Sammy is 4 months old!

Here are pics from Sammy's 4 month photo session.  Normally I just choose 1 official chair photo to post, but I couldn't decide between these two.  I love how she smiles with her entire being.  You can really see that in the first picture.

4 months! And back to work...

Sammy had her 4 month well-baby visit last week (roughly 1 week before she actually turns 4 months old).  She is doing great!  Here are her stats:

Height:  24.5" (70%)
Weight:  12 pounds, 12.4 ounces (39%)
Head circumference:  40 cm (30%)

So it seems likes she's continuing her trend of being longer than fatter and having a small head!

I went back to work on the 10th.  My mom and dad, who have been visiting ever since we had the baby naming, cared for Sammy through the 19th and we started Sammy at daycare yesterday (the 22nd).  It was hard to leave her in the care of other people but I found it easier to do so since I've already been through this drill with Ian.  My mom and dad loved being with her.  My mom did all of the feeding/diapering and my dad pushed her around in the stroller when she was cranky.  It was really sad to watch them drive away this past weekend.  I was crying and my mom was bawling (which she hardly ever does).  I guess she got really attached to Sammy in the 10 days she cared for her.  And Sammy has only been in daycare 1 day but already the teachers there love her.  They said she smiled a lot, drank her bottles nicely and even napped in her crib.  I'm so glad that it looks like she'll be happy there.

Sammy hasn't rolled over yet, but she tries very hard to get into a sitting position while lying down in her bouncy seat.  I'm impressed at her use of her stomach muscles!  So she really enjoys being in her bumbo seat as you can see from the picture below!

And Ian has been doing great.  He's started singing a lot lately and as it turns out, I think he can carry a tune!  So it looks like he may not have inherited his dad's tone deafness.  :-)

Baby Naming

Last Sunday, we had a baby naming for Samantha.  We had 32 people at our house to celebrate Sammy and it felt great to be surrounded by so many friends and family, many of whom drove long distances to be with us.  My brother and his wife and my sister flew to be here with us for the special day.  And many of my dad's first cousins came and so it was like a family reunion at the same time.  My mom mentioned that it was so very nice to celebrate a birth when she had been going to so many funerals these days.

Samantha Grace is named after my paternal grandmother Sylvia and her sister Goldie.  My grandmother and her sister lived together for decades after their husbands died and I thought it was really nice that the two of them would live on in the same person.  Unofficially, Samantha is also named after our fertility doctor, Dr. Grace Lee.  When doing the transfer during our FET, Dr. Lee jokingly made us promise that if our little frozen embryo was a girl, we would name the girl after her.  So we did!

We chose Shayna as Samantha's Hebrew name.  It means "beautiful" and we think it's appropriate because Sammy is such a beautiful little baby.  And my grandma loved using the word beautiful to describe things.  Except she said it as "beaauuu-tiiii-ful".

The rabbi of our local reform temple did a wonderful job with the baby naming ceremony.  One of my favorite parts was when my husband and I took two lit candles and together lit another candle to represent Sammy.  And Ian was hysterical during this time.  He knows that birthday candles are meant to be blown out and so as we were trying to do this part of the ceremony, he kept wanting to blow out the candles.  So he would blow it out and we would light it and then he would blow it out.  Eventually, we let him blow out all the candles and we didn't re-light them so that we could move on with the ceremony.

I also really loved the blessings that my father, mother-in-law and brother wrote and read.  And my sister participated by reading something the rabbi had written.  She said that if she had tried to read something she had written, she would have dissolved into tears.  And speaking of tears, I was so proud of myself for being able to talk about Sammy's name without crying.  My mom reminded me that although she was named after my very loved grandmother who is no longer with us, this is about a happy event and there is no reason to cry.  And so I kept that in mind when talking about Sammy.

So overall, it was a great day.  After the ceremony, we served a TON of food (as you would expect at a Jewish affair).  We had bagels (served with cream cheese, lox, tomatoes and onions), 3-bean salad, noodle kugel, asian-style cole slaw, broccoli pie, tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad, fruit salad, and a vegetable platter.  And my mother-in-law brought her roasted garlic-eggplant salad and her red bean/walnut salad.  And my great uncle brought home-made challah.  For dessert, we had banana bread, mandel bread, chocolate chip cookies, rugelach and chocolate truffles (brought by my mother-in-law).  After this week, I think we've finally finished all of the leftovers.

I'll sign off with some pictures.  The first one is the money shot.  I can't believe how beautiful my little girl looks.  I love her so much.

My sister, me and my brother.

Me and hubby

My brother, Ian and my sister-in-law

My sister and Sammy

My little babies

My mother-in-law and Sammy

Our awesome family of FOUR

Ian and my dad and mom

3 months!

Sammy is 3 months old today!  According to our scale, she is 12.4 pounds.

After a full month of sleeping through the night (roughly 10 pm to 6 am), she has started waking up again around 2 or 3 am.  Oh well.  I got lucky for a month!  I'm hoping she's just going through her 3 month growth spurt and will revert to her regular pattern of sleeping through the night.

Her pooping pattern has also changed so much.  Instead of having poop during every single diaper change, she is now only pooping once every 2 to 3 days.  And man, when she poops, it FILLS the diaper.  It's good to change her right when it happens.  Otherwise it will inevitably get on her clothes and whatever she is sitting on.

She's still a super happy baby.  She'll smile at you the minute you make eye contact with her.  I could look at her forever.  I'm definitely having some mixed emotions about returning to work on August 10.

