We have a thumb sucker

Over the last week or so, Lucy has realized that her hands are great for chewing. She constantly has them at her mouth. Well, she's also finally gotten coordinated enough to get her thumb in her mouth. She loves sucking on her thumb. I thought I'd post a few pictures to prove it.

Progress!!

Last night Lucy slept from 7:30pm -5:00 am without making a sound. She cried a bit around 5am, but went back to sleep and then was up for the day at 6:30.

If you've read my blog with any regularity then you will remember my posts on Lucy's sleep, or lack there of. She was a terrible napper, and was still waking 1-2 times a night to eat.

This Sunday night we started sleep training and each day we see more progress. Yesterday, Lucy took two 1.5 hour naps and one 1hour nap. This is great improvement over her little 30 minute catnaps she was taking.

I am so excited to have my 7-8 hours of sleep back as well as a few hours during the day to get things done. It's also so nice that Dan and I now have about 3 hours in the evenings to ourselves after Lucy goes to bed.

THANK YOU Michelle W. for lending us the sleep book. I've read 3-4 other books and this one is by far the best.

Photo of the week!

What are you talkin' bout Willis??

Happy Easter!

Finally!!!

I am FINALLY back into my pre-pregnancy pants!!!! YAY. It only took 3.5 months, but it's such a relief to actually be able to put on a pair of jeans that I wore last year at this time. Not everything fits as well as it did, obviously my body is slightly different, but I'm on the right track. The great thing is that I didn't even try to lose any weight, It's just come off. I guess lifting my chunky monkey is providing some extra calorie burning.


I'm still shopping for some new clothes though. I really don't have much in the way of spring or summer clothes anyway. Look out Mall, here I come!

They call it baby fat!

Saturday Dan and I, along with Lucy went to a birthday party for Dan's niece Monica. I had Lucy dressed in a cute denim jumper and I put her legwarmers on underneath to keep her warm. Now, if you've seen pictures of my daughter, you know that she does not go hungry. She has cute, chunky legs and thighs. The legwarmers are snug fitting so you can see all her little fat rolls. Dan's niece Natalie who is turning 7 in few months was looking at Lucy and asked "Why do they stuff her legs?" Her mom laughed and told her that is wasn't stuffing it was baby fat.

3 month pictures

Last Saturday we took Lucy to JCP to get her 3 month pictures taken. It was quite the ordeal as they were running 45 minutes behind schedule. I had timed everything just right so that Lucy would her happiest at our appointment time. But by the time they were ready for us I had decided to reschedule for another day. The lady convinced me to go ahead and try taking some pictures, if she got fussy we'd stop. I was skeptical because she was getting tired, but amazingly enough, she did pretty good. Here are a few of my favorites from that day. They are from the JCP website and if they look blurry it's because they are a lower resolution.

testing

I'm testing a new name for my blog. I'm not sure if I'll keep this one or not...it's all I could come up with this morning. If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

I came across this article yesterday and I shouldn't have read it. It's very disturbing and I haven't been able to get this little boy out of my head. It breaks my heart that this baby suffered like he did. Last night when Lucy got up to eat, I held her longer than I usually do. I just kept thinking about that poor baby.

Here's a link to the article. It is from the Peoria, IL area. This is one case where the death penalty is too good for these parents. Beware though, it is very hard read.

http://www.saukvalley.com/articles/2008/02/21/news/state/60183918800192.txt

my favorite photos

I made Lucy a tutu. It turned out pretty good, but bigger than I meant for it to be. I'm going to try making another one that won't be quite as big.

So much for that!

In my last entry I wrote about my excitement over Lucy's new sleeping pattern. I should have known it was too good to last. Sunday night was horrible! After an 11:30 feeding and 2:30 feeding, at 4am she was up about every hour. Last night was better, but I think I just need to accept the fact that no matter how hard we try, sleeping through the night is just not going to happen for us right now. And, that's ok. This too shall pass...

We're on our way

After weeks of praying over my daughter, I'm beginning to see my prayers being answered. We are on our way to sleeping through the night. This past week she's been doing very well. We do our bedtime routine after her bottle at 7pm and then she goes down between 8-8:30. She's been sleeping till about 2:30-3:00 am, we feed her, and then she's been sleeping till about 6:30am. This is such a welcome change from going to bed at 8-8:30 and then up at midnight, 3am, and 6am. I am also praying very hard that this will continue and every night she'll go a little longer till she's finally sleeping all night long.

Baby legs!

Dressing Lucy is so much fun. I found these baby legwarmers, called Babylegs, at Target.com. They are so cute. She can wear them like this, or I thought they'd also be really cute under a jumper. Poor kid, she'll be asking me in 15 years why I thought these were a good idea.

Two Things...

