us. There is so much in the area that we live to go to and try out. Our next adventure may be the Westborough town beach!

On a completely different note... When we were at Dean Park on Friday Eric got a call from the Union. They have a job for him for the next three weeks. We are very excited and we hope this leads to a full time job but even if it doesn't at least it's something.

However, I am a little sad. As hard as it was sometimes going through everything we've gone through since Eric got laid off in December, I'm really going to miss having him around every day. Because he was laid off for so long he was able to go to almost every one of my doctors appointments when I was pregnant and he's been to every doctor's appointment that the baby has had. On Friday I'll be going to the doctors with the baby but without Eric for the first time :(

If we had all the money in the world I wish we could both be stay at home parents. But such is life!

Eric has been smoke free for almost two weeks now! He just up and quit and seems to be doing very well! Hopefully it lasts!

That's all folks!

Rolling over the sequel

The baby rolled over from his stomach to his back today intentionally (7/17). I saw it coming, I had plenty of time to record it but I couldn't find the camera that was right behind me, grrr!!! One of these days I will videos of him rolling right across the room!

Rolling over

Most babies roll over from their stomach to their backs first. Not baby Eric. For the past week he has been working really hard to roll from his back to his stomach. All day on Tuesday (7/14) he was working hard trying to roll over. All day I had the camera ready and taping in case he did it. So of course what happens? I look away for two seconds and he quickly rolled over. I got video of him after the fact when he was on his stomach but he was screaming. For some reason he keeps trying to roll over but once he gets on his belly he's roaring mad. He's a silly one.

On another note, I was sitting outside with the baby and I looked down at him and in his mouth I thought I saw two teeth coming in. I had Eric look and he saw the same thing. I know he's a little young and it could be just us seeing things so we'll have to wait and see!

I need a nap

I have been a little worried about the baby because he seriously does not nap during the day for more than about 2 hours total or so. When he wakes up he screams like he's in pain and it takes about 15 minutes to calm him down. I don't know if he's having bad dreams or if he didn't get a long enough nap or what. It makes me very tired to try and entertain him all day. There's only so much you can do with a 4 month old. Normally after his mid afternoon cat nap I take him out for a long walk to get him to nap longer. That plan didn't go so well today since I walked 4 times around the neighborhood before he actually fell asleep. In talking to other mom's it seems as if this is a common problem. I just hate when he's miserable but won't sleep. That's normally when daddy takes over. He's good at getting him to calm down and have fun. I just get too stressed out worrying that he's not sleeping. Maybe I need to just relax and think of naps as more of a unexpected surprise as opposed to a regular occurance. Then I won't think too much into it. I just figure with how much he wiggles, you'd think that he would crash but nope, he naps for 20 minutes and that's the end of it. Someday when he's my age, he will appreciate naps! I'm just afraid he has my sleeping habits. I'm not a very solid sleeper and I don't get a whole lot of sleep during the night and if I do nap it's normally for about 5 minutes. Although I'm not sure I want him to have Eric's sleep habits either because he can sleep through a train coming right through our room. He's hard enough to wake up, I really would not look forward to mornings if they are both hard to wake up trying to get one up for work and one for school, yikes! I remember when baby Eric first came home. He was only awake basically to eat. I got so much sleep back then... those were the days!

So I'm all about using the video camera feature on my camera these days. I took a little video of Mr. WildMan. This video was taken around 7pm. He napped for about 45 minutes after his first bottle today and about an hour total after his second bottle. This video was taken 3 hours after his third bottle. You'd think he would be exhausted since he hadn't napped yet but nope! He did however crash after his fourth and final bottle of the day. At least he sleeps through the night!

Silly Pokey

So we've had some huge thunderstorms with hail the past two days. The poor baby was able to sleep through fireworks but there was a big crash of thunder that scared the daylights out of him and he was wailing. Poor little guy. We also found out that if it rains hard enough, rain just comes right in under our front door... awesome.
Lately Pokey has found a new place to sleep. Eric thinks it is because he's trying to stay away from a flood. I think he just wants me to change his diaper.
Check it out:


After downloading this picture I noticed that I have a lot of pictures of Pokey hanging out in strange places. They are pretty funny so I thought I would share.
On the diaper table of the pack and play at my parent's house:

On top of the cabinet:

In Eric's lunch box:

In the sink:

In the laundry basket:

We have sound

So Marissa pointed out that you can hear the sound on the video of the baby eating rice cereal. The key is to turn the speakers on! I need a nap! :)

Rice Cereal

Cereal face

Today I tried rice cereal with Eric for the first time. I did it before the doctor told me so but I was told that he could start solids between 4 and 6 months and he fits into that bracket. I've noticed lately that he just has not been satisfied by his bottles but I know if I increased an ounce he would just spit it up everywhere. So I figured I'd start cereal once a day. When I started him off with it today he took it at first and then started screaming. He was hungry and didn't realize that he was getting food. So I gave him his bottle and then tried the cereal again and he took it much better. I was contemplating just putting the cereal in his bottles instead but since I don't know how to go about that and how much to put in his bottles, I'll try this method for now. So here is a video of the first attempt before giving him a bottle. I thought there would be sound but apparently my awesome outdated camera can't possibly handle sound so this is a 5 minute video with no sound, how exciting:

Four months old

I took Eric's four month old pictures yesterday. I feel like every single picture epitomizes his personality and what he is in to these days. It has become very difficult to have him sit in the chair because he likes to grab his feet so I couldn't get too far away from him or he'd tumble right off the chair.


