Buffy's Ramblings

My baby boy turns 1 year old today.  Time flies, holy crap!  He's been such a happy baby; he's all smiles.  His default volume setting is screech and he's a big ham even as a baby.  He adores his sister, even though she's 50/50 on him lol.  He has grown so fast: 6 month clothes at 2 months old, 9 month clothes at 5 months old, 12 month clothes (for two weeks) at about 9 months, and is currently in 18 month clothes.  He seems to have slowed down a little thankfully.  He LOVES food.  This kid is a little man on a mission when he sees food.  He's looking to be a climber and a little imp. He took his first steps today on his first birthday.  I just can't get over him.  Happy birthday to my little monster, my sweet V <3

Today my first born child turns 3 years old.  THREE!  How did that happen?  Where does the time go?  She was a very serious baby who was ALL about Mommy.  Then she finally crawled at 10 months old and walked at 16 months.  She didn't speak until she was nearly two and a half.  She's a giant Daddy's girl these days. She likes to help with her baby brother, she likes to snuggle with Mommy or Daddy at every opportunity, and she loves to play outside, usually with a ball and lately she's taken a strange sudden interest in hockey, then tell us all about her adventures.  She has shot up in the last 6 months and everybody mentions how tall she is now.  She still looks a lot like her dad, but there's definitely a little of me that shines through. Here are a couple pics of her from the last couple days.  As far as her dress goes, she hates to have the string tied around her, so she wears a dress that's a size (or two) too big and it ...

THE BIRTH Today’s my birthday, so I thought it fitting that I post this today. WARNING: I will hold nothing back in this story, so it’ll be graphic. Oh the agony…of WAITING! My daughter came at 37 weeks and 6 days after my water broke. There was no question that the baby was coming. This was not the case with my son. I’d had contractions on and off for weeks – WEEKS! At one point, we were worried that he’d come before September even started, then nothing. He was due on September 22nd and my mother in law was staying with us to watch my daughter during the event from August 29th to September 26th. When nothing happened by a few days before the 26th, she changed her flight to October 2nd. On September 27th (40 weeks and 5 days), I felt a little nauseated during the afternoon, but otherwise completely normal. Miserable and anxious as hell (hoping I wouldn’t need to be induced). I was out with Tara conversing with neighbors and joking about how long the little guy was ta...

THE SECOND CHILD VS THE FIRST TIMER Having had a child already, you’re a lot more informed and prepared for the second one. There are a lot of things you don’t have to worry about or buy and that kind of thing. You typically don’t have a baby shower after the first baby. In our case, that’s a good thing anyway. Having moved to Minnesota from Virginia last year, we have very few real friends yet and no family around, so no one to plan or attend a shower to begin with. We didn’t take a birthing class this time around. We’re pretty informed now, and have even been through the whole birth thing, so we felt pretty confident that it wasn’t necessary for another course. We also have our workbook from our Bradley class, so we can skim that for a refresher. Plus I’ve already bookmarked the page with the “things to pack” list so we’ll be as prepared as possible when “D day” (as I like to call it, you know – D for delivery?) comes. We haven’t really talked about much regarding rais...

THIRD TRIMESTER With Tara, by this point I was still pretty ok. I had gotten some nausea back and had some heartburn, but ultimately I just don’t remember it being too bad. This time has been pretty miserable if I’m honest. It started early and hasn’t let up much. The nausea is occasional and not bad, but the heartburn has been GOD AWFUL. I take a Tums almost every single night and sometimes during the day too. Milk only sometimes helps. The belly has grown quite a bit and grows faster during this trimester, so sleeping is made difficult because I can’t get comfy, even with a body pillow. However, my weight gain is still perfectly on track and baby boy is measuring on track for his due date as well. I’ve been getting LOTS of Braxton Hicks contractions. Heat makes it worse and when they get really intense and frequent, it can take a lot of water to get them to chill. Rest helps too when possible, which isn’t too much with a toddler around. I have had more anxiety this...

