Max is styling in the outfit Tawny gave him at my baby shower. I'm so glad she got to see it on him in person. :)
Aunt Tawny and Maxwell
Sad Lola, Tawny, and Max
We took our time and enjoyed the morning. Eventually we got out of the house and met Brittany and her family at the park. Apparently the afternoon of Halloween is a GREAT time to go to the park because we had it all to ourselves.
Lola had a breakdown when we got to the park. She was so upset. She ended up walking off and crying by herself.
In the far distance in the center of the picture you can barely see the garbage cans on the edge of the grass. To the left of the garbage cans is a small dot. That's Lola. That is how far away she went from us to be alone and work through her stuff.
Here's a zoomed up view so that you know she really IS there. Poor girl. She really didn't want to be close to us at all. But luckily we were completely alone and could keep and eye on her without worrying about anyone else.
Peter and Alex playing on the playground
Me swinging with Max. He didn't like it too much.
He wasn't very happy until I fed him. Isn't he cute though?
Not too old to swing (or jump out of the swing)
Landen swinging
Hayden
Lola
The "men" entertained themselves by seeing who could throw a tennis ball the furthest. They did this for awhile. Joe won. Then us girls tried it. I can't even tell you the last time I threw a ball. I psyched myself out. It was pathetic. I am going to have to put some time in practicing so I can not completely embarrass my son. Super-awesome-softball-guru Tawny put Britt and I to shame.
Throwing the ball around must have put the boys in the mood, because afterwards we went to some indoor batting cages. I have never in my life been to a batting cage. I hit one softball at 40 mph and that was enough for me - it hurt! (The last time I hit a ball was probably junior high - over 15 (HOLY COW - 15?!) years ago.
We all had a lot of fun!
Sleeping babies - Max and Landen
Tawny showing us all how to really do it - she was freakin' amazing!
Candy colored tongues
Put me in, coach!
Britt impressed me. Apparently her and Joe have been a few times to the batting cages.
Joe helping Hayden
Peter rockin' a too small helmet
Cutie pie Lola
Max hanging with Momma
Alex ready to strut his stuff
Group picture!
After the batting cages we headed home to get ready for trick-o-treating
Lola was a good witch
Lola and Max in his orange Halloween outfit
So cute! The back of the good witch.
The three trick-or-treaters - - -Lola, Landen, and Hayden
Alex holding Max in his ninja costume
The dads are leading the way and the kids are following
Joe and Monkey Landen
Lola showing off her candy
Hayden the shark showing off his candy
Alex and Peter (Peter's face shows his mood that night)
Me holding Max. Max was NOT happy about trick-or-treating. Eventually I got him to suck on the binkie (miracle) and he went to sleep.
As soon as we got home, Lola dumped out her candy and was so cute about sharing. She would come up and offer something to you without you even having to ask. Max didn't go up to any doors and get candy. Hopefully next year (I look forward to raiding his candy!)
Max was a little happier at home so Peter got some shots of him in his costume.
His fighting stance
He's a FAST ninja!
Fighting off an attack from Lola's dog
Alex and Max
It was a fun Halloween and it was even more fun that we got to spend it with Alex, Tawny, and Lola! We only did 2 streets of trick-or-treating and the streets were pretty empty. You'd have to walk past 4 dark houses to get to 1 with their lights on. Next year we will go to a different neighborhood.
I don't have an exciting adventurous story to go along with this broken foot. That would make it somewhat cool. Nope. I am the idiot that breaks her foot by just walking.
I had just left Brittany's house yesterday after picking up Max after work. I put Max's car seat in the base and was walking around the back of my car to the driver's side. I stepped on a rock or a twig or something that caused my left foot to be uneven and so my foot rolled to the outside and I heard a crack. I knew instantly that it hurt but I hope that I had just twisted it and that it would feel better in a few moments.
During the short drive home it continued to throb and I started to think that something might really be wrong. When I got to our parking garage I loaded Max into the stroller along with all the bags I drag with me everyday (laptop bag, nursing pump bag, diaper bag, purse). I was able to push Max and put a little weight on my foot but I had to go slower and it still hurt. By the time I got to our door I was in a lot of pain and couldn't push the stroller over the threshold.
Once inside I immediately elevated my foot. I took my shoe off and noticed there was already some swelling. Peter brought me some ice and some Advil and I hoped like crazy the pain would start going away. After about 2 hours of deliberating what to do, I was clear that it wasn't going to get better and I needed to go see a doctor. So we loaded poor, tired Max up and headed to an Urgent Care. I was in so much pain that I couldn't walk on it at all to get to the car. I tried to hop but it was too far to go all the way through our hallways to the parking garage so Peter went back and got the rolling office chair and pushed me to our car on that.
