P-A-D: Days 106 - 110, End of July

Day 106: July 27, Nice Logo

Grandma stopped by for a quick visit before an important dinner meeting, and this time she brought an extra outfit to wear through any spit-ups. Instead of ralphing, Kai seemed very engaged in trying to grab at the World Vision logo. Grandma couldn't wait to tell Grandpa that she seemed to prefer this over the Rotary logo on the other side.

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Day 107: July 28, Asleep Again

I just can't resist these pictures of her sleeping. She looks so peaceful and delicate and beautiful. It takes a lot of willpower not to grab her up and plant kisses all over her.

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Day 108: July 29, Date Night

We finally had our first couple's night out to celebrate Eric's birthday. Kai had a fun evening with her Aunt Heidi and cousins - who are now pros at playing Keep the Bottle in the Baby's Mouth.

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Day 109: July 30, Courting Day

Ethan finally broke out of his shell and asked Kai to go steady.

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Day 110: July 31, Daddy's Cutie

Kai is wearing blue for her Daddy's birthday. Truth in advertising, this girl's definitely a cutie!

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138 days

138 days ago I gave birth to a tiny little baby girl. She has only grown more and more beautiful and vital and engrossing and perfect and time-consuming as the days have flown by.

Did I mention time consuming? I love her to pieces, but I really had no idea just how difficult it was going to be to constantly have another person attached to me. I expected her to sleep more, I expected her to play more, I expected to wear her around the house in a sling, I expected her to enjoy being carried from room to room in a carrier and just be fascinated watching mommy do stuff in front of her instead of with her. I spent months of sleep-deprived nights praying for her to sleep through the night, and now that she does, she makes up for it by not sleeping much during the day and demanding 100% of my attention 100% of the time she is awake.

I am jealous of stories of people going to the movies or trips or just dinner out, and yet I am exhausted after just taking her out for a trip to Babies R Us. Every time I come home from one of these shopping trips, I tell myself I am doing too much, and then the very next day I am either bored to tears or pulling out my hair worrying about the things I should be doing that I can't do because she refuses to let me move more than 2 feet away from her.

I am so busy trying to care for her and myself, yet balance everything else around me, that about the only thing I manage to do regularly is check my email in the morning. I don't blog, I don't Facebook, I don't clean the house, I don't design, I don't read. And yet I read an article about the problems with letting a baby "cry it out" and I'm convinced I am not spending enough time with her.

Lately, I am increasingly sensitive to the mentality that you can do anything, you just have to decide to change your life and *do* it. I am convinced that I need to watch her cues better so I can meet her needs *before* she flips out, but how do I make sure to feed her before she screams for the bottle if I can't even walk away from her long enough to make more milk when she's finally full? I need to eat better to help my overall health and energy levels, not to mention stop the postpartum weight gain, and yet the only food in the house quick enough for me to grab without her wigging out are popsicles and crackers. I need to stop using my laptop in my lap because I am doing serious damage to my back and my wrist in that position, and yet I have no time to clean off any of the spaces where I can use a computer properly.

The only reason our home is not infested with creatures living in our mess and eating our leftovers is because when Eric gets home he spends one hour making sure the important stuff like garbage and dishes and cat litter get taken care of.

I feel like I'm doing everything wrong, giving myself the worst possible care, ignoring the baby too much, and living completely unhealthy and yet… I feel chained to this way of living that is just making everything worse. My wrist is a perfect metaphor for my life right now: I constantly feel like I need 3 hands, I only have 2 hands, but one of them is seriously injured and I keep using it anyway because I have no choice so it doesn't get any better. I can't grow a 3rd hand let alone do enough to fix my injured one, so… how is anything supposed to get better?

No, this is not one of those "life-lesson" blogs where at the end I wrap everything up and say, "but I have a plan so yay!". No, I'm not on the floor bawling my eyes out either. This is just an update on reality, because sometimes this blog needs to be about me and not have any point except allow me to vent.

P-A-D: Day 105, Roll Over

Thursday, July 26 at around noon: here is the girl immediately after rolling over for the first time. Doesn't she seem pleased with herself? And it was no accident either - she did it 3 more times back to back. Time to rethink the swaddling at night!

Here's a video of roll-over #2...

P-A-D: Day 104, I'm Too Big for My Onesie!

Many weeks ago I sang a little song to Kai when I was getting her dressed, "I'm too squirmy for my onesie", to the tune of a certain 90's song by a bald French weight-lifting male model. Today I didn't sing the song, but I thought about it upon seeing her busting out of the seams of this Onesie. It seems only last week I retired the Preemie Onesies out of her wardrobe, and now the Newborn ones look like they've reached their limit. *sniff*

P-A-D: Day 103, Gaming with Baby

Do not be fooled by the title of this post, there is no dungeon master (other than Kai), no orcs to be slain (maybe a demon...?), nor any mission to accomplish (other than the game itself). No, this is about Kai's favorite new game: Keep the Bottle in the Baby's Mouth. I think she probably calls it "Frustrate Mommy and Daddy to Tears". Seriously, she's been doing this almost every feeding for two weeks now: shaking her head and otherwise making it impossible to either put the bottle in her mouth or keep it there. The worst is when she cries and you think she's in pain for some reason. I have been searching for signs of a tooth since Monday, but nothing. So, the frustration continues, with no real way for us to increase our odds of winning. We each have tried various techniques. Eric's favorite is to change position - from this one he can at least hold her arms so she can't shove the bottle away. My stand-by technique is to spend my time imagining swaddling her before every meal and convincing myself this does not make me a bad mommy for wanting to do it so badly...

P-A-D: Day 102, French Schoolgirl

The morning of Monday July 23 was a little chilly, so I put Kai in knee-highs, cute little shoes, and a little hoodie. I thought the end result looked a bit like a French schoolgirl uniform, although not so much in this picture. Each day I seem to have different criteria for how I pic that day's photo: composition, cuteness, expression, lighting... In the end I have to remind myself that it doesn't matter how imperfect it is, just pic the one I like the best. I chose today's because of her expression.

Her hair is really looking red here, isn't it? Yesterday I was thinking it was looking very strawberry blonde. She just gets cuter and cuter!

P-A-D: Day 101, Peninsula Hopping

Here's Eric showing Kai some real live art. Sometimes when she is very upset and inconsolable, Eric will take her over to the refrigerator to show her all the colorful things posted there. He calls it The Museum. It usually does wonders. Here she is, responding beautifully to all the amazing colors!

So the above was taken at Jordini's Subs, where we had an amazing meal. Port Townsend was at the end of of our whirlwind trip to visit the Peninsulas on Sunday, July 22. We startedin Kingston, since last week for the umpteenth time I drove through there and thought to myself that I should stop and visit for once. So on Sunday the three of us took the ferry to Kingston, starting out our trip by strolling by the shops. Turns out there really isn't much to do in Kingston other than eat. Well, you can buy yarn, or catch a ferry, and... you can look at the water! That's it. Here's Eric checking out the view with Kai. I have a special gift for taking pictures of people mid-sentence...

Then it was off to the historic hamlet of Port Gamble. Everything is adorable! The independent film Zombies of Mass Destruction was filmed here, but for some reason they didn't take advantage of many of the historical buildings. I think they used the church though. And here is proof that Eric is just as good as I am at taking pictures of people with their jaws wagging...

So finally there was Port Townsend, where we had lunch, did some window shopping, looked longingly at the beach buried by high tide and rain, and ran into a baby demon deer.