My oh my...

I can't believe how bad I am at keeping up here! I know that a lot of people have stopped even looking here for updates because they know by now that I am just notoriously bad at keeping this blog updated! I hope to start doing a better job of keeping up, mainly just because I don't feel like I can afford to take so much time off. It seems like just yesterday we were bringing home our sweet, 4 pound baby girl and worrying about getting her to eat a full ounce each feeding and praying that she would grow. Now, it feels as thoughCharlie is growing at light speed, a fact that is both exciting and scary all at the same time. She gets more and more beautiful each day. She also gets more and more fun. She is such a kick right now. She laughs a lot but her belly laughs are tough to get and are, by far, the most wonderful sound I have ever heard in my entire life. She also smiles all the time. It is the kind of smile that is one day going to get both Will and me into a ton of trouble because I know that we both melt completely when we see it.
Charlie just had a 6 month check up a week or so ago. She weighed in at a healthy 12lbs and 3 oz... nearly 10 pounds heavier than she was when she was born. She is also now 24 1/2 inches long and has made it onto the growth chart for her height! She is in the 10th percentile, but we will take it!
We made it through the holidays and really enjoyed her first Christmas. It was still a little more crazy than I had hoped but it was just about what we had expected seeing as how we had 2 weddings and Christmas to cope with. I will write more about that when I get the pictures onto my computer.
I am back at work now and that is presenting its own set of challenges. Luckily, I can work from home most of the week. I work my usual Sunday morning stuff and then go into the office on Tuesdays (when Charlie's Aunt Lisa watches her... a time I think they both really enjoy and look forward to) and then I go into the office on Thursday afternoons and the girl goes with me. So fa it is working out really well but I think a big part of that has to do with the fact that she is so good. The day I went back to work, I spent the entire evening reading BabyWise to see if I could get her onto some sort of schedule and be able to get more done at home. It was educational and a little stringent for me but it did have a lot of good stuff to say. I feel like I could write a lengthy review and an entire blog entry just on what I feel about various parenting styles right now but I won't get too into that. Essentially, I have just decided to take a little from here and a bit from there to come up with what I feel is a perfect parenting style for US. Charlie is on a good schedule now (she eats every three hours, goes down for a nap after she has been up for about 2 hours and then sleeps for about an hour or so). At night, she now sleeps about 5-7 hours... usually going down just after 9 and then gets up at about 3 or 4 to eat again. Sometimes she sleeps all the way through to 7am but that usually doesn't happen but once a week. We will take it when it comes though!!
What I really can't believe is that it was one year ago today that I told Will that I was pregnant and one year ago yesterday that I got a + pregnancy test and my life changed forever. I often miss being pregnant (particularly because half our church body is expecting right now... you think I am exagerating, right? There are at least 10 people that I know of having babies some time in the next 9 months. It is crazy!) but figuring out if I ever want to do this kind of thing again is a whole 'nother blog post in and of itself. I have much writing and catching up to do!!!
In the meantime, here are a few pictures to keep you happy for now :) Eventually we will catch up!!!

Here are some from the fall... Charlie's first USC game against Washington State (I know, I know... we chanced it and took her to a large group gathering. BUT she didn't get sick!!!!) She went to another one too in November. I think she was all of 5lbs when we went. Now, looking back, I am not surprised so many people looked at us like she was the smallest thing they had ever seen!




And her second game (she didn't sleep nearly as much during this game... it was homecoming, afterall!!)




Here are some pictures from the fall of Charlie after she started smiling (it was quite a game trying to capture her smiles on film... now it is pretty easy. Then, not so much!) These were all taken around the middle of November.





And here are a few pictures from Charlie's first Halloween and first Thanksgiving. We couldn't be more grateful for our little family!!

Charlie's in charge of our days and our nights...

So, our baby girl is now 4 months old... can you believe it? She weighed in yesterday at 9lbs and 4oz!! She is doing so well and becoming so much fun. She is becoming more and more responsive all the time. She obviously recocnizes Will and I now. She particularly LOVES her daddy (it is almost enough to make me annoyed!!) For example, she got her 4 month shots yesterday and she was pretty much a pill the rest of the day. There would be no smiles for mommy. But once daddy came home, it was an entirely different story as she became smiles from ear to ear. She even smiles sometimes when she hears Will laughing from across the room. It is pretty cute. Of course. as soon as we break out the camera we get nothing but "blue steel" from her. Hopefully we can capture some of her truly beautiful smiles here soon (her half smile that turns into a big open mouth grin is currently my favorite!!)

