Preschool?

     We have been batting around the idea of Laura starting preschool for several months now. Originally I wanted her to do it to give me a bit of a break (back when I was pregnant and she was really driving me crazy I didn't have enough energy/ patience to deal with her all day every day). She and I both have since mellowed out, and I don't feel the need for a break from her now, per se, but after thinking it through, I realized that there would be several other perks for her to attend preschool. Among my top reasons are:
1) I think she would really enjoy it. She loves playing with other kids, and although she has a sister now, Rachel is far from play-worthy yet. She needs the stimulation from other children her age.
2) I would still probably benefit from a break from her, and to be able to devote all my attention to Rachel for a few hours without having to tread lightly around Laura to not make her jealous. I've noticed when I am playing with Rachel, Laura has to come over and involve herself, too. I don't mind that she does this, because it's not usually in an agressive way, but I don't want to make her jealous, either. Rachel still deserves to have my full attention, though, too! (Right now I only get to give it to her when Laura is asleep, more often than not.)
3) I think Laura would benefit from learning things from people other than me. We spend so much time together, and I think exposing her to other people's ideas and teaching methods, etc. would broaden her in a positive way.
 4) I want Laura to learn some discipline, like following instructions, participating in circle time, etc.
5) And hey, if she learned some other stuff, that would be cool, too. ;)

     So, in light of this, we toured the Montessori preschool last week. I found it a little... overwhelming. I'm not sure it is the right fit for us, as I gathered it seems fairly content-driven, and seemed a bit strict. As I mentioned, the actual learning is relatively low on my list of things I hope she gets out of going to preschool at this point. She's only two-and-a-half - I don't think she needs to know the scientific names of the parts of a flower. I'm hoping for it to be more of an exercise in socialization right now. There were also a handful of other things that didn't sit quite right with me during our tour, so I think we will keep looking. On a strong reccommendation from our neighbour, who, because of her job, visits all of the preschool/ daycare facilities in town, we have another preschool  that I am hoping to look at and am anticipating will be a better fit for what we are looking for at this time. Now, if they would just get back to me about scheduling a tour, we'd be on our way!

Cute vs. Not Cute

   Lately it seems as though Laura is either being incredibly cute or incredibly trying... not a lot in between.

Some of the cute stuff:

• We took her to the movies to see Brave, which, for anyone who doesn't know, is set in medieval Scotland, and at one point during the movie they start playing some Celtic-type music. Well, didn't Laura start busting a jig right in the middle of the theatre. Guess her Scottish roots were calling to her. ;)
• Last week I had a bulb syringe out that I was using for Rachel, which Laura was obviously fascinated by (as it wasn't a toy for her), but I let her explore it for a little while, and found her lifting up my shirt to "listen to my heart" via pumping the syringe in my belly button. 
• Whenever Laura is hungry, she tells me, "tummy rungle",whether or not her tummy is actually indeed rumbling (she learned this phrase from the Backyardigans).
• We went to tour a preschool in town this week and the lady who was showing us around asked Laura her name, to which she replied, "I'm Waura!" - and the woman even understood her! This was the first time I didn't have to translate, and it was very cute.
• I can't decide whether this is cute or not cute, but Laura has started saying, "AH AH AH" (as I say to her sometimes when I don't want her to do something), however, she pronounces it more like an evil laugh....
• Last weekend Laura's grandpa came for a visit (the one she was previously scared of), but she seems to finally have decided that he isn't scary, and proceeded to have the cutest little date with him, talking his ear off the whole time.
• Rachel's cute moment of the week: a near-laugh and several consecutive whole-face smiles after Mommy gives repeated exaggerated kisses. 

Not so cute:

• This past week it has been quite hot, and Laura is getting a bit of a rash from her diapers, so I've been letting her go diaper-free a lot. She is pretty close to ready for training, anyway. We did a stint a few months ago to let her learn the feeling of when to go, so she already knows that, however she still chooses not to use the potty. This week I put her in a time out in her crib for something (without her diaper - a risky move, I know) and shortly after she called me up saying she had "peed on Baby Dumbo". I prepared myself for the worst as I went in the room (think a giant flood of urine all over the crib and floor), but when I came in there were about 4 drops of pee, all concentrated to one stuffed animal. Clearly she just pulled this to get out of her time out. She also pooped on Josh's kitchen chair one morning, too. I swear, we are making progress, though! 
• Remember when I mentioned recently that Laura was such a sweet little girl, and how even strangers were commenting on her lovely disposition? Well... I think that phase is over. We have now come to the "MINE!" phase, and I'm sure the "NO!" phase is right on its heels. She also threw a rock at the little neighbour girl yesterday while we were swimming (it didn't hit her, but I'm pretty sure it was deliberate on Laura's part). Sigh. Two-year-olds are such a rollercoaster. 
• She has also developed this terrifying litte habit of taking off. This week we were visiting a friend, and when we were leaving, I was walking with both girls out to the car, and opened the door to put Rachel in her seat (not buckle her in, just put her down so I could strap Laura in first), and in the less than ten seconds it took me to put Rachel down, I went around the car to the other side to put Laura in, and she was GONE. Completely-out-of-sight gone. My friend came out of her house to help me look for Laura, and we found her about a minute later, but my heart was lodged in my throat the whole time.
• Rachel's not-so-cute moment of the week: Screaming bloody murder when all her well-meaning mother was trying to do was allow her to enjoy the loveliness that is swimming in the cooler-than-bath-water lake when its 35 degrees outside. Geez.

