Gigi turns 10

Happy 10th Birthday to my beautiful, kind, hardworking, responsible Gigi!

A photo posted by mommidiary (@mommidiary) on Dec 17, 2016 at 6:28pm PST

Yesterday was Gigi's birthday.  I always struggle with her big day.  It is a week before Christmas.  When you are married to a student it was actually an awesome time to have a birthday.  It meant her dad had two weeks off after she was born.  Now as a student herself it means she often isn't in school over her birthday.  It also means that I'm busy and her parents friends are busy and a lot of time she gets kind of the shaft when it comes to a party but this year I asked her what she wanted and she decided she wanted to have a party at a jump place.  The jump place is pretty far from our home so we only invited a limited amount of friends we could drive down there but it turned out nice.  We had three little friends from three different places, one was from dance, one was from her class, one was her little friend from the bus.  Seriously it could have been a nightmare, someone could have been left out or felt awkward, but you know what I shouldn't have worried.  Turns out the girls were all like my daughter, and so they made instant friends and were running like a pack after about two seconds.

There are a couple downsides to this type of party.  One was just distance.  If it had been closer I would have invited a bunch more kids but because I felt an obligation to drive them all we were limited.  Secondly they split kids by height.  Technically Cheetah was suppose to stay in the under 48 area and the other kids were suppose to stay in the over 48.  They did plenty of switching around but there were some other kids who ended up narcking on them for being too big.  So then they were separated again.  She did not love being the tiny left out one.  The third thing is just places like this are dirty/gross.  I mean seriously.  Adults (mainly dads) why are you walking around barefoot.  Uck. There was wetness in the foam pit in the little kid area.  They got in and checked all the foam pieces, pulled a few and let the kids back in.  I kid you not in less than a minute a kid had puked in there and all the kids were kicked out again.  So gross.

The upside, it was zero work for me.  They provided the pizza, cupcake, and water bottles.  They provided the fun.  At one point they even took our group to the dodge ball area and kicked all the other kids out so that our group could play dodge ball alone.  You sort of felt bad for the other kids and yet their had been times when our kids were kicked out of areas for parties so we didn't feel too bad.  After our party was over we came home and did a brownie so we could blow some candles out and opened presents.  The best part for me was one the moms came and asked if the girls were ready to go and all the girls said, "NO!"  Haha.  Happy Birthday Gigi.  You are still stubborn about things that are important to you, you are kind to your siblings (most of the time), you love to play and laugh, you love to read.  You are good at school but don't worry about making a mistake here and there.  You are a super helper at home.  We are so lucky to have you as part of our family.

Fresh 48 Little Man Photos

One of the things that made loss of all my phone photographs from Little Mans first two weeks easier was the fact that the hospital had a professional photographer come to each room and take Fresh 48 pics and I happened to order ours.  These were the day Little Man came home, so he's probably 40 hours old and he is of course adorable!

Have I Been Your Doctor Before?

Sometimes the spheres of our lives overlap and we find ourselves totally disoriented.  A couple weeks ago my husband had a family meeting and the mother-in-law showed up.  He looked at her and she just looked so familiar to him.  "You look so familiar to me."  She smiles.  "Have you been a patient of mine before?"  "No," she says with a funny little smile, "you've never been my doctor."  "Ok," he says and goes on with the meeting.  It wasn't until a half hour later that it struck him that he was talking to our neighbor!  He comes back and ask the wife if her mothers name was ****.  She says yes.  "She's my neighbor," J says.  "I know," she laughs.  I haven't had an opportunity to talk to our neighbor about this since we normally meet at the fence and it has been so cold both of us are avoiding going outside but I can't wait to have a good laugh with her about it. 

First Day at the Hospital

I'm not a huge fan of hospital stays.  I don't like people walking into my room at all hours of the night and I think being home is more comfortable but there are certain things about being at a hospital that I can appreciate.