Luckily there were no patients at the Urgent Care and they got to me immediately. I really hoped it wasn't broken - I've never broken any bones and up until my C-section, I had never had an stitches or sprains or anything. I hadn't even had my wisdom teeth out. (At the hospital they called my medical history "vanilla" - meaning completely plain). They took X-rays and I waited for the verdict. The doctor came out and asked if I had ever broken anything, I looked at him and said "why, because I have now?" and he said yes.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! My perfect, vanilla medical history has turned into rocky road this year. I fractured my 5th metatarsal.
So I now have a boot on my foot and some crutches because I can't bear any weight on my foot even with the boot. They say it will take 4-6 weeks to heal and I have an appt to see an orthopedic specialist in 2 days. I have pain meds which are okay to take while nursing but prohibit me from driving.
Ugh, it's a mess. I am supposed to go to Arkansas on Friday. There's no way I can walk through airports at this point. I have 98% of my Christmas shopping left to do. I had all these plans of things I want to do like baking and decorating and getting Max's pictures taken. I can't even really go into the office at this point. Then there's my son - I can't carry him around. I can't even push him in the stroller. I certainly can't carry him in his car seat up Brittany's stairs. WHAT BAD TIMING!
So, I will work from home for now. I will try and do my Christmas shopping online. I will discard some of my plans and others I will adjust. I will have to get help from my loving husband and my awesome sister. And thank goodness Kimberly and Kaitlyn will be here in a week.
We had an awesome visit from Peter's brother and his family - Alex, Tawny, and their daughter Lola. But first, some cute pictures of Max. He is getting so big!
Alex and Tawny came to visit on the weekend before Halloween. They were troopers and made the yucky 18 hour drive from Utah. They were so generous and pulled a U-Haul trailer behind their car that was filled with my mom's stuff that Brittany and I wanted from her house. (It was hard for me to see that stuff again when it got here - I teared up quite a few times. It was just another thing off the "to-do" list of tasks to accomplish after Mom's death. The task list is getting shorter and shorter. The only things left are to sell her house and her car. After that, there's nothing left. It's over and done. Completely done. That's going to be really hard.)
It was so fantastic to see them! We were sad that Jaxton and Payton had school and couldn't come but it was fun to spend time with just Lola, too.
As soon as they got here, Lola immediately wanted to hold Max. She will only call him Maxwell. And it is so cute the way she says it. :) I should taken a video of that! Max wasn't too happy at that point but Lola didn't mind.
I love this picture of Alex, Lola and Max. I seriously love it. Max looks so big! He is doing great at holding his head up and sitting up with some help.
My sweet son sleeping
Brittany came over with her boys to visit as well. Landen is really paying attention to Max now. He was so cute and went over to Max sleeping and wanted to touch him. I look over and see him doing what he's doing in the picture. Touching Max softly, with one finger only.
Peter came home from work early so that he wouldn't miss out on the fun. We all headed to Raising Cane's (yummy chicken fingers and texas toast - their menu is like in-n-out in its simplicity but it's chicken fingers instead of burgers) for lunch. Then the women-folk and the kids went shopping for food and then men-folk went to unload the stuff in the U-haul at my house and Britt's house.
Lola and Hayden - instant friends. I love how children make friends so quickly. Why can't we do that as adults?
Alex, Peter, and Max
I LOVE the music they play in Raising Cane's. My kind of stuff. Here's a video of Peter helping Max get his groove on.
Joe,Britt,and Landen
That night we all hung out at my place and enjoyed snack food - veggies and dip, yummy cheese dip and chips, etc
Lola and her daddy
Tawny has a nice camera and got some really sweet pics of Maxwell.
Best buds
The next day Alex, Tawny, and Lola went to visit with some of her family that lives in the area and Peter and I hung out with Max.
Good Morning sweet Max! - movie
Max got some good tummy time in -
He's finally starting to pay attention to his hands. He really loves to eat them. Here's proof -
This sweet boy is sharing more and more smiles everyday. He's becoming more of what I feel safe calling "a happy baby" with the fussing not happening as regularly. Also, if he wakes up rested, he is so happy! (sometimes he wakes up because he has a burp he can't get up and then he wakes unhappy)
Lola really warmed up to Peter this night and had a lot of fun playing with him. Here they are posing nicely:
Now the funny face pose:
Landen is getting so big - pulling himself up all the time and walking along the furniture. He's forcing me to baby proof my house a little earlier than planned, but that's a good thing.
Hayden and Lola playing
I love the calm face of a sleeping baby.
Have I mentioned how awesome Peter is at getting Max to sleep? He's so much more successful at it than I am. So most of the time, Dad is the one putting Max to bed. I really appreciate it.
