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longstrider's aunt called up and offered to help pay for summer activities for the kids. Cool! we thought initially. Swimming lessons for K and help paying for the summer program we had just signed Alec up for the day before. But as we talked, it became clear that no, she meant actually paying for a full summer program for both kids. Oh my goodness. And yippee! It didn't take any time at all to find a four week program for K at a local Friends school that's right on the way to drop Alec off, and as a bonus, one of her friends is going as well. There are longer programs we could send her to, but I think four weeks will be a good compromise between getting her out of the house and giving her some introvert down time for the summer before we start school again.I'm all agog at the thought that for a month, I'll have three days a week with only the baby. Yippee! I love my children, but I could really use some introvert time myself.
*****
I keep thinking of other things to write as I go through the day, but the sleep deprivation has made them drip right out my ears in the 3.2 seconds a night I'm allowed to lie horizontal. Plus, ever shred of concentration I have right now is going to our stupid portfolio. I honestly think that it's a good thing to require homeschooling parents to prove to the state that they're actually educating their children, but right now I find myself in the bizarre position of actually wishing we lived in New Jersey, where the only requirements for homeschooling are a vague handwave in the direction of your school district to let them know you'll take care of that whole education thing, thanks. Since I'm not sure a million dollar check could convince me to live the same state as Christ Christie, that should adequately convey the degree to which this stupid portfolio is a pain in my ass.
He's lying in my lap, blissfully asleep with a full diaper. And because he's a third child, I have no intention of waking him up to change it unless he starts developing diaper rashes or decides to protest. Until then, if it isn't bothering him, it isn't bothering me. As an experienced parent, my first priority is always on "blissfully asleep."
****
longstrider's parents left last Thursday (leaving behind a rearranged basement, some very nice plants in the backyard and our eternal gratitude), which means shit is about to get real around here. longstrider will be home from work for the next two weeks, which will cushion me from the cold hard reality of life with three children for a little while longer.Life being outnumbered by our children is going reasonably well. We're getting a good bedtime routine down, and except for a stomach bug throwing it into chaos last week, the older children are actually going down pretty easily. The nighttime itself is much dicier - James will often go for at least one extended 5-6 period a night, but it might not always be at a useful time. Sunday, for instance, it was from 4:30 to 10:30. Not exactly helpful, baby.
Yesterday was devoted to figuring out how to get Alec out of the house for the summer. His current preschool has a summer program, but it's full time only, and that feels like a big jump from the two days a week we've been doing. So we checked out the preschool at our church today, which will let us do only a couple days of week on an individual weekly basis and have the advantage of being quite a bit cheaper. I think it will be worth it, even though it will be more driving. It will be good for all of us for him to have time out of the house with well-rested people who have planned activities for him, and it will save my sanity to have one less kid in the house.
***
As for the oldest kid, we're keeping her somewhat occupied with a minimal schedule of reading and math, and that's more than plenty for the moment. Last week, I had to ask
longstrider to take over math instruction for the day because I couldn't figure out how to do it. In my defense, our math curriculum is designed to teach problem solving and algebraic thinking, so it wasn't just straight addition and subtraction. But still. Five terms of upper-level college math and a BA in computer science and I was so tired I had to look at the answer manual to figure out a first grade math sheet. Sigh.I do have a few more things beyond reading and math planned to do soon to round out our portfolio. Do me a favor and bug me to get the portfolio done this week, since I really need to make myself do it while
longstrider is home and I still have some time and energy. Bleah.***
On a completely different note, we managed to see Avengers last weekend. I think it might possibly have been the best action movie I've ever seen (and the least problematic, which I admit is pretty low bar, but I was pretty happy with how little cringing I had to do). The interactions, both positive and negative, between the team members was fantastic - of course, who would expect any less that great dialogue and character development from Joss Whedon?
longstrider's parents, who do a fantastic job of keeping the older children occupied and relieve me of the need to worry about their physical needs, allowing me to spend my time on James's physical needs instead. So how's it going?