I Deserve It - The Story of the Squirrel

I like gardening and have planted quite a few bushes in the mulch beds around my house.  I also take pride in how my property looks and get great pleasure from mowing the lawn every week.  I was using the hose to water some dried out bushes yesterday when I noticed a deep hole in the mulch bed.  I thought it might be the home of a little bunny (who has been ruining my lawn by eating it and peeing on it).  So I decided to make it less hospitable and started spraying water down into the hole. After about 2 minutes, a little chipmunk surprised me by springing out of the hole and sprinting around the corner.  I was very pleased with myself for determining what lived in that hole until I rounded that same corner to realize that my garage doors were up.  And not only were my garage doors up, but while multitasking, I had inadvertently also left the door to our basement open.  Crap.  I had just left an open pathway for this little chipmunk to run right into our house.  I thought there was only a slim chance the chipmunk actually ran into the house until this morning.  I was feeding Sammy on the couch when I heard this high pitched squealing and the cat running around.  Something inside my brain went "click" and I knew then that the chipmunk was, in fact, in the house.  I went to the local hardware store and bought a Havahart trap.  When I came home and entered the house, I actually saw that little sucker running up the stairs!  So now I know for sure the rodent is in the house.  I baited the trap with some cheese and peanut butter and set it back downstairs.  I hope we catch it in the next 24 hours.  In the meantime, I looked around upstairs for the chipmunk but couldn't find it.  I did, however, find a huge old pile of cat puke under our dining room table.  Awesome!  I'm guessing that this is karma coming back to bite me.  I ruined this chipmunk's home and now he's in mine.  I deserve it.

Updated Bedrooms

I wanted to post pictures of Ian's updated big boy room.  The picture below was taken last weekend just after the bed was delivered, while Ian was taking a nap in our bed.  As soon as Ian woke up and saw it, he ADORED it.  Now, the bed is a mess because it is piled high with every single stuffed animal that Ian owns.  But he is so cute in it.  We have had no sleep issues since switching him from the crib to the big boy bed.  He wakes up very happy in the morning and chats with his stuffies and surprisingly, doesn't get out of bed until we come and get him.  This morning, I didn't get him until close to 7 am!

And here is Sammy's room.  We previously used this room as a guest room - it just had hard wood floors and white walls.  And now it is transformed into her special nursery.  Enjoy!

My dad pointed out that we really went with the stereotypical boy/girl colors and themes.  But I don't care.  If Ian loved butterflies and flowers, I would have given him butterflies and flowers.  But he loves trucks, trains and airplanes and so that's what I got him.  If Sammy expresses different preferences as she grows up, I'll accommodate that too.  But for now, this is what she gets and I love it!

Weight Loss and Big Boy Beds

Samantha is roughly 10 weeks old now and I weigh about 150 pounds.  This means I still have 7.5 pounds to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy weight.  I'm trying to eat right and exercise but I'm finding it extremely difficult to shed the extra pounds.  It was much easier the first time around when I was, perhaps, younger and fitter.  Sigh.  I can't really diet for a couple of reason.  The first and most important reason is that I'm exclusively breastfeeding Sammy and I want to make sure I eat enough to be able to produce enough food for her.  The second reason is that I have no will power and am pretty much unable to actually diet.  I really want to get my shape back, but the pregnancy pooch is pretty bad.  I was so sick of wearing my maternity clothes so I went to Old Navy and Target and bought some cheap clothes to fit my bigger body.  I'm hoping that these clothes will be much too big to wear next summer.  I'll be going back to work in 1 month and I'm going to need to figure out what I will wear.  I have slacks with an adjustable waist band and so I think I'll try those on to see if they'll work.  Hopefully they will and then I can wear them now and as I lose weight.  Otherwise, it's time to go shopping for some size 10 pants!  Either way, I will NOT be going back to my maternity clothing.  There is someone who is 5 months pregnant at work and she has asked for my maternity wardrobe and so I am happily giving the clothes to her.

In other news, Samantha is just fantastic.  I am so in love with my baby girl.  She smiles ALL the time now and when she smiles, her whole body smiles.  Her face lights up in this little baby girl grin and her arms waggle and her legs kick and she makes a laughing-like sound.  Not only is it a blessing to have a second child, but we really hit the JACKPOT with her.  Last night, she slept from 10:45 pm until 6:15 am.  I actually started panicking this morning when my son woke us up and I still hadn't heard from her. I rushed into her room and there she was, squirming around all swaddled up in her Pack N' Play.  Totally fine.  She opened her eyes and gave me a big toothless grin.  Love.

And Ian is such a loveable little man.  We took away his crib this past Saturday and put his crib mattress on the floor with 2 side rails.  This is a temporary transition step until his real big boy bed arrives this coming Saturday.  And he LOVES it.  He is so excited to be a big boy and climb in and out of bed himself.  And thankfully, he is still sleeping through the night despite the fact that we took away his crib.  I can't wait to give him his new twin bedding.  At first I bought this because the bedding that I loved had sold out:

But then this morning, Overstock emailed me to let me know the bedding I wanted was back in stock.  So I figured it couldn't hurt to have some spare bedding.  At some point, I'm sure Ian will have some accident with bodily fluids in bed.  And so I bought this too!  It was only ~$60 (including shipping for a 5 piece set and I figured I couldn't go wrong.

I can't wait to see his face when we finally have his twin bed made this weekend.