SECOND TRIMESTER & FINDING OUT THE GENDER Last time, I got that boost of energy that around 14 weeks that everyone talks about. “Oh the second trimester is the best!” Well, when you already have a toddler, that boost of energy isn’t nearly as noticeable. I still needed to nap when Tara napped almost every day. Things that should start around the second trimester had already shown up a couple weeks prior too, such as round ligament pain. Joint pain showed up nice and early as well. After talking with many other moms, as well as my midwife, I was assured that was normal…but it still sucked. I continued to feel like I grew really fast. Part of the reason for that was because I was gaining weight a little bit faster than I had the first time. You’re supposed to gain about half a pound a week and I was gaining about a pound (or more during a trip to visit family on the west coast :P). Part of it was also probably just my hormonal imagination, obsessing over feeling fat li...

9 Tips for 9 Months 1) Find a doctor that makes you comfortable! I think it’s important to find a doctor that you connect with. Pregnancy is an emotional time thanks to all those fun hormones and you don’t need a doctor that makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong, your opinion doesn’t matter, or like you’re just another patient. Personally I recommend finding a midwife as I believe in natural birth, but also because I’ve never felt more cared for on a more personal level than with a midwife. 2) Morning sickness sucks, so eat whatever you can and tell your conscience to take a vacation! Morning sickness is a misleading name; it can come on at any or all times of day and night. Some foods or smells may trigger an episode, or you may just feel it constantly regardless. While it’s important to eat healthy, you just do the best you can in the first trimester until that morning sickness passes. If for instance, all you can stomach is an entire box of plain ol’ macaro...

FIRST TRIMESTER & SHARING THE NEWS When I was pregnant with Tara, my entire first trimester was a secret, I slept a LOT, and was nauseated pretty much 24/7. This time, we announced a little early, I didn’t get to sleep much more than usual, and I was nauseated only periodically. Sleep is one of the desperately desired things in the first trimester of pregnancy. However, when you have a toddler to entertain and care for, you don’t get to sleep whenever. I started napping whenever she napped (for 1-3 hours in the afternoon) and going to bed around 9 pm. Of course, no matter when I went to bed, I had trouble sleeping around 4 am because of nausea. The nausea this time around wasn’t as constant, thank God, however it was worse. Whenever it did hit, I got sick – sometimes repeatedly. I couldn’t eat meat at all (a single bite of turkey once sent me running for the porcelain god almost immediately), I couldn’t stand almost any veggies (gagged on broccoli after only a couple ...

GETTING PREGNANT & FINDING OUT When Tara was about sixteen months old, the hubby and I decided we could face having another child. The week of Christmas 2014 was when we officially decided to start trying. When we decided to try for Tara, I had to go off birth control. They say it can take three months for it to completely leave your system. The fourth month is when we achieved Tara. This time I didn’t have to go off birth control, because upon trying to start taking it again after Tara was born, we discovered it made me a little cuckoo. That being said, the hubby expected it to take a few months, and I kind of did too. However, I also suspected it might happen right away. About a week after New Year’s, I noticed I was getting really cranky and was super tired, no matter how much caffeine I drank. The crank was new, but the fatigue – oh that was familiar. I knew I should wait until I officially missed my period and take the test first thing in the morning for bes...

INTRODUCTION Hey all. First let me apologize for not talking about life with a newborn. I meant to write about it, but as you can imagine, life with a baby is busy and exhausting. I enjoyed writing about my pregnancy with Tara, and thought I’d do it again for this pregnancy. I think I’m starting a little later than last time as I’m already 24 weeks pregnant, but that’s not a big deal at this time. This time will be just as honest and graphic as before, but this time the focus will likely be on the differences between this pregnancy and the last one. I had always heard that each pregnancy is different, but always thought that they’d generally be pretty similar none the less. I was wrong. There have been quite a few differences, some of which are typical of not being a first – such as things happening sooner. It’s called the “warmed up” effect. I will say that the biggest difference is that I don’t get to revel in the good things much like I did with Tara. I could o...

THE BIRTH Today’s my birthday, so I thought it fitting that I post this today. WARNING: I will hold nothing back in this story, so it’ll be long and graphic. On August 16th, I woke up at 4PM to watch a League of Legends tournament. I went out to the living room and sat down. I was still groggy from my nap, but I thought I felt weird. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but I felt weird. I was having a conversation with the hubby and right in the middle I noticed that I felt wet and squishy. I didn’t say anything to Greg; I just got up and went to the bathroom to look. There was some clear thin fluid. I was suspicious, but just changed my panty liner and made a mental note to keep an eye on it. I stood up and took three steps before I felt another little squish. I turned around and checked again and there was a little mucus in there too, but still it was more of that fluid. At that point, I called Greg in and told/showed him what was going on. I put an actual pad on and w...

