Nine months old!

Wow, three-quarters of a year already gone. My little baby is no longer so little! He's crawling like a madman and pulling up and cruising with ease. He amazes me every day.

I thought his weight gain had picked up, but unfortunately that was not the case. His doctor recommended that we increase his solids intake dramatically. I'm feeling at a loss. He'll always eat his cereal and yogurt, but lately everything else is likely to be met with lips stubbornly sealed shut. Frustrating. I'll keep trying, of course, but in the meantime I figure he can eat as much cereal as he wants if it'll keep him growing!

5:00 a.m.

Oh, how I loathe 5:00 a.m.

When I get up at 5:00 a.m. my eyes water and my head aches. It's hours before I feel really awake, and the fatigue lingers all day. So it really sucks that Andrew has chosen 5:00 a.m. as his new wake-up time.

I am not a good mother at 5:00 a.m. I am irritable and impatient. I can think only of sleep and when I can get some more. "How soon can I get you to take a nap?" I think obsessively while I watch my baby play.

A 7:00 wake-up time would be ideal. I would grudgingly accept 6:00. But not 5:00. Please not 5:00.

Laziness is a hard habit to break.

I am a lazy person. There. I said it.

Take school, for example: I coasted along throughout my entire student career. I did well enough but I know I could have done better if I'd put a little effort into it.

- If I weren't so lazy I might have a career I was eager to get back to instead of a job I don't really care about.
- If I weren't so lazy my home would be much cleaner.
- If I weren't so lazy I wouldn't have gained weight after I had my baby.

I could go on and on, but what's the point? Oh, right. The point is that I know this about myself and I don't like this about myself, and yet — wait for it — I'm too lazy to do anything to change it.

See the problem?

I Spy...

I spy, with my little eye, two tiny TEETH!
(Please excuse the messy yogurt face.)

The Rest of the Story

I realize that I never shared the conclusion, more or less, of my breastfeeding journey. Having shared the rest of this struggle in such detail, it's only fair to share the end of the story. I guess it was early in November that I felt like we had reached a crisis point, again, and the breastfeeding clinic had given us all the help they could offer. I got tired of Andrew's constant rejection of the breast and finally decided to bottlefeed all day.

Since then I have been pumping twice a day, getting between 10 and 15 oz of breastmilk. He gets two breastmilk bottles and two formula bottles each day, and, until recently, at least, he nursed once overnight and once first thing in the morning. The past few weeks he has been losing interest in the morning nursing session, however, and since he's been sick he's been refusing to nurse at night as well.

Sooo... I guess my breastfeeding days are over. And I think I'm going to stop pumping when my current prescription for domperidone runs out in a few weeks. I have a great deal of regret and disappointment about the way things turned out, but I have made peace with the decision to stop. I did the best I knew how to do. Maybe, if I had it to do over, I could have done better. Or maybe not.

An interesting side note to the end of my lactation is that my cycles may or may not resume, and we'll need to make some decisions about TTC#2. Since I believe it was the removal of my minor endo that allowed me to conceive Andrew, I think our best chance at conceiving again without intervention will be sooner rather than later. While I am terrified at the prospect of being responsible for two very young children, I'm sure we'd manage, just as millions of families do every single day, and I'd be beyond thrilled to get a BFP in the months to come.

Photo and Mini Update

Here's the winner from our belated photo shoot:



Man. Remember, just a couple of days ago, I said this: "He can sit up by himself, and he's so close to crawling and pulling up and standing. And he has a tooth!" Well, since then he progressed to proper crawling and another tooth broke through! Things are happening so quickly these days! We are so not ready for a crawler, and he's going to be walking before we know it!

Eight months old!

My little Andrew is three-quarters of a year old! He can sit up by himself, and he's so close to crawling and pulling up and standing. And he has a tooth! He just amazes me every day. Whenever I look at him I just want to squeeze him and cover his soft chubby cheeks with kisses. And I do, several times a day. My darling boy.

Unfortunately he spent his big day still quite grumpy with his first cold, so we didn't do pictures. I'll do them just as soon as he's his happy little self again.