Here's my new post--thanks to Abbie for the idea


Two names you go by… Kristin and Kitty
Two things you are wearing right now… my maternity jeans (yep, still can't fit into my old pants) and a black sweater.
Two things you would want (or have) in a relationship… trust and respect
Two of your favorite things to do… sleep and go to estate auctions
Two things you want very badly at the moment… to be able to fit into my regualr clothes again and to lose about 20 pounds.
Two pets you have or have had… Jake and Molly, both childhood dogs
Two things that you did last night… Went to VisionWay's fundraiser and gave Lucy a bath
Two people you think will fill this out...Don't know since it's not in an email. Maybe Becky...
Two things you ate today… poptarts and vegetable soup, but not at the same time :)
Two people you last talked to… Dan and Dan's parents
Two things you’re doing tomorrow… staying home and taking care of Lucy
Two longest car rides… Our Road trip to Charleston, SC and driving to Disney when I was 14
Two favorite holidays… Christmas and Thanksgiving
Two favorite beverages… Diet Coke and ice tea
Two people no longer alive who you’d like to talk to… Grandpa Ryan and ??? not sure

Some recent pictures

Here are a few new pictures of Lucy.

Talking to daddy.

I LOVE my thumb! And my pacifier too!

2 months old!

I could be a supermodel if I wanted to.

It just never ends...

After getting our sewer problems taken care of a few weeks ago I was hoping that our water issues would become a distant memory. Not the case. In fact it's become a nightmare that I hope to wake up from soon.
As I last reported we were still waiting on the plumbers to come back and hook up our floor drain. This should have been done when they replaced our sewer, but they thought that the drain was an old connection to the old storm drains when the gutters used to tie into the sewer line.
Over the weekend as we got closer to Monday and Tuesday and all the forcasted rain, I was starting to get very nervous. Our floor drain was not connected to anything. I just kept thinking that if the ground becomes saturated then eventually that water is going to come up that drain and we're going to have a muddy basement once again.
Monday came and went and everything was fine, but Tuesday brought a whole new set of problems. Dan was home working that day and late in the afternoon he came upstairs to tell me that the laundry sink was full of water and about to overflow. How could that be? We have a back water valve in our line that is supposed to close when the city mains can't keep up. This back-water valve is supposed to stop any rain water from coming up our line. Since our laundry sink was full, obviously something was not working right. We also had water coming in from the small room off the steps. This is right next to where they dug outside, so the soil has not settled. There are lots of air pockets allowing water to pool and allowing it to seep through our foundation. It was gushing through at alarming speed. All that water was running across the floor and pooling up around our second floor drain where the washer is hooked up.
Poor Dan. He had to stop working and get our small pump and start pumping that water out our basement window. He hooked up the long hose and ran it out the window and down our neighbors drive far away from our house. Then he had to keep moving the pump from the laundry sink to the floor drain. They both kept filling up so quickly. Thank goodness the pump was working. I am sure that if we had not been here to pump this water out, we would have had a flooded basement once again and this time I think it would've been more than 3 inches.


Dan made another call the plumbers and yesterday and today they've been out to try and fix the problems that should have been done right the first time. All I can say is that they better be giving us a nice discount. The price for this job was not cheap and I think we've been put out one to many times. Not to mention Dan's lost work time.

After all this I am seriously ready to start house hunting. I don't know that we will, but I've just about had all I can take of this.
Anyone want to buy a house?

2 months

Lucy was 2 months old on Monday. We went to the doctor today for her wellness checkup. She weighed 13lbs 14oz and measured 24 inches long. She is getting so big so fast. She's already outgrowing her 3-6 months clothes and even wearing a few 6-9 month things. Lucy had to get her first shots today and I hated seeing her cry in pain. Her face got the brightest shade of red I've ever seen. She cried for quite awhile afterwards. I think partly from the pain and also because she was overly tired. She's been doing pretty good this evening and is sleeping at the moment. I am not looking forward to the 4 month shots!

I forgot to take her picture yesterday and was going to do it this evening, but with her not feeling well I think I'll wait till tomorrow. So I'll only be 2 days off. I'll post those pics when I get them.

Mom advice needed

I'm posting this so that maybe some of you who read this can give me some advice. We're having trouble with Lucy's naps. She won't sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time. I'll put her down and she'll go to sleep and then like clockwork, 30 minutes later, she's crying out. She's still tired when she wakes because as soon as I pick her up she goes right back to sleep in my arms. She'll sleep at least 3 -4 hours at night (thank goodness) so I can't figure out why she's waking during the day and I'm not sure what to do about it. If she woke up and was alert and happy I wouldn't worry, but it's obvious she still tired but just won't sleep.
And I have tried letting her cry for a few minutes to see if she'll go back to sleep. She sometimes will but only for another 5 mintues or so and then it starts all over again.

So for all you ol' pros out there, any advice??

There it is!

I finally caught one of Lucy's smiles on camera. Her smiles are becoming more frequent now which is a lot of fun.

And we thought we were done...

After all the sewer and plumbing craziness that happened 2 weeks ago we thought we'd gotten everything taken care of. I think I mentioned in my last entry on this subject that we had to have some guys come and snake our drain because they thought that after all the work being done the trap was clogged. Parks Sewer came out and did just that, but all that happened was black muddy water pooled up around our drain. Still nothing would go down. Parks contacted the people who did the job and told them what happened and come to find out that when the guys were hooking our new sewer line back up they didn't connect this drain. Luckily we have 2 drains and this was the floor drain that is just for draining any water we get in the basement. All the water from the house and laundry goes down another drain and then out the house where the two lines are supposed to connect. So, they have to come back out and dig up a section of the trench again and reconnect this line. This is getting frustrating!!!