Catching Up

Many good things have happened since my last blog. The first bit of good news is that Robby is on his way to being a teacher! He was accepted into the Region 4 Educator Preparation program and he will be taking classes, observing, and taking many tests in the next few months. Hopefully we will both be teaching next year! If anyone needs a middle school math teacher, I know a good one!

The second good thing is that Sadie is growing like a weed (well,a slow weed...she's on the petite side) but developmentally she is amazing! Just this past week she has started scooting across the floor in pre-crawling style. I keep trying to get a video of it but, no matter how quiet I am, she always knows that she is being recorded and she won't perform.

The teeth cutting is going slow but she has been extra fussy lately and chews on everything so maybe this time those wee pearly whites will actually come in. She loves to chew on her biter biscuits but not as much as she enjoys throwing them on the floor. I love the biter biscuits because they are excellent for those fine motor skills and for keeping her occupied for a few minutes. Plus she is just so cute when she is knawing on one. Don't take my word for it though...

They are a little messy but who cares. She has also tried a number of solid foods. Her favorites are oatmeal, bananas, and oatmeal with bananas. She eats other things like chicken, turkey, carrots, green beans, squash, applesauce and pears but she is a little finicky about everything but oatmeal and bananas. She WILL NOT eat peas which I am glad about because I really hate how they smell. She is almost able to grasp little things with her finger and thumb but we aren't quite there yet...soon though!
We are having so much fun watching her grow up. She loves to laugh and spit. Her favorite sound to make is "thuh" which is a weird sound for a 7 month old to make but she's a little weird (in a good way) Her hair is really starting to come in too. It is an absolutly beautiful strawberry blonde. So are her eyelashes and eyebrows. She also sucks her thumb on a regular basis and is a champion bouncer.
Here are a few more pictures for your viewing pleasure!

Clearly she loved Christmas morning.

Yummy fresh peaches in her mesh feeder.

Prima ballerina!

I love smiling. Smiling's my favorite!

All Kinds of Sickness and Cutting Teeth

Well this has been a most horrendous week. Sadie had a little cold that grew up into RSV and bronchitis. She was wheezing and having trouble breathing Thursday night and by early Friday morning it was getting worse and worse so we took her to Huguley. As the ER goes it was a very good, proficient experience. They got us in within 5 minutes of arrival, checked her out and had completed a number of tests within 45 minutes. The worst part was when she had to have her nose swabbed, that was the only time she cried. She was given a breathing treatment where they just held the nebulizer in front of her. She was mesmerized by the steam and tried her darndest to grab the tube. I was relieved because the wheezing stopped immediately and she was able to relax and get some much needed sleep.

She is such a happy baby (most of the time) and she enjoyed meeting all the nice hospital people and greeted everyone with a smile. Once she felt better and was just being monitored, we couldn't resist, we had to take some pictures. So here is Sadie at Huguley.

Don't worry, that is not an IV line. It is a heart monitor that was supposed to be attached to her toe but she kept ripping it off. I don't blame her, I hate stuff wrapped around my toes too.

Tiny baby, BIG bed. She was laying on the bed alone for the picture only and I was standing close by in case she decided to dive. We are really concerned about her super skinny legs. Do you think she is getting enough to eat? :)

The next night she was having trouble breathing again so we called the doctor to see if they could call in a prescription for a nebulizer (Huguley coudn't prescribe one) the nurse was knd of snarky with me and told me to take her the Cooks Children immediately where they could prescribe her what she needed. I'm not too happy with the nurses at the pediatrician's office right now but that is a different story (let's just say, apparently, I am a seer because I made a sick baby appointment 2 months in advance...whatever)

So Friday night at 9:45 we head to Cooks. It was packed with sick children and their ENTIRE family. I mean, come on, if you have more than 5 children maybe one parent should bring the sick child to the ER while the other parent stays home with the healthy kids...really! It was loud, and full of sickness, and it smelled like sickness, and some kid threw-up all over the floor...it was just nasty gross.

We waited for 2 hours with a sick, feverish, wheezing baby and when we got to the back the room was loud, bright, and the air was filled with gut-wrenching screams. The doctor listened to her chest, gave us the diagnosis of RSV/bronchitis and told us a breathing treatment wouldn't work but he would order one anyway if it would make us feel better...ok, I said. Here she is, shortly before being messed with.

30 minutes later a nurse man comes in and first he suctions her out which made her cry in a way I have never heard before so I cried too. Then he let me hold her while he covered her face with a chicken mask to do the breathing treatment. She screamed and screamed with big fat tears in her eyes. All I could do was thank God that Sadie is a healthy baby and this is not something that she has to go through all the time. It was horrible and Robby and I are convinced that she dreams of giant chicken masks coming to eat her face.

Here it is...the dreaded chicken mask. Now imagine you are a teensy person and this thing is covering your face and emitting a hot, smelly steam down your throat. At least it made a loud, scary hissing sound.

As bad as it was, the breathing treatment worked and Sadie was much more chipper for the next half hour and decided to do some gymnastics for everybody.

When we told her it was 2:00 in the morning she couldn't believe it and decided to take a little nap while we waited to be discharged.

Luckily that was our last hospital visit. The past few days haven't been the best. Sadie just felt really poopy and angry. But time moves on and we are all a little stronger. I thank God every night that Sadie is healthy and able to kick these little viruses pretty quickly.