People ask us all the time if she is sleeping through the night yet which I find funny because she is really only about 7 weeks old (adjusted age). She gets up 2 or 3 times a night but I have been bad about keeping track. I usually start her out in her bassinet and then when she gets up the first time, I usually just pull her into bed with us (learning to breastfeed lying down was one of the best things about lactation clinic :) Speaking of lactation, we have officially graduated (as of the end of October!) So we don't get to go to CHOC every week anymore or see her old nurses (which is kinda a bummer!) We still get to see Amanda though since we will be going to her baby shower at the beginning of December. She is so great! It will be fun to do something in return for her since she spent so much time taking care of our baby. I feel like I owe her in a big way.

We still are not completely settled into our house. Some of that has to do with money (it is expensive to get everything I really want to finish off the house, like a new kitchenette set, some decor items and, of course, my porch swing!) The office is still an eye sore. I hope that by Christmas it will be a bit more put together. I just realize that I don't have nearly as much time as I would have thought with a newborn in the house! She takes up so much time. Not only that but I seem to spend a lot of time falling asleep myself when she naps. So, I basically feel as though I get nothing done. I just ordered Baby Wise though from Amazon so I am hoping that we get a schedule figured out soon. (one of those things I wanted to read before I delivered... turns out that didn't happen!) I am certainly looking forward to Christmas though. I had my first Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks last week and was SO happy! I also realized yesterday that Coast 103.5 is already playing nothing but Christmas music here :) So fun! My fear is that the next month is going to go by way to fast and I am going to let Christmas slip by again. So, I am doing a few things to combat that. First of all, I am trying to get all my Christmas shopping done this week (I am mostly there!) Second, I want to put together a FAMILY CHRISTMAS CALENDAR because we have so much going on this December (including 2 weddings and all of the stuff that goes along with that... showers, rehearsals, etc.) And I want to put EVERYTHING that I want to do down on that calendar.... even if that means writing down the little things like getting our tree, putting up lights on the house, or cozying up with a Christmas movie and a fire, I don't want to forget anything. Also, I have been reading a book on Christmas traditions and I want to incorporate a few things into our lives... especially since it is Charlie's first Christmas!!!

Thanksgiving should be fun too. We are hosting at our place and invited anyone from church that has nowhere else to go to come here... it will be fun to have people over. It is nice to have a place to actually host. We certainly have so much to be grateful for!

I hope to have more pictures soon... like of Charlie's first halloween (we had SO many trick-or-treaters, Will had to run out and get more candy at about 8pm!! It made me think though about how much I LOVE living in a neighborhood!) As soon as I get pictures, I promise to post :) Will has them all right now and I am negotiating their release :)

Hope you all have a great Thanksgiving. We are thankful for you, our friends and family at this time of year and all year long.

The end of the freak show

For so long, I honestly wondered if we should join the circus. There was not a time that we left the house that people did not comment on how little our baby Charlotte was. People would ooh and ahh over her and say things like "that is the tiniest baby I have ever seen!!" All of a sudden, no one is a stranger anymore and everyone wants to know the background story behind our little freakshow baby. People still ask how old she is when we go out, but I think it has more to do with the fact that she is finally looking like a newborn baby rather than a preemie. She weighed 7lbs and 2oz at our last weigh in last friday. She truly gets cuter every day. We can't get over how much we love her. I do think I need to get a onsie made though that has her info on it so I don't have to get into it every time. Just something that says, "I am older than I look. I am 3 months old but was born 12 weeks early at 2lbs, 8 oz. I now weigh over 7lbs and am doing well. Thanks for asking!" It might save me a lot of time next time I run to starbucks :)

It is kinda crazy to think that we are slowly losing the remnants of preemie life. She is even beginning to breastfeed more frequently and needing the bottle less and less ( although we have finally put a dent in the hundreds of oz of breastmilk we have in the freezer! I might actually have some room for some frozen veggies again soon!!) Most of her preemie clothes are now quite... snug. I guess this is where we move onto newborn life. As crazy as it sounds, it almost makes me a bit sad! Oh well! I am excited to see what this new phase has in store for us. Hello newborn world!!

Catching up to do

There is so much to catch up on... I don't even know where to begin! Charlie is doing well. She is growing quickly. At her last weigh in (last Thursday) she was 6lbs 10oz. She seems to be gaining about an ounce a day so I figure she is over 7lbs by now. My new favorite thing is that she can really hold her head up on her own pretty easily. It is fun to see her looking around and being so aware of things that are going on around her. I can pick her up by grabbing under her arms and lifting and not have to worry about her head bobbing around. In some ways I feel so lucky to have a preemie because she is still so little. I guess one positive thing in all of this is that my baby is a baby for so much longer. The down side of having a preemie is that I really do feel paranoid about everything. I started getting a cold yesterday and now I am worried sick that Charlie is going to get sick and that it is RSV, not just the common cold (of course RSV is the virus that is really bad news for preemies... it causes major respitory issues and can even cause death). Her pediatrician mentioned that there is RSV out there in the community already but I checked a Southern CA blog that gets info from various hospitals in the area and they have yet to have any reported cases, which makes me feel better. For some reason they don't start giving the RSV prevention shot until the first week of November (which makes no sense seeing as how the season usually starts in October). In any event, she seems to be okay as of right now. I am wearing a mask around the house (luckily my packrat of a husband kept the mask that he wore during my c-section) and washing my hands after every time I sneeze or blow my nose (which is rather frequent at this point!!) So, we just keep praying that Charlotte has some how eluded this sickness. Even if it is NOT RSV I would hate to see her sick with this. It is truly no fun at all!