His eyelashes are getting more noticeable
Just wanting to touch mom while sleeping
Now I'm awake! Hi!
I came out to my car one day, and look what I found on my window. That's right, a Univ of Utah flag. Alex is a fan of Utah (he has a ridiculous tattoo on his leg, proving what a "fan" he is) and we tease each other back and forth since, naturally, I am a born and raised BYU fan. He threatened to buy Max a U of U outfit and I told him if he did, I'd just throw it away. I had to laugh when I saw this - what a punk he is.
On Sunday we went out to the Waffle House for breakfast. Cheap, fast, diner food.
Tawny and Alex
Lola
Peter letting Max sleep on him
Britt and company didn't come over this night so Lola played with Peter:
For dinner that night, we thought we'd introduce our guests to some real Texas, home style, southern cookin'. Plus Lola's B-day was coming up and we needed to celebrate that too! So, we took them to Babe's Chicken House. The food is amazing.
Us
Alex, Lola, and Peter
There is obviously something wrong with this picture. However, it is the perfect visual depiction of what one feels like after eating at Babe's. :) You sort of go into a food coma after all that food. You can't stop yourself from overeating so you feel a little sick and certainly stuffed. And, you wonder how you are going to get from your chair, out of the restaurant, and to your car.
Lola got the birthday girl treatment and got to wear the chicken hat and be sung to.
Here's a video of the event - she was so cute about it. She didn't quite understand she needed to do some chicken dancing. She just sort of sat there, taking it in, and trying not to move her head so that the big chicken hat wouldn't fall off.
Holding her head so that the hat didnt' come off
That night Alex gave me a facial with the new NuSkin machine thingy-that-I-can't-remember-what-it's-called-but-is-supposed-to-be-awesome. Cracked me up to have tough little Alex doing the girly facial thing. (He did a great job by the way.)
The last full day of their visit was Halloween, which deserves its own post. It was sooooooo great to have them here. We enjoyed every minute of it. It's great to have family around and have them love on Max. Overall, we didn't do too many "things", we just enjoyed each other's company and visited. I love visits like that. I wish we could see our far away family more often. It's time someone invented a form of travel that is both quicker and cheaper than flying.
I really get annoyed when my posts aren't in chronological order but that's what happens when I get behind on my blogging. Sometimes I will blog about what is happening right now and then blog about what happened 2 months ago. Which then means my blog isn't chronological. Annoying! So I have fixed the dates on the posts since Max was born so they are in order. I am still behind and will need to do some more catch up posts from Max's first two months in order to be all caught up. So, what I am trying to say is, look back through older posts because you might just find a post that you haven't read because it is newly written but I've changed the date in order to make it chronological and keep my sanity. Sorry.
Peter says it's not nice to expect you to look back through my blog to figure out what is new so I will post links here to the new posts until I get caught up.
Today was my first day back at work. It had that same feeling of the first day back to school after summer vacation - a little bit of excitement and then disappointment that the summer is over.
Last night I started preparing so that I would have less to do this morning. I got Max's stuff all ready for his first day of being watched by Aunt Brittany. I got everything ready so that I could pump at work. The whole time I was thinking about what it was going to be like to leave him for a full day. Would I cry? Would he cry the whole day? Could I stand to be away for a whole day? What if I didn't miss him and was happy to be back at work? I didn't want the morning to come.
I was going to get myself all ready - shower the night before, maybe even straighten my hair, pick out my clothes, put together something for breakfast, etc. Max had a different idea. It was AWFUL last night. He just wouldn't go to sleep. We hardly ever have a problem getting him to go to sleep between 9-11 pm. He just wasn't going to do it last night. I tried getting him to go to sleep around 8 so that I would have plenty of time to get my stuff done. I tried until I couldn't do it anymore and then I handed him off to Peter. Peter tried forever too. Max would fall asleep but the minute we laid him down, he would wake right up and start fussing. Or if we were lucky he'd stay asleep but then would wake up 10 minutes later. So after we both put in some serious time (like an hour and a half) I figured I would feed him and then he'd go to sleep. Nope, that didn't work. "Maybe he just wasn't tired", we thought. So we played with him until he yawned and his eyes were all red. That didn't work. Same thing. No sleep. At around 11:30 I gave up and decided to lay in bed and let him lay there with me. Maybe that would work? Eventually...like at 12:30 am!!! So much for getting any of my stuff done and getting to bed at a decent hour like I had planned.
He woke up around 5:15 am to eat and I put him back to bed after he ate and I just stayed up after that because I now had a lot of stuff to do. As many of you know, I am not a morning person. AND I don't do well without a full nights sleep. --- So it felt exactly like the first day of school. You have to now get up early and that gets to be your new routine, JOY! You try and prep the night before so you can sleep as much as possible. You wake up multiple times in the night to check your clock and make sure you haven't slept through your alarm. You get up, don't feel refreshed, but have a little bit of adrenaline pumping that helps you get going.
