Tales from The Tummy

If anyone is still reading or occasionally checking in, I’ll be moving this blog to Life As I Know It at wordpress.com. I don’t have much time to take care of or use the hosting services to their fullest, so it’s time for me to get real and start using some of the free services out there.

I will most likely retain the domain name urgena.com. I’m thinking about using it to set up a private forum at Terapad for all the Urgenas out there, but that’s another project for another year.

This site will be up until May or so, but please update any bookmarks or links to point to wordpress.

So Pretty

Elodie Siobhan made her surprise appearance on Thanksgiving Day. She was kind enough to wait until I finished making the cranberry sauce, at which point my water broke. An hour later I was at the hospital and had started labor, and about two hours after that, she was born by C-section. (The Memorial Hermann system currently has a moratorium on VBAC.)

I had wanted to avoid spending Thanksgiving in the hospital, which is why she was originally scheduled for delivery on Nov 26, but in the end, it worked out really well. We are so happy to have her, and since she came on a holiday, people were in town and off work and able to visit her after such a grand entrance.

I can already tell she is going to be a drama queen.

Yesterday was my last official day at the office, but I’ll probably be randomly online for the next week wrapping some stuff up. It is now time to get down to business and start preparing for Baby Cupcake.

The first thing I need to do is redesign this blog so that it’s not so Soren-oriented. I am already super paranoid that The Cupcake is going to have a complex because her older brother gets everything.

Doctors have confirmed it’s a Connie Jr and not a Trevor Jr.

Her estimated due date is Nov 30, which is my mom’s birthday. We were joking about naming her Emmalina Ferrar, which for some strange reason is the name on my mom’s birth certificate, though in fact that’s not her name at all. I’ve tried to ask, but all I get is a kind of funny giggle.

Chalk it up to poor record keeping in a tiny island country.

Baby Boyd, expected late November 2007.

My blogging duties, not my mothering duties. Although with as much time as I spend at work, one could argue …

In any case, rereading the June 24 post. Talk about indepedence, Soren is full time in his crib for every nap and for sleeping at night. He tolerated the bassinet in our bedroom for a little while, but then promptly decided that he had humored us enough. The last night in our room, he spent several minutes screaming bloody murder and when we finally put him in his crib, he rolled over and fell asleep.

Ever since then he’s been progressing toward the fabled “sleeping through the night.” There were three days in a row around the time of my sister’s wedding that he slept from about 9 pm to 6 am and we had to keep on checking if he was breathing. Since then, he’s had a few 3:30 am wakings, but for the most part if he wakes up for a last feeding at midnight, then he’ll sleep through til 6:30 or sometimes even 7:30 or 8:30. It’s pretty amazing.

The bad thing is that all this sleeping through the night means that he is ravenous during the day. I can no longer keep up with his milk consumption, so he eats about 12 oz while I’m at work, and I pump about 8. I’m too lazy to do the math as to when I’ll eventually run out, although I suppose it will all even out again when he starts solids.

I love my baby. Have I mentioned that?

And by independence day, I don’t mean either the Fourth of July or the movie. Soren is growing up too fast!!

We have always taken the baby-centered approach to raising the tot, so he has pretty much told us when he is hungry, when he is sleepy, and well, he doesn’t actually need to tell us when he has a poo bomb; we can hear that a mile away. In any case, this approach has worked very well for us because Soren is a fairly ordered kind of kid — he’s got his own schedule and routine, and he more or less sticks to it.

Soren left co-sleeping behind about two months ago, when he switched him to the crib for daytime naps, and the bassinet (in our bedroom) for nighttime sleep. Well, I think Soren is about to leave the bassinet behind for good. Tonight, when we put him down for the night in the bassinet, he would seem to fall asleep and then fuss and cry and then be quiet and then cry. Finally, I picked him up and he instantly quieted and got that glassy look in his eyes. I held him for a bit, then put him down in his crib where he rolled over and fell asleep instantly without complaint. Sigh.

I’m proud of him for wanting to sleep in his crib, but since I’m still getting up at least once a night, I’m not looking forward to having to fully wake up in the wee hours. With him in the bassinet, it’s easy to pick him up, feed him, put him back and drift back to sleep within about 45 minutes. I worry that walking down the hall into his room to deal with the wee morning feeding will pretty much pull me out of sleep and keep me up between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m. when it’s time to start getting ready for work.

Sigh. I supposed I could work out at that time and catch up on some light reading. At least I have one more month of full-time breastfeeding before he starts solid food. It’s all going by so fast. Damn having to work!!

I don’t know if 5 data points can be the basis of a scientific analysis, but I found my Johari window to be quite interesting.

I never would have suspected some of the ways people described me, although I suppose that’s why they call it your blind spot. Bold?? Interesting.

Just a little social experiment.

I’m a happy kid

Soren goes to town in his little Jumperoo now that he’s figured out how to actually jump. He’s such an active little boy; I wonder if he’s going to be hyper and full of energy like cousin Cameron. There isn’t much more progress on the crawling front, which is a relief. I’m hoping he holds out for another couple of months so I don’t have to start chasing him around the house yet.

I had my annual well-woman exam yesterday and my doctor was telling me how some women he’s seen have had two babies in one calendar year. Yikes! I am loving motherhood, but I can’t imagine what it would be like to be four months pregnant right now. How is that even possible?