7 Months

Okay, I admit it. I'm backdating this post. Yesterday I was having issues with the computer and couldn't log in.

So, Elsie is now seven months old! No way! Every month I am more and more amazed at how quickly she's growing and how quickly the time flies.

This month, Elsie has become a solid sitter. She also has been getting up on all fours and rocking, but that's about it. She's very mobile in that she can roll and scoot all over the floor. She thinks it's absolutely hilarious when she ends up under the coffee table.

As far as solids, she has tried rice cereal, sweet potatoes, peas, and prunes. She likes to eat. And she also has been eating way more than I am able to pump. This means that my frozen stores of breastmilk have been diminished severely in the last three weeks. We are down to only three 2.5-oz. bags--three weeks ago I had over 30 bags in the freezer. Part of this is that Elsie had been sleeping through the night with maybe one waking. Then the weather changed, and she has been waking up every 2-3 hours from being cold. I have ordered some wearable blankets to take care of this and am impatiently awaiting their arrival. Because Elsie has been eating more during the night, there has been much less milk available at my first morning pumping. Used to be I could pump 7-8 ounces in the morning. Now I'm lucky if I can get four. It's very depressing. On top of that, Elsie was eating 6-2.5 oz. bottles a day, and then increased to seven. Yesterday J sent a note saying that Elsie ate NINE bottles. I can't keep up.

After the winter break, we're going to set J up with a high chair and a feeding schedule for solid foods. In the meantime, we will probably have to supplement with formula. I know this isn't a big deal in the overall scheme of things. It's just different. Up to this point I have been able to pump enough. Now I'm not.

So, that's it for an update. If I were to guess, I would say that she topped 17 pounds this month.

Love her to pieces. She's just so darn adorable.

Cheers.

Picture Pie

So, I had the camera out to take pictures of Elsie's shoes and ended up taking more pictures. I guess that's easier to do when the supplies are handy and there are batteries all ready.

On Thursday night I went to a retirement party for the librarian at our school, and I thought I would be coming home to a hungry screaming baby, but instead I found this:


Then yesterday, I wanted take a picture of Elsie's new shoes, sure, but more importantly the cute blue jacket she's wearing belonged to my niece...about eleven years ago. I remember when Elsie was born I thought that she would never be big enough to wear it. Ha! Now I can't remember when she was ever small enough not to. So, the picture below, she looks like a little boy, but she was looking at the camera without making a silly face.

Then, when we came home yesterday, we had a package from Julie that was full of good stuff. At first Elsie was just interested in chewing on the box, until I unpacked it. We played on the floor with the blocks for a while. You'll notice Timmy in the background wondering what this stuff is.

Uh-oh!

And in the box was a beautiful winter dress that was perfect for Elsie to wear to our first middle school dance last night. We put a bow in her hair and some patent leather shoes on her feet and went dancing!

Whoops. Left the pacifier in the car.

And finally, the in-laws came through last night on their way to Atlanta for the SEC championship game today, and we went out to dinner. By this point, it was way past Elsie's bedtime. Haha. Look how mesmerized she is with her paci clip. Stuck awake.

I'll probably have more pictures for you for tomorrow. We're putting up a Christmas tree today at some point and inviting people over to watch the game. Should be lots of fun.

Cheers.

Obsessive what?

Okay, okay. Here are a couple pictures of Elsie. The first one shows off her awesome shoes made by my friend Misty at Misty's Blessings. Tomorrow E's going to wear the red ones to show J. The second one is my hungry caterpillar chewing on The Hungry Caterpillar rattle/teether. So, my blog header went from one caterpillar to another. Check out her mint green velour jogging suit.

Two funnies for today:

My students were talking about obsessive compulsive disorder amonst themselves, you know, as if they're experts on the topic (which some may be, and it wouldn't surprise me). They enjoy telling each other that they're OCD about various things. So, yesterday, as some of my students were putting up stickers on our Team Peyton reading chart for Scholastic, someone skipped one of the numbered spaces. The next person went and put her sticker in the empty space to make it all look right again. The boy behind her said, "Man, you're ODD." She asked, "What's ODD stand for?" His reply? "Odd."

I overheard this exchange as we were getting ready to line up for lunch and it really made me laugh. :) But not nearly as much as the kid who bent over the water fountain today to get a drink, but misjudged where the water would squirt and got his eyebrows all wet. An advanced student, I might add. This, my friends, is why I still have a job. :) (FYI -- You should turn the water on and then lean into it and not the other way around, in case you didn't know. Just sayin'.)