I got everything done that I wanted to and only got out the door 20 minutes later than I had planned. Not bad considering everything I had to do for myself plus still getting Max in the car seat, etc as well. Max was great and fell back asleep in the car seat after being buckled which was what I was hoping for. I drove him to Brittany's and tried not to think about the fact that I was about to leave him (I purposely DIDN'T wear waterproof mascara so that I would have a good reason to keep my emotions in check. Waterproof mascara I think sometimes jinxes you and putting it on sort of writes it in stone that you are going to cry. side note - while we are talking of makeup, this was the first time I put on more than just some blush and mascara and actually did my hair since Max was born. Poor Peter.)
It was super hard to leave once he was at Britt's. I wanted to create excuses to keep me there. But he was sleeping and I knew I should go to work. At work, the first thing I did was put up some framed pictures of Max. It was nice to have people stop by my office or stop me in the halls to say welcome back and ask about the baby and how I was doing. I enjoyed all the adult interaction. But really all I wanted to do was pull out my phone and show them a billion pictures of my son.
My day ended up being very full and busy with all the visitors, some meetings, pumping twice (CROSSMARK is awesome and has a private room for nursing mothers only, such a nice thing!), and starting to get back into the swing of things. But regardless of being busy, I still wished I could just sit at my desk and flip through the pictures on my phone. Or, I wondered what Max was doing. Or, I wanted to text Brittany and ask how he was. Or I wanted to call Peter and see if he was missing us since he was working from home today and had the house all to himself for the first time in months.
Brittany's house is only about 10 minutes from my work so I did get to see Max for my lunch break. It's my plan to always leave during lunch and go to Brittany's so I can feed Max and get to see him for a little bit. As a nice plus, Brittany is going to feed me lunch as well. I am so lucky to have her so close. It really helped today that I was able to see him in the middle of the day. Of course, it was hard to pull myself away when I needed to leave. Hopefully I am able to continue to go to her house for lunch which will make me feel like I am not leaving Max for a full day (I do know that he is in great hands with Brittany and that she and her boys love Max).
I did it. The first day back to work has been survived. I am sure it will just get easier and easier. I am not sure that is what I want to have happen. Today, I was reminded about what it is like to get busy at work and feel like there is always more work to be done and wonder how there is time to take a break and still accomplish what I want to. I left work at 5:20 when I really wanted to leave work at 5:00. I know it's going to take some effort to get that work/life balance. I'm just not sure that I want to have to do what it takes to figured that out.
Max rolled from his belly to his back at Brittany's. Peter had been saying that Max rolls now but I never saw it so I thought that maybe Peter was stretching the truth and that Max rolled with help or something like that. But no, Brittany saw it. Before I did. :( I did get him to roll for me tonight but it was a sad reminder of things I stand to miss out on if I work.
But then, at work, people were genuinely happy to see me back. People already need my help with things. I put things on my to-do list and got some crossed off. I had conversations about the good things in my future at CROSSMARK, etc. It felt good to be in an environment where I feel confident about what I am doing and know that I make good decisions and am good at what I do. People look to me for answers.
That's not what it's like for me when I am home being a mom to Max. I get very little done. I'm unsure of myself. I'm insecure. I'm googling what to do. I'm asking my sisters for their advice.
So, yes, it felt like the first day of school. But it was the first day of a completely voluntary school, where you have no obligation to continue and know that can quit anytime you wanted to. It was rough.
Max has slept from 10 pm to 7 am the past two nights. He has slept through the night (meaning I don't have to wake up in the middle of the night to feed him) probably 3 times total before this and never 2 nights in a row. So I have my fingers crossed that this is a pattern that will continue. Have we finally figured out the trick to getting him to sleep through the night? I hope so! (KNOCK ON WOOD)
Here's him sleeping this morning after his 7 am meal - he sleeps so soundly that I still often check to make sure he's breathing.
UPDATE 11/24/11 -
Well, he hasn't been sleeping completely through the night. What we've been getting since I have gone back to work is usually 6 hours of sleep, then he wakes up to eat, and then another 3 hours of sleep after that. I can deal with it this way. Especially since after the feeding, I just swaddle him back up and let him sleep in our bed. I don't have the energy or alertness to stand up and soothe him back to sleep and then lay him down in the pack-n-play. And if I just leave him in our bed, he usually falls right asleep, no problem.
Wife, Mom, and Career Woman. Trying to succeed at all three. Enjoy cruising, time with friends and family, and sleeping. Busy life doesn't leave time for as much fun as in the past but that's okay, it's still a good life.