Me: not too bad for a week post-surgery. I'm mostly off of narcotics. I'm still pretty tired and weak though, beyond just the tiredness of highly interrupted sleep. I spend a lot of the day on the couch, so it's easy to get illusions that I'm stronger than I actually am. Then today I walked up the stairs twice in relatively quick succession and later went out to Target, and was quickly relieved of any notion that I'm anywhere close to my normal energy levels.
I have all the normal lovely post-partum hormones, but one benefit of this being my third time around is I recognize them for what they are, which makes it easier to ignore them. That doesn't stop me from crying over a broken shoelace though.
Breastfeeding: I almost hesitate to say this, but I think it's going pretty well. We went through the usual first couple days of poor latching and frustration, then the discussion with the pediatrician over the large amount of weight the baby had lost. Like many things, I discovered that once you go through this with your third baby, it's all much less fraught. It also helped that with K and Alec, the problem was that my milk didn't come in until day 5, but by day 3, they were so frantically hungry they refused to try to latch any more. This time, my milk was actually coming in by day three, but James was having the worst time actually latching for any amount of time. So I suggested we try a nipple shield, got one from the lactation consultant, and had an entirely drama-free nursing session that ended with the baby falling off the breast like a swollen tick with a trail of milk drooling out of his mouth. And since then, I wouldn't say it's been easy, but we've been exclusively breastfeeding. He's producing plenty of wet diapers, lots of appropriately colored poop and had gained an impressive amount of weight at his first pediatrician appointment. The thing I could live without is his recent habit of spending ten minutes screaming into my nipple about how hungry he is before finally latching on and getting on with it. My best guess is that he's enraged over the fact that milk doesn't immediately squirt into his mouth the second his mouth gets near my nipple, which kind of sucks because it means I should delay introducing a bottle, since I don't want him to know there are easier ways to get milk. Of course, there's nothing that makes me feel more like handing him off for a bottle like trying to convince a crying, hungry baby to just latch on already, dammit. I know it will get better over time. It's just frustrating to make through to that point.
James: well, he's a newborn, which is to say that he pretty much eats and sleeps, with intermittent crying. He was 6 pounds, 15 ounces, and 21 inches, which is the 20th and 90th percentile for weight and height respectively. He is a long, skinny baby. When I heard his weight, I thought we would have to go out and buy some newborn size clothes, since all of our baby clothes start at 3 months due to our propensity for huge babies. But then I found out his length, and discovered that it doesn't really matter what size I put him in, he's going to swim in them. The only real difference is that in newborn clothes his wrists stick out too.
He has all four limbs, I swear.
At a week, he's already starting to have some alert periods when he's not also eating. He's also had a couple nights where he slept in some longer blocks. The six hours he did Sunday night wasn't as great as all that because he achieved it by cluster feeding until 2am. But Monday and Tuesday, he slept from 8:30 to 2, and then until 7, which is excellent for a newborn. Too bad I had stayed up until midnight waiting for him to wake up for one last meal before bed. I know far too well not to count on current performance guaranteeing future returns when it comes to newborn sleep, but I can even live with what he was doing before, which was eating every 2-3 hours during the day and 3-4 hours at night. It's a modest hope for that to continue, but hopefully realistic.
So to sum up: we're surviving, the baby is great and we'll see how things are going in a week when the grandparents leave.
Totally worth the chaos
James Corey Atkinson-Freeman was born today at 11:49 AM. 6 pounds, 15 ounces, with a healthy set of lungs. We're both a little shocked at how tiny he is compared to his brother and sister, who were both 9 pounds at birth, but he's absolutely perfect.
I know that this hospital has wi-fi (unlike the one I was in with Alec, where we were told they didn't, then discovered they did on my second admission when I brought along my laptop so I could watch movies), so hopefully I'll be doing well enough tomorrow evening to update with pictures and vital statistics.
