December 30, 2006
It's so hard to believe that 2006 is almost over. I know I say that every year, but this year really did zoom by. Mostly I think about how, a year ago, we had no inkling that Ella would be in our lives. I had just weaned Ethan about a month prior, and though it was not really by my choosing and accompanied by horrible hormone side effects,  I was enjoying my "freedom" (that's a relative term of course) from either pregnancy or nursing. I had no baby physically attached to me! With my pregnancies with Natalie and Ethan, the pregnancies included a change in the calendar year, making them seem longer. This time it was all in this year, so it seems so strange, now with her here and a part of our lives, to think that she wasn't even yet a twinkle in our eye at this time last year!

I can't seem to keep up with much of anything these days, including this languishing journal, but keeping some amount of record for my kids is really important to me, so I'm going to try to at least get the highlights. I can't guarantee the writing to be that stellar, though -- I have trouble completing a single spoken sentence right now, and trying to keep written thoughts clear in my mind and as I type is just as hard! (Even though I usually think best "through my fingers".)

Ella is growing like crazy. She had her first real smile a week ago Thursday. (Right before Christmas weekend.) It's really adorable. One corner of her lips goes up, then the other follows, then the smile goes into her eyes and she's all lit up. So far I've been the only one to make her smile, but Natalie sure tries a lot too. (Her favorite thing to do with her baby sister is get VERY VERY close to her face and kiss her nose or tell her "hi baby Ella! hi baby Ella!" Ethan likes to hover over her too, but just not as close and as often, and he usually tells her "Ella cute" over and over again.)  After smiling last Thursday, she didn't smile for me again until yesterday, but she hasn't been feeling well so I don't blame her. The poor girl, along with the entire rest of our family, had some kind of cold all week, and with Ella unfortunately it really hit her hard on Christmas.  My whole family had heard about her learning how to smile and they were looking forward to seeing it, but Ella spent most of the day asleep in my arms, and when she wasn't asleep she was fussy. That's pretty much the extent of my memory of her first Christmas. She was asleep or crying.  I didn't think she was feeling well, and then later in the evening we went home and played a game of Trivial Pursuit (the "Totally 80's" version - and guess who won?) with my sister and brother in law. As I was holding her, about an hour after getting home, Ella threw up all over me. Like she had been acting like she wanted to all day. After throwing up, her color went back to normal and she acted better again, at least for a little while. Later that night she threw up two more times, and she's continued to do that pretty often all week. I think it's a stomach irritation though, from mucous and not a stomach virus, because she's been coughing and sneezing just like the rest of the family. The past day or so she's definitely acting like she's feeling better, and not throwing up so much, or at least, not as much with each spit-up, so hopefully this is on its way out. It's so hard to see such a little baby sick!

Other than everyone not feeling all that great, we had a really good Christmas, and Natalie and Ethan were so much fun this year. Ethan had a little trouble opening the first few presents (Natalie was happy to help out) but he got the hang of it very soon, and both kids were happily ripping into all their presents. Our living room is still a disaster area of toys. (Tonight we did get some of them put away.)

December 20, 2006
I finally got Ella's photo posted! It's located here. (Also linked at left.)

There's a lot I need to catch up on, but for now I just wanted to get that photo, and a few others, located below, put up as well. We're getting ready for Christmas (and yes, we finally got a tree!), and that plus still the adjustment to three kids is still throwing me for a loop (do you know, suddenly I NEVER finish laundry - I just start up again as soon as the "last" load is finished...) so I'll get this updated once I can stop to breathe for a minute. Ideally when Phil is home so that I can type with two hands. Stay posted, I'll get some things written down here in a couple days. 

December 14, 2006
A month ago this evening we were headed to the hospital! I really can't believe that it's already been a month. Ella is getting even more alert, looking around and watching us. She loves watching her brother and sister a lot too. Ethan calls her a "sweet potato bug", after which Natalie always "corrects" him, informing him that she's not a potato bug, that she's a sweet potato. 

