Now that I have a minuscule amount of time on my hands, I've started to get bored. There are just so many times one can vacuum the floors. Am I right, ladies?? I needed a hobby, and fast. I also needed an Ole Miss door wreath, and refused to pay $40+shipping on Etsy. (Now I'm hoping someone else wants one like mine and is willing to pay $25+shipping on Etsy!)

First I made my Ole Miss Football wreath


Cute, huh?? And check out how stinking precious it makes the front of our house. Hotty Toddy!


And this is what the fabrics and ribbon look like up close.


I love, love, loved making it, and I loved how it turned out, so I made one for Halloween!


How stinking cute is that??  Here are these fabrics up close!


I had enough left-over fabric to make a double of the Halloween one, and I have enough red, white and blue fabric to make probably 3 more Ole Miss ones. I'm starting on my Thanksgiving wreath now, and I already have some Christmas fabric ready to go! If you're interested in a wreath, I'm selling them for $25-$35, depending on the wreath. I even have my own Etsy shop now, so go check me out! I promise lots more to come!

http://www.etsy.com/shop/EmilyGotCrafty

KB started school on the 5th. Please don't think I'm a terrible stay at home Mommy for having her start school at 2. She only goes for 3 hours a day, 2 days a week. And I can assure you, she was beyond ready. By her 2nd birthday, she knew all of the basic colors, could count to 10, and knew the entire alphabet, even out of order. Want to see??



So maybe you can understand how I could feel it was time that she got a little professional teaching. Another important thing was friends. This kid is a super social creature, and I think she needed a little more interaction from kids her age. She was getting 1 hour a week at gymnastics, and 1 hour a week at church, but she needs to play!

First day of school!

So very excited!

And play, she does. On her very first morning, she kissed me goodbye and ran off on her own. On her second day, I showed up to get her and asked if she was ready to come home. She said, "No. Bye, Mommy!" and ran off to keep playing with a little boy.  Every morning we go, she sits in her car seat and sings "New friends, I see my new friends!" on repeat. 

I love her teacher, Ms. Julie! I think she genuinely cares about all of the kids in the class. And, she has great ideas for crafts! Katie comes home with something she has made every day she goes, and she's so proud of it! She shows it to me with a big flourish, and then we hang it on the refrigerator together. 

This week's fridge art. We change it out weekly!

While I felt really guilty for putting KB in school at first, now I'm so glad we did it. She's growing even more as a beautiful, intelligent young girl, and I get 6 hours a week to spend with only Thing 2. Of course, he naps 4 of those 6 hours, but that's alright, too.

August 29, 2010 - 5 days old - roughly 3 lbs

First night home!

Bed time?? Who has time for bed?!

Blowing bubbles with her friends

About a month ago, Baby G stopped taking his bottles. He slapped at them, screamed, arched his back, clamped his lips shut.. you get the picture. Talk about awful! I had no idea what to do!

Wait.. I take that back. I was afraid of what I was going to have to do if it kept up. You see, being Infant KB's mommy had it's very hard moments. Bottle feeding was one of them. KB had terrible reflux, which you can read about in dozens of my posts. She did all of those things that G was starting to do, and it got to the point where we had to force-feed her bottles. That was probably the hardest part of having a preemie. Seriously, having her in the  NICU for 27 days didn't hurt me as badly as having to force-feed her for 6 months.

G started life so easy.. He latched onto my breast his first day of life, took a bottle easily when I weaned him to formula at 3 months, and loved solid food the very first time we introduced him to it. He was easily drinking 32 oz of formula a day when he tried his first food, so it was time. All of a sudden, two weeks later, it came to a screeching halt. He was refusing every bottle, only getting maybe 16 ounces of formula a day from them, and those ounces were fought for! Food though, was a completely different story. He was still trying new things and gobbling up everything we gave him, so I knew he was hungry.

Don't let this precious face fool you.. I'm giving Mommy a hard time right now!

We tried everything.. first we switched his formula from Similac Sensitive for Spit Up to Enfamil AR. Nothing. We changed nipple sizes,  varied bottle temperatures, and added cereal to his bottles thinking maybe he was having reflux since this was the way KB acted when her reflux flared. Nothing. One day, four things happened.. #1, he had a slight temperature, so I gave him some Tylenol. #2, I found some of KB's left-over Prevacid and gave him that, too. #3, He took 2 full bottles in a row. #4 I talked to his pediatrician for the first time and she said it sounded like it could be reflux. Awesome. Of course, I had already decided that was the case since he had full bottles after the Prevacid. She also said that as long as he was making a few wet diapers a day, he was ok. She told me that stage 1 baby food has a lot of liquid, so he was getting that, and that since we make our own baby food, it's even better.



Having some delicious mommy-made squash

So a week went by, and nothing changed. He met his pediatrician for the first time on Aug. 22. He weighed 15.25 pounds, and she said he looked healthy. She also wrote a prescription for more Prevacid and said to come back if he got worse about eating.

Two more weeks went by, and the only thing that changed was that it did get worse. The Prevacid didn't seem to help at all, even after we increased his dose slightly. Then I realized that I could see two little bitty white spots on his lower gums.

After a terrible weekend of G hardly eating anything, and Honey being away for work on top of that, I made another appointment with the pediatrician. I told Honey over the phone that if I got in there and she said "Oh, it's teething." I was going to feel like a huge jerk. And that's exactly what happened. She told me to give him Tylenol every 4 hours. Oh, and after I nearly cried to her about how he hadn't been taking bottles at all, she showed me his weight. 16.1 pounds, which means he gained a full pound in 2 weeks! I told her how stupid I felt, and she was so kind about it. "Don't worry, this is my job. I say "It's just teething" probably 10 times a day."


So now, a week later, G has 1 tooth in his mouth and at least 2 more will be closely following. Oh, and he doesn't have reflux at all. Nope, this is just how teething affects my baby. My poor, poor baby.

Wow. It's been a long time since I took a month off from writing. In fact, I'm not sure I ever have. The life of my little family has been so insanely busy over the last month that I wasn't able to even think about writing. Things have finally settled down a little bit, so my brain is able to hold a little more. 

My babies have been growing and changing a lot in the past 35 days. Baby G has had a bunch of drastic changes. In the past month, he's eaten a bunch of new foods, cut his first tooth, started arm-crawling around the house, and finally slept through the night at 6 months old. Whoa, that was a long 6 months!

Katie learned the entire alphabet, learned to count to 10, turned 2, had a big birthday party, and then started school for the very first time. See all those updates? That sounds like a bunch of writing to me.

As for Honey and I, we've been busy putting our house together, and getting used to being around each other all the time. We just ended our longest streak of nights in the same bed together last week at a whopping 77 nights! That's a whole 77 days without a single duty day, or night spent on the boat for work, and it was amazing. I'm telling y'all, Shore Duty is every single bit it was cracked up to be! Alas, Honey is recruiting for NUPOC, so that means a bit of travel. In fact, he'll be in and out a lot this Fall. That's ok though, because in exchange, he works shorter hours when he's home. I can handle a few days here and there, I think. I think.

And now I'm going to get back into my routine of writing while the Tinies nap.. at least I hope I am.