* All goes well on the pregnancy front. An ultrasound on Monday revealed that Godric is estimated at 6 1/2 pounds (my doctor did an ultrasound Wednesday as well and estimated him at 5 1/2 pounds, which just goes to show what a big margin for error ultrasounds have at this stage. Personally, I'm inclined to go with the ultrasound tech, who spends all day long measuring fetuses). It also showed that he's very much like his sister. Firstly because he made it impossible to get any good pictures by curling up in a little ball and putting both his hands AND feet in front of his face. But also because he's lying transverse across the top of my abdomen. That would explain why my stomach is largest at the top and rather pointy. I can still wear pants that I had to give up before 30 weeks in previous pegnancies, because all of the baby bulk is above my waistline. On the plus side, since he's not in my pelvis at all, the pubic bone pain I've had before isn't as bad this time. K was transverse too, but was happily lying in pelvis like a hammock, while Alec favored various weird positions within my pelvis, often involving his head lodged in one of my hips. With both of them, at this point I was mostly wondering when my pelvis was going to split right in half, whereas now, it's painful but not as bad. On the down side, a baby lying right under my ribs is free to happily kick and punch away at my cervix and bladder, activities that my previous babies had to give up before 30 weeks. Ow. I'm not exactly thrilled by his habit of shoving his head into my ribs by pushing as hard as he can against my hip either.
Anyway, we already had a c-section scheduled (as it turns out, it's very hard to find a doctor around here who will let you attempt a vaginal birth after two c-sections, and at this point, I just don't care enough to try), so mostly I feel amused that Godric has decided to make it so very necessary.
* It's a little hard to absorb that I'm having a baby in two weeks. We're using our three-day weekend to rearrange our bedroom, and now that the baby's dresser is set up in there, I'm hoping we can dig out clothes and diapers tomorrow. At that point, we'll be at least minimally prepared. There are plenty more things we should do, like go through and see what bottles are reuseable and stock the freezer, but we'll at least have clothes, diapers and carseat ready.
* In other child news, K is getting glasses. I noticed a couple months ago that her reading was markedly better when she held the book about six inches away from her face, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. I'm pretty sure she knew she needs glasses too, because she was vehemently opposed to the idea of going to the eye doctor, and every time the topic came up, she would yell, "I don't need glasses!" Not exactly a master poker player, dear.
Once she was actually in the chair, thankfully she was really very cooperative (something I was very worried about because she's been displaying a level of shyness and stranger anxiety lately that I find challenging, to put it mildly). She happily picked out a pair of pink glasses and was disappointed to find out she would have to wait for them, so hopefully it won't be a problem getting her to wear them consistently. Actually, I think it won't be a problem at all to get her to wear them once she finds out what life is like when you can see clearly. I'm going to be interested to see what happens to her reading and writing after she has glasses.
* I'm having a baby in TWO WEEKS. TWO. And then there will be three small people around here that we're expected to take care of and send to college. Eek.
* In other news, I'm giving birth April 23. That's less than six weeks from now. Eek. How did that happen? And our total baby preparation is that we finally settled on James as a first name, mostly because we couldn't think of anything better. Oh yes, I also bought a cute little outfit when we found out he's a boy. Oh, poor third child. I hope you don't mind your total lack of fanfare and new clothes.
Part of it is that we need to buy him a dresser, which we can't do until the weekend after next. Once we do that, it will feel worthwhile to pull out the newborn clothes because we'll have a place to put them. That will also make it necessary to do the bedroom rearranging we've been planning. And I suppose when we have the tubs of baby clothes out, I'll find the infant diapers and we can get those ready too.
* Moving plans have been put on hold due to complete lack of anything remotely good on the housing market at the moment. I'm getting a little sick of finding only 1) wildly overpriced houses, 2) houses that are only the square footage advertised if you include the roof, and 3) obvious scams (why yes, we'd love to rent your 4 bedroom house for $500 a month! We'll just mail that security deposit to you sight unseen). We've re-upped with a six month lease, so we'll see what things are like in August. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to get some major purging and rearranging done, which seems to be my version of nesting. I want to get a better homeschooling space set up, and finally finish cleaning up the basement so we can spend more time down there this summer.