We took her to her doctor yesterday for the one-month checkup, and once again we're impressed with this "miracle grow" (Phil's words) that I'm providing. Recall that at her last official check, at 5 days, she was 20 inches long, and 6 pounds 13 ounces. Yesterday, just three weeks later, she has grown to 23 1/2 inches, and she now weighs 9 pounds, 13.25 ounces. Almost ten pounds! We knew that she had chunked up, but wow! I've spent the past two afternoons sorting through our girl baby clothes, because suddenly Ella is more than ready for the 0-3 size, and it likely won't be long before she is into 3-6 months -- I'm thinking that she'll be into that size by next month. She's taking after her brother and sister after all. She was so tiny just a couple weeks ago, I thought that maybe I'd finally have a kid who was true to age/size -- but, it looks like she's going to be about double, too, just like the other kids. Even her head has gotten suddenly bigger. Her head circ is 15 inches, but I knew she was growing that way even before her appointment, because a few days ago her little stocking cap left a red welt on her forehead where it was digging in too tightly! (Sorry Ella!) Everything else looked good at her checkup, too. She looks and sounds very healthy -- even though she's had a bit of a stuffy nose the past couple nights and has had trouble settling in to nurse (meaning, she's been awake therefore so have I), but it's not affecting anything else, like her ears or lungs. Her belly button has finally completely healed up. We gave Ella her first real bath last weekend, which she screamed through, of course! She's got a rash all over her arms, legs, and belly, from where I put Johnson's creamy baby oil on her earlier in the week. Her skin looked really painfully dry, but apparently she got my mom's extra sensitive skin. 

I'll get her one-month-old picture taken tomorrow. 

This was the week of doctor's appointments. On Tuesday I had my postpartum checkup with my midwife. (For some reason they schedule them at four weeks instead of six.) I'm healing up perfectly, both my incision stitches as well as the stitch from the perineum tear. (Which happened, if you remember, because Ella wasted no time in coming out, so there was no controlled pushing!) Both areas still hurt a lot more than they did the first two times, though. Of course, they mostly hurt when I've been more active than I should be, which is pretty much all the time. I find that my tummy hurts really bad after I've had to carry around Ella's car seat all day, like the past couple days when I've been out for the appointments. (Yesterday was a double whammy, because I had Ella's checkup then Natalie had her speech therapy.) If it wasn't so completely convenient, I wouldn't carry that dumb car seat around all the time. (Which weighs twice as much as the kid in the seat.)  I know I should just take her out and carry her in the sling. It would be easier on my back and tummy, but it's hard to do that when she's sleeping peacefully in her seat and I'd like her to stay that way (sleeping and quiet) for awhile longer...she usually settles right down into the sling, but there's always the chance of the angry wake-up (any parent will know the cry I'm talking about, right?), so it's hard to justify attempting it for my own comfort!  I guess I could also haul out the stroller and pop the car seat into the stroller, but that's not something I think about if I'm just heading into somewhere to sit or to wait, and not planning to walk around too much. Unfortunately, I've been doing too much of that though, because my tummy has really been sore the past couple days. And I still need to sit on a pillow if I'm sitting on a hard chair for too long. I really seemed to bounce back much faster with the previous two kids. I even had more stitches with the previous deliveries than I did this time, but for whatever reason, this time it hurts more. But apparently, it's all healing up perfectly.

At my appointment, I asked to find out exactly what had happened during the surgery, since I still really didn't know. Liza let me read through the entire report. Everything went just fine, surgically anyway, but it did say that after being given several doses of the epidural medication, I was still feeling too much sensation, so I was given an IV sedation. (What I'd like to know, though I probably won't find out unless I could have talked to the doctor who did the surgery, and if she'd even remember, was if they gave me the medication before being cut, or if it had to be given because I started reacting or something.) Liza told me what the sedation given to me was called but I don't remember the name of it now. It really knocked me out, though! There was nothing written in there about why it took so long for me to wake up, or that anything else unusual happened. She did say that Riverside repeatedly "bumped" another lady there that same week, just like they did me, and after they did the same thing to her (denying her food/water), they flat out told Riverside that until the deluge of scheduled c-sections slowed down, they just went ahead and scheduled the tubals for a couple weeks after delivery, instead of keeping people on edge and waiting like they did with me. Normally they want to wait 6-8 weeks after delivery to do a tubal if it isn't done right after delivery, but with it being bumped a couple days after delivery anyway, the benefit of the tubes being right up by the belly button isn't there so much anymore anyway, because within that couple of days the uterus has already shrunken back down quite a lot. So it wouldn't have been any worse for me to have the surgery a couple weeks after delivery, with the exception of having to go to the hospital. If I had known how wretched my treatment would have been at Riverside, in so many ways not just including the surgery, I would have opted for delivering at St. Ann's and doing the surgery two weeks later.