Of course she is cutting her first tooth (top right incisor) so she is popping teething tablets and knawing on her cold boo boo bear. Hopefully I can get a few toothy pictures up soon.

Till then...

Sadie: The Newborn

I probably won't sleep much tonight so I might as well update the blog. Let us continue the saga of Sadie.

We brought Sadie home on Tuesday but unlike the people on Bringing Home Baby we did not show her around her new home because we knew that she couldn't see much beyond 6 inches. So we just sat on the couch and cuddled with our new angel. I was very lucky, Maleah my mother-in-law and Kathrine and Kami my sisters-in-law stayed with us for a week and enabled me to actually get some real sleep. Some of the wonderful families at church made sure we always had something to eat and Robby jumped right into fatherhood without any hesitation.

We knew most of the newborn basics: they need to eat every 2-3 hours, their days and nights are usually mixed up, the umbilical chord will dry up and fall off etc...etc...

Well there were also a few things we didn't know about newborns, for example: they eat every 2-3 hours but is takes them 45 minutes to an hour to eat so you are pretty much feeding them constantly, the sleep for most of they day and will only cry at 3:00 in the morning because they hate sleeping in the bassinet, their poop is explosive and comes in a variety of colors and textures, when they aren't pooping they are spitting up, the umbilical chord won't fall off for two weeks and it has to go through mulitple stages before reaching that point; dry to juicy to gooey to extra gooey to almost off to "crap where is the umbilical chord?" The most important thing we learned though is that the newborn will ALWAYS poop when you are giving them a bath.

Okay so a lot of that was specific to our situation but I'm sure many new parents find themselves in similar situations. Overall we enjoyed cuddling with our little snuggle bug and we never tired of reveling in her extreme cuteness but the newborn stage is mostly work. I am loving where we are now. So until next time here are some priceless pics of newborn Sadie.

Folding her hands so sweetly. We didn't know at the time that Sadie would later become obsessed with her hands. She stares at them now and makes lobsterclaws.

She was slowly waking up. This is actually a video still.

This was her "after dinner" pose.


Sitting with Nana at her 89th birthday party (Nana's, not Sadie's) One of the older ladies asked me if she was a boy or girl. I was like "a boy, we just really hate him so we put giant bows on his head." As you can see from the picture she slept through all the festivities (Sadie not Nana)

The Return of the Blog

Father forgive me for I have sinned. It has been 6 months since my last blog. Between being a mom, a teacher, a wife, and a naturally tired person I let the blog slide by the wayside. I have been keeping a journal for Sadie and that has taken precedence over anything else. I really want to write at least one entry a week though and that is my goal (resolution) for 2010. I know it's not as exciting or demanding as cooking everything in the Julia Child Cookbook but hey, that's just the way it is.

Back in June I had planned to write out the story of Sadie's dramatic entrance into the world and then blog about all her milestones as she reached them. Since I never got around to any of that I will start at the beginning and, over the next few days, try and catch up to where Sadie is now...six months old!

Let us begin:

The following is a condensed (and non-graphic) summary of June 22nd 2009.

It had been a long and grueling 9 months. The Thursday before that fateful Monday my doctor told me he would be surprised if I didn't make it to my due date because there was no progress at all. That was unacceptable to me so I decided to take matters into my own hands. I read about some accupressure points that would induce contractions. I don't know much about accupressure but I figured...what the heck. The next morning, the contractions started. They weren't really noteworthy until Sunday though. We clocked them at about 7-10 minutes apart. They were consistent but not really painful so I took a walk, a nap, and spent the evening relaxing in the pool with my mom. At about 12:00 a.m. the contractions weren't really that painful yet but they were coming every 3-5 minutes so we headed to the hospital. I won't get too deep into the next four hours but I'm not exaggerating when I say they were the worst four hours of the entire pregnancy. Strapped to a monitor, stuck on my side, freezing room, snarky 12 year old nurse who forced me to drink three giant glasses of ice water to "stop the false labor", and contractions that were starting to smart quite a bit.

At 4:30 it was decided that I was in false labor so they gave me an Ambien, patted me on the head and sent me home whilst shaking their heads at the silly first time mom who cleary didn't know what real labor was.

5:00 a.m. I lay down to sleep and get hit by a pain so hard I couldn't even see straight. I tried to get my glasses off the nightstand and my hands were shaking so bad I knocked everything onto the floor. In tears I called the hospital and they told me to take a warm bath then go back to bed. So I did what any full grown woman would do...I called my mommy in tears. We went to my parents house where I took the warm bath (didn't help..go figure) and spent the next few hours on my hands and knees in tears. We left for the hospital again at 7:00 because we knew there would be a shift change in nurses. I should note that I really wanted to get to the hospital so I could get the epidural because I didn't think I could handle the labor if it got any worse. Unbeknownst to my, I was in hard labor and that was a bad as it was going to get.

We arrived at the hospital at 8:00 and Sadie was born at 8:42. There was a moment of panic when I was told I was too far along to get an epidural but then it all happened so fast, all the sudden she was there and the pain was gone, even now I can't recall what it felt like.

Sadie Holcomb Fryar is in the world! As wonderful as that moment was, it just keeps getting better.

Stay tuned for the next entry: The Newborn Stage: A.K.A. Trial by Fire.