And now that I have all of this planned, all I need to do now is find some energy and develop the ability to walk without feeling like my pelvis is going to fall apart.
longstrider came home puking on Tuesday and slept most of Tuesday and Wednesday. I wasn't throwing up, but felt like someone had dropped a 50 ton weight on my head. I managed to keep the children and house from falling into too much squalor and kept K on track with reading and math, but that was it. Thursday, longstrider was well enough to go to work and I thought I might be in the clear, until I started puking. Thank goodness Thursday is a preschool day for Alec, because I spent the day dozing on the couch while K spent quite a lot of the day on the Nick Jr website. Does it count as education if she played a bunch of Team Umizoomi games, which involved math? Okay, preschool math, but at least a bit better then spending all day marinating in cartoons. Friday, Alec was home but thank goodness, so was longstrider, so I slept most of the day and was something resembling better.So here we are in a new week and maybe we'll actually get something I planned done. Thank goodness for Reading Eggs is all I can say. I hadn't planned to use a computer program to teach my child to read, but there's something about the impartiality of the computer that she responds to a lot better than having to read to another human. She's willing to spend large amounts of time playing and according to it, has advanced over a year in reading skills in the past month.
In other news, an ultrasound yesterday estimated Godric's weight at 32 weeks as 4 and a half pounds, which puts him right on track to be the same size as his brother and sister. Somehow I feel justified in my refusal to worry about growth restriction. He also appears quite healthy and active, and is quite definitely still a boy. So all's good on that front.
Anyway, among other news:
- We saw Arrietty last Monday. It was just so fantastic. The pacing was slow, but the animation was so gorgeous that we didn't mind in the least because we just sat and took in all of the details. K loved it too, and we've started reading The Borrowers to her at bedtime. That's significant because it's the first chapter book she's shown this much sustained interest in. I think she inherited my difficulty with absorbing things through just listening without anything visual to back it up. I can read until the end of time, but I have real difficulty absorbing the same book if I hear it. Similarly, being told how to do something isn't nearly as helpful to me as a nice diagram or set of written instructions. Auditory processing is not my strong suit. Up to this point, K has only wanted books with pictures for her to look at as we read, I suspect because the pictures helped her keep up with the story. But we're up to chapter 5 of The Borrowers, so she can listen to longer texts without pictures if she tries.
- We took K to a new urologist a month ago. He was quite nice and K even liked him enough not to dive under the table upon seeing him, so that's an improvement. We're now on a regimen of frequent water drinking and cranberry pills, which seem to be working pretty well. We have a standing antibiotic prescription if we need it, but we haven't needed it so far. I'm really hoping this is a sign we're making progress.
- Our infant carseat picked up some mold on the straps while being stored in our last garage. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide if it was possible to clean it off without damaging the strength of the straps. Finally, last weekend was the last opportunity for Babies R Us's baby equipment trade in, so I sent
longstrider out to get the car seat out of the shed so we could look at it again and decide once and for all if it was salvageable.As it turns out, all of my indecision was rendered moot when we discovered that a squirrel had been chewing on it. Not to mention pooping in it. And at some point, apparently ran off with the cover.
Well, that certainly made the decision a lot easier. So now we have a new infant carseat. I haven't done any other baby prep, but Godric can now show up and we can at least take him home from the hospital.
I think I'm in a bit of denial about the fact that I'm 31 weeks pregnant and will most likely have a baby two months from now. Part of it is that having had two babies at the end of June, my internal pregnancy clock is two months off. Mentally, I feel like I should only be five months along. My body, however, is acutely aware that I'm 7 months and is letting me know it doesn't appreciate it with the joyously traditional pelvic pain of the third trimester. So I really do need to start thinking about baby planning.