Liza also told me that my nurse, Shannon, had called the next day to say that she had done a delivery for one of their patients that night before. Liza asked me how the delivery went, and I answered, "fast". When I started telling her what happened, she said, "Oh, so YOU'RE the one we heard all about!"  

We still haven't gotten a tree or any decorations up yet for Christmas. We're going to try to get some decorations up this evening, and hopefully this weekend we can go out and get a tree. (At this point all that might be left are charlie brown trees, but for this year, that would be just fine.) Natalie and Ethan are both so much into Christmas stuff this year, so it pains me that we haven't gotten anything up around our house. Speaking of being into Christmas, Natalie is so cute this year. She's been asking about how Santa will get into our house, since we don't have a fireplace. She asks if we can go to the north pole, and what color shoes he wears. I think this is likely to be the peak year for Natalie's enthusiasm about Santa. (Maybe not, but I can't imagine her being more excited and into it than she is this year!)  We had one difficult moment a couple weeks ago, when my friend Ashley was over for the afternoon with her kids. Ian, who is almost exactly a year older than Natalie, got into a conversation about presents and Christmas with her. She came running up to me at the couch and said, "Mama, Ian said Santa's not real!" Ian then came up behind her and said, "yeah - Santa doesn't give you presents, your mom does!" I was so upset at him - I know we're going to face this soon, but I didn't want to this year, when she's so completely enthused about Santa and there isn't a bit of skepticism in her yet.  Phil and I aren't ever going to lie to our kids about Santa, but I hadn't prepared ANYthing to say yet! We got through it this time, and she seems to have forgotten all about the exchange now.

December 5, 2006
Today's my due date! Seems amazing, considering Ella will be three weeks old tonight at 12:30 am. At (almost) three weeks old, Ella has started to stretch out. She doesn't keep her legs and arms tightly around herself all the time anymore. She's also finally wearing size 1 diapers now! (I think Ethan was wearing size one by the end of week one...) She sometimes  momentarily lifts her head up and is showing a little more neck control, and not as much floppiness, like when she's up on my shoulder to burp. Ella is a lot more alert, looking around and watching our faces all the time. The past couple days she's also been tending to fussiness, although I don't think she's been feeling very well (even had a couple big throw-ups yesterday) so that would certainly account for being fussy. She's also beginning to remind me a lot of Natalie, in that she just wants to be held, and her favorite, many times only, comfort measure is to nurse. Which is really fine with me, but we have to make an effort in the evenings to remember to get her daddy time as well!

My friend April came over to our house this past Saturday, set up a backdrop in our kitchen, and took some really fabulous pictures of the kids. I'm trying to get Ella's birth announcements put together, so that helped a long way toward completing that! (Which, by the way, will be in lieu of Christmas cards this year -- I think I'll be barely managing to get these all addressed and mailed out this year, let alone another round of cards!) April's photos turned out so nice. There is one especially beautiful shot of Natalie, who actually allowed me to blow-dry her hair that morning.  If you want to see them, just send me an email and I'll send you the link.

Ethan's been continuing his destructive streak. On Friday, during enforced "quiet time", I went to check on Ethan because, after a long time of silence, it sounded like he was trying to open his door, and then he started crying out "mama! mamaaaaaa!" I opened his door, and saw "painted" all over himself, the carpet, the walls, door, and now door knob, gobs of white zinc oxide diaper cream. He only cried out to me for help because he'd covered his hands and the doorknob so thoroughly that he couldn't twist it open. Sunday morning we woke up to the same thing, only this time all over the living room as well as his mouth. We're not sure how much he ate, but Phil called poison control and he was told that it would likely go right through him, that it didn't get absorbed by the body. Ethan is getting really good at climbing, because after Friday I had put the tubes up high. He also regularly empties the tubs of wipes, one at a time, all over the house. We've gotten to the point that ANYTHING remotely destructive is being put up high, out of reach. Unfortunately for the kids, this includes every crayon in the house. Unfortunately for me, it also includes all the things that would make life much easier to be kept within reach -- like diaper cream and wipes!