I guess there are more cute behaviours than not cute, so it wins... for now.

Rachel: 2 Months

     Rachel is two months old today. Where the first month flew by, the second month has kind of dragged.     
     Around 6 weeks we hit a bit of a wall. Josh felt like he wasn't handling the adjustment to a family of four well, even though I felt like things were going much better than we had anticipated. Up until 6 weeks, Rachel had been fairly chill, but then she started getting fussy. Now, two and a half weeks later, she seems to be mellowing back out a little, but the second month has definitely been harder. (Laura was like that too, although her fussy period started at about week four and lasted much longer.) Laura has also been more difficult the past few weeks, as well. Maybe she is just acting out because she senses everyone is a little more on edge, but she has been pulling out all the stops lately. The worst part is, she knows exactly what makes me the most mad the fastest - clever little monkey, she is. One of them is her chanting in an impossibly annoying manner, "Baby Rachel, wake up!" while Rachel is sleeping. I know she is just doing this to get (negative) attention from me, but it really takes all of my control not to pummel her when she does this. Luckily, this particular behaviour seems to be on the downswing now. She has now taken to poking her in the eye or pulling her hair. Sigh.
     On a happier note, as of week six, Rachel has also started smiling at people. It's pretty cute - if you smile at her, she'll smile back. Or randomly at the fence. She is also cooing and gurgling a lot more now, too, which is also pretty cute. She has outgrown all her newborn clothes, so this past weekend I went through her dresser and re-organized everything, putting away all the too small items. She is still in the newborn cloth diapers, as they are supposed to go to 12 pounds, but I suspect she will be out of those shortly, too. She was 9 pounds 12 ounces at her 8 week check-up last week and 21.5 inches long. She had her first needles, then, too, which she didn't like too much. When we got home in the afternoon she was inconsolable for a while so I caved and gave her some Tempra, which seemed to help. I may or may not have cried from putting her through that. Poor little thing.
     We have also officially moved Rachel out of our room this past week. All of her clothes and laundry and changing station, et cetera that we had in our room are now in the nursery. We've been trying to transition her to sleeping in there, too. She sleeps in there in her cradle from about 10pm until 2am, and when she wakes up to feed, I bring her back into our room so I can nurse her in bed. She stays with us after that and usually wakes up again at about 5:30am. Sometimes she stays awake then for about an hour, but will eventually go back to sleep, and luckily for me, Laura doesn't usually wake up until after 8am, so I usually get to go back to sleep, too. We are planning to get Rachel a mattress for her crib this week because there isn't really enough room in the nursery for the crib and the cradle.
     Oh, and she has also started trying to suck her... fist. Or thumb, or something. It's not really working very well for her right now, so we'll see if anything pans out. I remember Laura went through something similar, but it never caught on. She is also starting to look less like Laura, I think. The first 7 weeks or so, I was considering having them genetically tested for being twins, but lately Rachel's face has started taking on it's own shape. There are some other subtle differences too, that are beginning to make themselves more pronounced.

Summer!

Laura and Rachel with all their girl cousins :)

     First long weekend of the summer = love.

   It has certainly been summery weather here for the past few weeks (read: too hot to not live with a/c!).
Saturday we were planning to host a BBQ for the neighbours, so we hit up the grocery store as early as possible (for a family of 4 who sleeps in until 8:00am), and then came home and did a quick tidy of the house. Then we took off to the cottage for the afternoon for a swim. One of my cousins that we hadn't seen in four years was going to be up, so we wanted to make sure we got to see her and her kiddos! It was nice to have a quick visit with everyone, and we enjoyed swimming in the lake. Laura was a little unsure of the waves, but eventually decided she liked them so long as she was clinging to Mommy or Daddy like the baby monkey she is. :) Rachel slept in her carseat the whole time we were swimming. Bless her. <3
 We headed home in the late afternoon to finish up prep for the BBQ. Homemade chicken burgers from Weelicious.com (they're sooo yummy - we have made them several times now) and a crunchy broccoli salad I found on Pinterest that turned out to be delicious, as well. We sort of ended up commandeering the neighbours' house for the BBQ as they have a patio table to eat at and we don't. They brought some yummy treats for dessert and we had a good time sitting around and chatting while Laura and their daughter played in the yard with the toys and pool. That night everyone needed a bath, so we decided to bath the girls together for the first time. This was only the second time Rachel has been in the big tub, but she sure loves it!