I put him next to his bear again. I'm going to do this every time now so we can see how big he is getting in comparison to his bear. This is him being a goober:


woah he almost fell over!:



His favorite pasttime... chewing his hands:


Oh boy he caught his feet!:

Fourth of July Fireworks

First of all, I cannot believe it is the fourth of July weekend already. This summer is flying by! Hopefully at some point we'll have nice weather so that we can enjoy the summer. I'm just happy that it's not freezing and snowing.
Every year we go to the Northbridge fireworks. I have been going for as long as I can remember. I love the fourth of July because I love fireworks. So we wanted to take the baby but we weren't really sure how that would go. The baby startles fairly easily but we thought that if he was awake he would like the bright colors. We went to our friend's house first for a mini cookout and then we went to the fireworks. The baby fell asleep at our friend's house and since he's just started sleeping through the night I was praying that he would stay asleep.
We got to the fireworks just in time to see them start. Then something hit me... you never realize how loud fireworks are until you have an infant with you! Yikes! It made the fireworks a little stressful. Eric kept checking the baby to make sure he was ok. He would jump when he heard the loud bangs and then pass right back out. Thankfully he slept through most of it except the super loud ones. I hope we didn't scare him too much. Maybe if we go to any more fireworks this year we'll watch them from the car!
Happy Fourth of July!!!

Tests and Babies

Today the baby went to UMass for the tests to see if he has reflux of the bladder. He woke up in such a good mood. I felt so bad because I knew what was coming and that the tests were not going to make him happy but the poor little guy had no idea (even though I talked to him about it!). First he had an ultrasound of his bladder and kidneys. He did so well! He didn't fuss at all. He just laid there and let the woman do her thing.
After that was the big test. He had to have a catheter put in and a dye was injected into his bladder. Then they took X-Rays of his bladder as he was peeing to see if the urine was going into his bladder. After that test was done the doctor was able to show us right on the screen that he does in fact have reflux of the bladder. They grade it on a scale of 1 through 5, 5 being the worst. He is at a three. He has it in both kidneys and his right side is worse than his left.
Eric was very positive about the whole thing because we were already told ahead of time that unless he was a 4 or a 5 he would most likely not need surgery. It took me a little bit of time to see the bright side of all of this. Everyone keeps telling us that this is common as well as him having an extra thumb. However, I have come across a lot of kids in my day and have not heard or seen either. My mom did inform me that someone I know had the reflux of the bladder as well so at least that made me feel a little better. I just hate putting the baby through all of these tests. It breaks my heart. I'm so thankful that we caught all of this when we did though. Now we can just focus on his recovery.
So, from this point on he has to be on an antibiotic for at least a year. After we were done with our appointment they sent the results to the pediatrician's office and within hours Dr. Evans gave me a call to give me more information and answer any questions that I had. Dr. Evans has been so great to us through this whole process. She has stayed on the phone with me for 15 minutes at a time going over things and answering my questions. She is very thorough. Although I like the nurse practitioner at that office, I think from now on I am going to make his appointments with Dr. Evans because she knows everything that has gone on with him lately. She also was the doctor who saw him when he was first born.
A year from now we will have to take him to Children's hospital to re-do all of the tests he had today. Dr. Evans said that she normally sends patients to UMass for the intial tests because they are very thorough but after that she sends kids to Children's Hospital because they use less radiation in their tests.
Eventually the reflux should clear up on it's on as he grows. According to Dr. Evans, 90% of patients won't need surgery. There's not a lot to do about it. The antibiotic really is just given to keep him from having any more UTIs while the problem fixes itself.


On another note two new relatives have joined the family. My gramma now has two more great grandchildren. My cousin Jane did not know what she was having. We were all hoping she would have the first girl but surprise surprise, she had a boy named Ian Benjamin. She was two and a half weeks late. She chose not to be induced. She's a brave one. My cousin Andrew's wife had the first baby girl, Avery, this morning. His wife went through a horrible labor and ended up having a c-section.
All of this makes me feel very thankful and blessed that I delivered 2 weeks early and had the easiest delivery ever. I'm sure if I didn't I would be sold on not having any more children. I'm still not sold on having another child down the road. It's been a tough almost 4 months with Eric and I don't know if I'm up to the possibilities of going through this with another child. Daddy Eric is definitely sold on one more baby (not anytime in the near future!). He is set that we will have a girl next. We'll see how the future plays out. If we do have another child I hope that baby naps during the day unlike baby Eric!