One thing is for sure, our little peanut is so cute and getting cuter every day! Here are some new(er) pictures of our sweet 3 month old (can you even believe that she will be three months tomorrow?!?! She is so precious!!!

I found a few pics from back in the NICU that I wanted to post here...

Here is the three of us on game day. Check out Charlie's booties :)




These are pictures that we took the day we left the hospital... One of the nurses was hilarious and wanted to put Charlotte in all these crazy places. I will have to find those pictures on Will's computer. For now, these are a few we took that day.

Charlie in daddy's ball cap (just to give you some perspective on how little 4lbs is)

Here we are with her nurse Amanda (who we still keep in contact with and has become a good friend to us) and Charlie with Dr. Kukraja (one of our favorite and most encouraging doctors!)


Here are a couple pictures from the night we got home (we stopped at Marsha and Wyman's on the way so that we could feed her, so we didn't get home until late)


And here are just a few random cute ones from around the time we got home from the hospital...





That is all for now... I promise to update more soon and get some pictures of our showers up here as well as pictures from just before she was born when we were in Hawaii :)

D-Day

So, here we are... the beginning of October. It is crazy to think that just 6 months ago, this was the week that we were so anticipating. It is strange to think now that October 4th will always just be "another day" for us from here on out! The nice thing is that Charlotte is officially a newborn now, at least when it comes to her corrected age. Now we can actually expect her to do all the things that a newborn does. It is just so crazy to think that, in a perfect world we would just NOW be finding out if Pip was a Charlotte or a Liam. To think that we have known this sweet girl and really gotten to know here for 12 weeks already is just so hard to fathom! It is also hard to quantify how truly in love with her I am. Just thinking about her and the way she looks at me or the cooing she makes as she eats or the way she and Will look in the morning as they face each other and make googly eyes at one another, or her little smirk,,, it all just makes me melt. I feel so lucky to be her mom!

For a quick update, Charlie is now just over 6 pounds and doing very well! Will and I absolutely love having her home. It feels so natural to be a family. People ask me what it was like bringing her home (at a hefty 4 pounds!) and if we had those usual parental anxieties. Of course there was some trepidation but I think having the NICU buffer makes our experience much different than the average. There were so many pros and cons from this whole experience. It is hard to believe now that I can feel as though there were actually POSTITVE aspects to this whole ordeal but I have to admit they are there. First of all, I was able to fully recover from my c-section and prepare for her arrival. Additionally, it is nice that she is pretty well scheduled (she eats just about every 3 hours!) as well as the fact that she takes a bottle. That makes it easy for dad (or the grandmas when they were here!) to take a shift in the night and allow me to get some extra rest. That freezer full of breastmilk is nice to have on hand too (we haven't even made a dent in that yet!) Plus, we have really been able to see our community (our friends and family... even our new neighbors!) rally around us in this time. We feel so blessed. By the end of her 7 week stay at CHOC, we aleady knew so much about our little girl, her eating habits, her personality and we had a strong sense that the best place for her was at home and that Will and I could be as attentive to her needs (if not more so!) than the staff at CHOC. In the end, we were certainly more excited than nervous to bring her home!
We feel so blessed to be so supported. Our church family has been so amazing throughout all of this as has our actual family. Lisa loves spending time with her niece and both grandmas were able to come and spend a week or so with us the week before and after our latest shower (which I will post about soon! It was wonderful!) Having them here was so great! I also feel that we have an amazing new support system since we made friends with her awesome primary nurses (Amanda and Kelly) and now get to go to lactation clinic once a week to get weighed in and have some support in the breastfeeding department (which, again, could be a whole nother blog post). In any event, we continue to be reminded of how blessed we are and how grateful we are for the health of our sweet Charlotte.
I know I have a LOT to catch up on since my last post... I promise to do a better job (and post a lot more pictures) very soon!
Thanks to all of you for being such a blessing to us! We are incredibly grateful for each of you!

At long last...

Here are some pictures for y'all! These are some of the same that you can find on Will's blog in the slide show... this way, you can pore over them a little longer if you like.

Enjoy!!!

Jess

Overwhelmed and overjoyed

I can barely wrap my brain around the fact that our little girl is already a month old. She is such a big girl already (and still so incredibly tiny!!) Here is an update on where she is at right now (since I know we haven't been that great at keeping you all updated! I am so sorry about that!!)