 

    Sunday we were planning to go strawberry picking first thing in the morning (before it got too hot). Unfortunately, Laura has developed the charming little habit of trying to take off in the other direction if she doesn't like the plans you have for her. So, as Josh was trying to get her dressed for the day, she attempted this little stunt and he grabbed her arm to keep her put. She immediately started screaming like she was being murdered. She continued to complain about her "eye-bow" while fairly hysterical for several minutes. We decided to call the Big Al Hotline to see if he thought we should get her checked out for a dislocation. He said if she could rotate her lower arm, she was probably fine. She couldn't. She wouldn't let us touch it without more hysterics, and she was just letting it hang limply. So, we trucked off to the ER, really the absolute last place I wanted to be on a beautiful summery long weekend. It was probably around 9:00 - 9:30am at this point, but the waiting room was already hopping. When we arrived, Laura was in hysterics again because I had to move her arm to get her out of the car seat, and there were several people in front of us just waiting to be triaged. Siiiiigh. So we sat down and I tried to calm her. Once she didn't have to move her arm anymore, she was fine and began chatting with the lady waiting beside us. After we had been there for about 15 minutes, she seemed to have forgotten about it, and was carrying Pooh Bear around and using her arm normally again. I took her over to where Josh was sitting with Rachel and told him I thought she was okay now. Josh, once again, asked her if she could do this: *rotates lower arm*. She looked at him and flailed bother her arms around like she was drowning. lol. Yep, I guess she was okay! So, we happily left the ER and headed out to the strawberry fields.

Apparently it was the last day for picking, and it was pretty scarce out there. We managed to get about a quart of smallish berries, but they were still quite tasty. Laura was right into it, picking over-ripe, under-ripe, smooshed - there was no discrimination. :) Josh kept trying to explain to her which ones were good, and which weren't, but it seemed a lost cause. I was just glad she was having fun.
     We came home after that and washed and sliced our berries. I had wanted to try out this strawberry upside-down cake I saw on Pinterest with our berries, and got Laura to help me. She was pretty excited, as two of the ingredients were Jell-O and marshmallows, probably her current two favourite foods. We got the cake in the oven and put her down for a nap. We had wanted to go downtown to check out the Canada Day celebrations, but ended up running out of time due to our extra detour to the hospital. Two-and-a-half hours later, Laura still had not gone to sleep, so we gave up on naptime and let her play in the back yard for awhile. My mom came over for dinner and got to have a nice visit with Laura. I was wary of taking Laura to the fireworks since she would be up past her normal bedtime and had missed her nap, but she was a trooper and enjoyed every minute of it. We brought sparklers (which she only sort of liked), and glow sticks (which were a much bigger hit), and we tried this glow-in-the-dark bubble idea (which failed miserably). She was scared by the loudness of the fireworks, but we were sitting far enough away that it wasn't too loud, and she eventually came around.
     We were all exhausted by the time it was over, and so came home and went straight to bed. She slept in until quarter after ten on Monday morning. We went out for breakfast after she finally woke up (sadly our favourite place was closed so we had to go somewhere else), and then spent the majority of the day relaxing at home. We did, however, attempt to escape the mid-afternoon heat with a matinee showing of Brave. There weren't too many people there on a holiday Monday afternoon, but both girls were miraculously well-behaved. (That movie is scary, by the way!!)
     Those were pretty much the highlights of our weekend - hope everyone else had as an enjoyable time as we did!

Popsicles & Other Stuff

Okay, so I said I wasn't going to post an update on how we are doing every week, but as it turns out, I seem to be doing just that.

In the past week:

• I went on a popsicle making binge. We had orange creamsicles (vanilla ice cream blended with orange pop), fudgesicles (Nutella blended with milk), and avocado-mango ones. All delicious. I highly reccommend homemade popsicles!
• Three separate people told me how sweet/ what a lovely little girl Laura is. Made mommy proud. <3  (Until we got to this week and she decided she isn't listening to a darn thing I say anymore.)
• We finally got our new windows installed, which is nice, but was also a huge PITA because they happened to both be in the rooms where my children sleep, releasing noxious chemical stink from the caulking for several days. It was so bad we put Laura back in the nursery, and I slept in the living room with Rachel for two nights, which really just resulted in a terrible night's sleep for Josh, her, and me. Ugh. I wish they would have just come to install them several months ago when we first ordered them.
• We got Laura (and Rachel) a play set for the back yard. Along with Josh, Laura's grandpa gave up his whole Father's Day weekend to come up and help assemble it. And it's still not even done. This thing was a massive amount of work. But, I'm sure Laura will L O V E playing on it when it's ready.
•  Rachel has finally started showing interest in things other than boobs and sleeping. She has started smiling a lot more (though not deliberately yet) and is looking around more and more now, examining lights, and other high-contrast things like trees against the sky, etc. She had her first ride in the stroller sans carseat, and really enjoyed laying back and looking up at the trees. Super cute.
• I have had a few more emotional days. Sigh. Most days, I'm completely fine, but when something upsets the delicate and carefully crafted equilibrium I have, it tends to be a bad day. Pregnancy & motherhood is such a peach sometimes. My C-section scar has finally healed up now, too. Only took five weeks. :/

A Special Day

Today was a special day for a few reasons.
1) Today was my original due date.
2) Today Rachel turned one month old.
3) Today we hosted a Sip & See for our family to come and meet Rachel.

The spread - nothing too fancy since it was really a party to come meet the baby

 

buggy cupcakes for our Junebug

Ladybug for Rachie Bug

... I should probably take some cake decorating classes...

To sip: Watermelon Lemonade and Raspberry Beermonade (amongst others)

Lots of unnecessary but adorable and much appreciated presents

 It was a great day and a great excuse to get together to see everyone. As usual, I must include a shout out to the parentals for all the help with preparations, etc. Couldn't have done it without you!

So, now, at 1 month old, Rachel is 7 pounds 2 ounces and 20.5 inches long (as of Wednesday) and has already rolled over, grabs at/ plays with her toys and holds her soother in or out of her mouth in accordance to her own wishes. One night this week she also slept 5 hours in a row. That was nice. She still doesn't cry much, mostly grumbles and grunts, and occasionally coos. <3

Rachel Bee's one month picture with Chester

Week Three: I Can Do This!

      This week was the first week I was on my own with our two girls. Josh had been very helpful while on his paternity leave, so Monday I was pretty nervous to do it by myself. In the morning I took both the girls for a 45-minute drive to pick up a new crib for Laura's big girl room (since she is still refusing the big girl bed). It went pretty well, so Laura got to go to the toy store and pick something out. When we got home, lunchtime was a bit crazy, and we had a little snafu when I was busy nursing Rachel and Laura was deliberately poking Chester in the eye after I asked her to stop. Trying to discipline her while nursing my crappy-latcher was ... something. But, I can happily report that that was the most difficult moment of the whole week. The rest of the week has gone pretty well - we've been to the park two mornings and to the Early Years Centre, too.
      I'm not even that tired, either. I think mostly because my poor body is just accustomed to being sleep deprived, but also because Rachel is a pretty good sleeper (and she sleeps a lot, too). Heck, this morning everyone slept in until 9am! We have had a few rough nights, but generally I'm only up with her for 10-15 minutes when she needs to nurse. And she can also nurse in the side-lying position, so that helps. Night-time feedings were much more of a production with newborn Laura, usually lasting 45-60 minutes. I can honestly say I was more tired the first time around. I have also been able to nap in the afternoon when Laura is napping, which has helped greatly. I would say I am no more tired than I was during my pregnancy.
     The hardest part is mealtimes. Especially now since Rachel has decided that she doesn't want to be put down. I've asked Josh to get Laura's breakfast in the morning before he goes to work, and that has made it a lot easier for me. He is home by dinnertime, and we have all of these awesome home-cooked frozen dinners, so really it's only lunch that I am responsible for feeding three people simultaneously. (Rachel's feedings often seem to land at meal times). As long as I make something for lunch that Laura doesn't need help with eating, it's not too bad.
     I don't want to jinx anything, but so far this mom-of-two gig has been a lot easier than I had anticipated. I read somewhere this week that how the older sibling handles the new baby is what determines how the experience for the whole family goes down. So far, I can attest to this. Other than the first couple of days when Laura was getting back into her normal routine after being uprooted while we were in the hospital, she has been stellar with Rachel. She hasn't really been jealous, and this week she has taken to comforting 'Baby Sister' (what she exclusively refers to Rachel as) when she is crying, "Oh no! Baby cry! Okay, okay, okay, shhh, shhh, shhh." It melts my heart a little bit. She asks to hold her every day, and enjoys snuggle time while she watches TV. She is an amazing big sister and I am so happy and proud of her.
    
     Today I was thinking to myself that having two kids is almost easier than having one. Then I realized that was crazy talk, since there is and always will be more laundry now. But honestly, I have found the transition much easier than anticipated. Phew! I can do this!