1) I can order food whenever I want...and I do.  Is it great food.  No, but it comes relatively fast and I don't have to clean it up.  Plus if I want a cherry popsicle at 2:30 in the middle of the night someone will go and find me one.
2) You don't have to worry about getting your clothes dirty.  Look having a baby can be messy work.  There is a whole lot of body stuff happening.  Get dirty, someone will come and help you change and that someone will put those messy clothes somewhere and you will never have to see them again.  This particular hospital does pink gowns in maternity which was fun.
3) And speaking of cleaning you won't have to clean anything in that bathroom either or the sheets so feel free to bleed without worrying.

The blessing of a C-section was no one came in to press on my uterus during the night.  Good grief that is torture.  I did have to have blood drawn and poor Little Man had to have quite a bit drawn as well.  Because he was technically a preemie they had a policy at the hospital I was at that they had to do a glucose draw on him every time he ate for the first 24 hours.  By the middle of the night his poor little heals looked like he'd been walking on glass.  Finally he got a reprieve.  One of the night nurses told that if I wanted to "forget" to call her when I was doing my night feeding we wouldn't have to do the draw.  Of course that is how she reported it in the morning to the incoming Ukrainian no nonsense nurse.  She was not impressed with me, although I'd like to think by the end of the day she had warmed up to me.  Some items of note from our hospital stay...

-They didn't put a shirt on Little Man.  They had a wrap thing for him but no one got him dressed.  I had some clothes for him but I didn't bother either so for the first two days of his life he was jut a kid in a diaper wrapped in blankets.

-The Olympics were happening so when I was all alone of even sometimes when people were there we spent a lot of time watching the Olympics.  Can anyone say synchronized diving, Gold Metal soccer match, Usain Bolt and gymnastics.  It was lovely.  If you are going to have to be stuck in a tiny room for two days do it during something interesting, like the Olympics.

- Our room was super tiny but was still one of the bigger rooms.  The hospital is downtown and while it is the biggest one in our area it really has no place to grow.  As a result they've gotten the rooms down about as small as you can.  For the most part it wasn't that big of a deal but when you put J, our four other kids, my mother-in-law, my mom and her hubby in the room with us, well you can imagine it got really crowded.

-The kids loved meeting their little brother.  I happened to lose most of the pictures of them doing it along with all the pictures of J holding him at the hospital when my dumb phone died a week after Little Man was born, a fact that I'm still super sad about, but believe me, they loved him.

-My mom and her hubby showed up on the second day I was there and just did not leave.  It was nice to have her company and it was fun to watch Men's Volleyball with Rhys (he played college ball himself) but two things that were not lovely, with such a tiny room I just didn't feel like I could shower with them there and secondly she just kept trying to adjust my gown so that my boobs weren't falling out.  If you read my previous post you happen to know I'm not shy about nursing in full view in my own hospital area so this obviously got on my nerves, but we survived. 

-This was the first time I'd ever sent a baby on purpose to the nursery.  J didn't stay the night...there was this terrible, I mean just the worst chair that theoretically folded out but it was so uncomfortable he headed home both nights.  So there were two, two hour stints where I sent the baby away after he fell asleep and to be honest it was lovely.  Little Man was a very noisy newborn and I could sleep really well during that time and then when he woke up I could nurse him somewhat refreshed.  It was the first time I'd felt comfortable/exhausted enough to ever do that and you know I'm sorry ladies I judged for doing it before because it just wasn't half bad.

-I just did not love the resident who was taking care of Little Man.  He had a student who he was teaching but he just came off so condescending to her, I just didn't love him.  He then asked me why they'd delivered at 36 weeks.  I gave him the full run down and while I'm speaking his eyes get super big.  "Are you in the medical profession?"  "No," I told him, "but I do know a lot about what is going on with my own body."  "Hmmm..." "Also my husband is a doctor."  "Uh-huh."  In the end it ended up ok and I do appreciate that he let us leave with Little Man at exactly 48 hours even though the Attending wanted him to make us stay and feed him a couple more bottles, so sorry resident for my earlier judgement.