Surprisingly, that wasn't my second funny for today. The second one came from a news story on NPR about troop reduction in Afghanistan, talking about how if they reduce troops and then the commander turns around and immediately asks for more manpower, that President Obama will have a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment. Took me a minute, but I had to laugh.

Okay, enough of that. Time for bed.

Cheers.

Cleaning out my time

I mentioned in a previous post about my addictive gaming personality. I've been playing Mafia Wars on FB since this summer. The game really has no objective and no way to win. So, if you can't win, why play? I don't know. It just seemed like a challenge or something, but it's getting old and it's getting in the way. So, I decided that once I master New York, that I'm done.

Lucky for me, a few weeks ago, the makers of the game that are always adding new content decided to have a Big Apple Week where you could earn twice the experience and twice the loot. As a result of this adventure, I am about a week away from mastering NY, when before I was about two months away. So, ladies and gentlemen, this is me publicly exercising a little accountability. Even though I've been working on it for months, when I meet this goal, I will be deleting my MW account, as well as my CastleAge account (another game that is also futile), and I will be paring down my friends list by deleting MW- and CA-only friends. And while I'm in the mood for profile cleaning, I think I'm going to delete students from the past and high school/college people who I didn't even really know all that well anyhow but were wanting to see my profile.

And you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to unpack more of my children's books and read to Elsie more often. There are days when I feel like even though she's only seven months old (almost!!) that I'm already missing out. When she was a helpless babe (lump) and needed/wanted holding, I could think about 100 other things I wanted to be doing, which is why I enjoyed other people holding her. When she was asleep, I wanted to either sleep (or play around on Facebook), now I wish that I had paid more attention to her and held her more at that age, watched her sleep and "treasured all these things in [my] heart."

It's just something that's been on my mind recently.

Cheers.

Lip Nose

Well, here we are on the 30th of November. I want to personally apologize to everyone who read any part of my blog over the last month for the true lack of sordid occurrences and the overabundance of the mundane details of our lives. :) It was much easier this year since I didn't have to travel out of state during the month.

On that note, you may be wondering about the title of this post. Me too. I had a student asking me questions about what kind of illness you have when you have swollen lip nose, and my thought was cleft lip? Elephantism? Oh. I see from the way you are gesturing in the general vicinity of your neck and armpits that you mean lymph nodes. No, he assured me, he was talking about lip nose.

Okay.

On another random note, I didn't mention that when we were at the game on Friday, which you will remember we went sans-baby because Auburn does not admit infants without tickets even if they are going to sit in your lap or stay in a Baby Bjorn-type carrier, that a couple walked by us with their infant strapped to them in one of the aforementioned carriers. I told Eli, I know they didn't pay $400 for a ticket for that baby. We sat in a row that had walking space in front of us, and they passed by a handful of times to and from their seats and the concessions stand. Each time they did, I pouted to Eli. I just wanted to run and go get Elsie and bring her. Anyway, after the sun went down, it got cold and I was once again glad that Elsie was elsewhere, but pounted just one more time as they filed down the stairs and out of the stadium ahead of us.

Randomly, the center director at Sylvan is moving because her husband got relocated when the BF Goodrich plant closed, so tonight we had a staff meeting followed by a surprise birthday/going away party for her at a Mexican restaurant in town. I took Elsie with me since Eli is out of pocket (more on that later) so there was a lot of talk about babies. There was a girl there who taught at Sylan before me, but had a baby in February (I was hired to replace her, coincidentally). Somehow the talk of these 9 women, plus the one nerd-guy, turned to Friday's game, and the girl was talking about how they took the baby to the game and how they tried every gate until someone let them in, though they really partially snuck her in. I perked up. Was your baby wearing and orange and white striped hat? Yes... I knew she looked familiar. They were the offending parents at the game. And this has been another episode of it's a small, small world, courtesy of Auburn football and Sylvan Learning Center. Weird.

So, I'm about to roll into bed. Eli had Coast Guard Auxiliary tonight--he was teaching the boating basics lesson--and then hopped in the car to head to B'ham, where he'll stay with his brother tonight, drive to Nashville bright and early to go to MEPS for the National Guard (Medical Entrance Processing S-something), after which he will turn around and head back to Auburn, possibly in time to pick up Elsie from J's. Long day of driving for him.

I, on the other hand, will have to get up early to wash Elsie's dishes for tomorrow because I'm too tired/cold to do it right now.

Again, thanks for hanging in with the mundane details, and thanks for a great month.

Cheers.