Our sweet Charlotte is now weighing in at a very hefty 3 pounds and 9 oz. She has already gained over a pound since she was born! It is easy to see it on her! She has begun to fill out her little cheeks and such. Just this past week, I really started to notice how much bigger she looks. There are several developmental milestones that you can notice with her now. She loves to suck on her pacifier... she is vigorous with it now. She gets it mostly when she is being fed (still by feeding tube... hopefully she will try the bottle again later this week. She would have been 34 weeks on Thursday and that is about the time that they get their suck/swallow reflex. She tried a bottle last week but only took about 2 or 3 CC's. Hopefully she will do better at the end of this week) this tricks her into realizing the connection between sucking and getting a full belly. She gets my breastmilk every 3 hours. Right now, she gets one oz every feeding. Not a lot to you and me but quite a bit for her little belly. She has some relux issues (common for preemies since the sphincter between the esophagus and stomach is not developed yet) but has been handling her feedings rather well. My milk is supplemented with HMF (human milk fortifier) which gives her about 24 calories per feeding rather than the usual 20 that would be in my breastmilk alone. She has been off all of her IV's for the last couple of weeks (since the 9th of August) and as of this weekend, she was moved to the "big girl room" (as we call it) of the NICU. It is much nicer and MUCH more quiet than the rest of the ward. It is known as the "feed and grow" room since she really just has to eat, feed and grow from here on out. The doctors told us on Thursday of last week that she should be ready to go in 2-3 weeks. I was elated. It was the first time that anyone has given us ANY sort of timeline at all besides the standard "she should be home by her due date." It was also good timing because I was beginning to feel incredibly down. Just the night before we had been in to see her. As we left the NICU I just felt incredibly down. I was overcome by this sense of grief. I couldn't bear it. Leaving your baby in someone else's care day in and day out has become so tiresome to me. On top of that, it felt as though there was no light at the end of the tunnel. She was still on the feeding tube and far from learning to eat by bottle. Plus, she had been having more frequent "De-sat" episodes (where her pulse oxygenation would drop substantially) during her feeds. It just felt as though things had hit a very depressing plateau. So, to hear the next day that the doctors were optimistic about her going home in 2-3 weeks and the next day to come in and find her in the "feed and grow" room was incredibly relieving.

Charlotte clearly loves the new room. She has grown 20-40 grams every night since she moved. That is an average of one oz a day. Within the last day or so her "Spells" (where she de-sats or "Bradys") have reduced quite a bit and any spells she has are self-resolving. It appears that her little body is slowly learning what to do and how to function.

As for me and how I am doing... well, it kinda depends on when you catch me. I vacillate between being completely overwhelmed and overjoyed. I love spending time with my sweet girl. I try to "kangaroo" (skin to skin hold) with her as often as I can... usually between her 11:00 and 2:00 feedings every day. I go in with Will in the mornings and then my sister-in-law, Lisa, usually comes to pick me up around we leave to grab lunch and go home around 2. Who would have ever guessed that I could spend so much time staring into a plastic box! I marvel at how fast the time seems to pass while I am in the NICU. I could spend day on end in there and it would feel like hours. It seems that my mood tends to revolve a great deal around how well my baby is doing. The better her day is, the better I seem to feel. There were several weeks where I felt so incredibly helpless. It is true what they say about being on a rollercoaster ride. I have felt my emotions take me on quite a flux of highs to lows. I suppose I could blame it on my horomones. More likely, it stems from just being a mom now and dealing with the pain difficulty of trying to protect my sweet baby from that which I have no control. It is daunting. I just continue to pray that she will have good days so that, hopefully, I in turn will have good days too. Overall, I am simply overjoyed and overwhelmed by all of it. I cannot imagine loving anything as much as I love her. I am so happy to be a mom... to be HER mom. I am also overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. To be a mom has got to be one of the most daunting jobs in the world. The idea of actually bringing her home and taking care of her ourselves is scary, to say the least.
I am also overwhelmed though by the outpouring of support and love that we have received from our family and friends. We are SO incredibly grateful for all of their prayers, their meals, their willingness to pack us up and help us move. It is truly amazing how much people have done to help us over the past few weeks.
I truly am grateful to all of you for your calls, your desire to check in on us, the ways you have taken care of us, the clothes and baby stuff you have sent... we are overwhelmed by your love and support. I want to make sure to talk to you all personally in the next few days to make sure you know how genuinely grateful we are. We love you all and could not have made it through the past few weeks without you. Thank you for being there for us right now and for being so patient with us at this time. We cannot even begin to tell you how much we appreciate it!

PS check out Will's blog for more pictures... it takes forever for him to get them to me so I don't have anything to post right now!