*We're getting baby clothes back from the nephew who wore them last summer, although we need to buy at least a few 0-3 month clothes with long sleeves and pants, since a late April baby needs warmer clothes than a late June baby.
*We have plenty of small diapers, although I should probably order some more one size covers because unless a potty miracle occurs, we're going to have two in diapers for at least a while. Eventually, I'll have to decide what to do about the larger cloth diapers, which are getting decidedly ragged, but we have at least six months for that.
*We gave away some baby equipment, so we should decide what we want to replace. Do we really need a baby swing? A double stroller would be really nice. We can look through some consignment stores for those.
*We also really need to decide what to do about the bed situation. We currently have a queen sized bed, which hosts both of our children on a fairly regular basis, leaving
longstrider and I desperately hugging the edges of the bed. Adding another child to the already overstuffed bed will require an advanced degree in Tetris. When Alec was born, we put K's old toddler bed next to ours for extra room, but he's using it now. So do we get a king sized bed? Buy a twin to shove next to our current bed which will eventually get used by one of the older children? Two months is starting to seem awfully close, all of a sudden.
You can buy an owl pellet online, but K's grandfather was visiting and brought a couple that he had found in the woods. Since these were fresh from the owl and not nicely sterilized like the ones you find online, I was quite grateful that he was there to handle the dissection. The reason pregnant women shouldn't change cat litter is that it can carry toxoplasmosis, a disease adults barely notice but is dangerous to fetuses, and the place cats normally pick up toxoplasmosis is from eating wild rodents. Even after microwaving the pellets to help kill the germs and taking care not to touch them, I'm not sure I would have felt safe being that close to them. Anyway, with the help of some plastic utensils and a multitool, the pellets were dissected and it was deduced that they were the remains of a bird and some sort of small rodent.
We spent another day reading all about owls. We also did a neat art project I found called Winter Birch Tree, where you put down masking tape to look like tree trunks and the moon, cover the paper in dark blue water color paint, sprinkle some salt on to give the effect of snowflakes, and then peel up the tape so you have a lovely nighttime scene of trees and the moon. If one wanted, one could use the opportunity to point out the use of shadow in the art in Owl Moon while adding shading to the trees. We didn't, or at least as far as I know since this art project happened while I was at work. K's two efforts didn't have much resemblance to those on the web page I found the project on, but they're lovely in their own way and she had fun.
On our last day, we read a bunch of books on the moon and solar system, watched several videos on Discovery Streaming, and then did a project on the phases of the moon. It was a fun and productive day, but not in a way that gives me a lot to talk about.
So that was our week of Owl Moon, which was really more like a week and a half. I've been trying to plan out what we're doing in the next few weeks. At 30 weeks pregnant, my energy is pretty low and getting lower, so I think we won't be covering a lot of books as thoroughly as I would like. I'm also not cleaving terribly closely to Five in a Row at the moment. K keeps giving me requests for topics that it doesn't cover very well, like London, or her ocean obsession or her longstanding request to make a volcano. Added to that is the fact that FIAR is a bit poor when it comes to racial diversity or really much of any diversity outside of the USA and Western Europe. So next week we're doing a book on Hawaii (to be determined based on what I can get from the library), which will address the volcano desire as well as some ocean life. After that, I'm contemplating Robert McCloskey's One Morning in Maine and Time of Wonder jointly, which will give us the excuse to spend more time on the ocean, and even throw in some dentisty, another subject of interest (no, that particular choice doesn't address the lack of racial diversity, but they're good books for the ocean-obsessed child). Beyond that, I'm not sure yet.
Books used this week:
Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
See How They Grow: Owl by Mary Ling
Owls by Tony Angell
Owls : the Silent Hunters by Sara Swan Miller
Great Horned Owls by Doug Wechsler
I didn't Know That the Sun is a Star by Kate Petty
The Moon Book by Gail Gibbons
The Moon by Elaine Landau
Moon by Steve Tomacek
The Magic School Bus Get Lost in the Solar System by Joanna Cole