THE WAITING GAME So in addition to all the discomfort of the 3rd trimester, there’s the waiting. The constant wonder of “when?!”. There’s worry in that for a lot of reasons, at least for me. At 32 weeks, your baby has a good chance of surviving if born early, but there’s likely to be complications. The doc will say that if you have more than 5 contractions in an hour – call them because you could be in early labor. Well in class we learned to try some things before panicking. SWEND – Shower, Walk, Eat, Nap, and Drink. If absolutely none of those things stops or slows the contractions, then yes, call the doc. If they help, then you’re pretty safe. I knew that walking tended to induce the contractions so I stuck to the other four to gauge my intensity level. All 5 of those activities play a part in my birth story though, which will post on October 12th. At 34 weeks, I lost my mucus plug. Nobody warns you that you could lose it early and don’t need to worry. I lost mine ...

DIAPERS: CLOTH VS DISPOSABLE So when you think of diapers you think of the disposable kind, right? I always did. It’s the most common path to take and it’s the easiest. However, it’s not the best for the planet, the baby, or your wallet. Now for the record, I do NOT mean for this post to be preachy about cloth diapers. I’m just going to toss what I know out there and y’all can take it as you will. My mom did cloth diapers with me when I was a baby. My grandmother paid for a service to come and pick them up weekly and wash them. They were even the kind that you had to pin closed (my mom admits to having stuck me a couple times – ouch!) and needed to be covered with plastic undies to help protect clothes and stuff from leaks. Guess what? It ain’t like that anymore! We decided to go with cloth diapers after hearing about the experience from our Bradley teacher and reading about it. We got our diapers from Bum Genius and they’re awesome. There’s cool designs, they snap sh...

THE SHOWER & THE NURSERY I think you generally have a baby shower in the third trimester, though not too late. I know someone who had a baby within days of their shower, and I myself did about two weeks after mine. Thankfully we’d gotten pretty much everything we’d need! So about thirty people were invited to my shower, and only 9 showed up (including my friend who hosted the event). A little disappointing, but it was all family that showed up, so that’s the important part! We played a bunch of silly games. Baby item bingo that is played while opening presents, word scramble, names of baby animals, and word search are the little ones that are played with a pen and little board. We also did the guess how big my belly is using yarn one (my mother NAILED that one) and the lottery where you guess when the baby will arrive and all the stats (another one my mother nailed). Then of course there’s presents and cake. The cake was delicious, especially to a pregnant woman w...

OBSTACLES There are a lot of discomforts and issues during pregnancy. Thankfully I didn’t have any series issues, but still some concerning ones. There’s a lot of blood work done in the 1st trimester, but that slows down later. The main thing they check for is a blood count. Now I have had chronic problems with anemia for years so I really wasn’t that surprised when I was told to start taking iron pills early in my 2nd trimester. I was, however, surprised to get a phone call early in my 3rd trimester saying I was anemic. It’s common at that point apparently, but having already been on iron pills, I was concerned. Anyway, I just ended up taking two pills a day and I was fine. It helped with my energy levels some, but it’s really not something that you notice all that much outwardly. There are some other very common ailments that a pregnant woman is more susceptible to. I had a UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) once in high school and it was miserable. It hurt to pee, but I h...

BIRTH PLANS & DOULAS One of the many scary parts of labor, at least for a first timer, is not knowing what’s going to happen other than “I’ll have painful contractions and eventually have to push a giant baby out of a small orifice”. If you take a class, you will learn about what to expect from the experience. In that class, you’ll be asked, or at least advised, to make a birth plan. A birth plan is basically a bulleted list of what you want during labor. Things like whether or not you want an epidural or some other drug for pain relief, who you want present during labor and delivery, what positions you want to labor in, where you want the baby after he/she is out (get cleaned up first or directly on you), and other related things. My birth plan basically had line after line of “I want…” or “I don’t want…” though maybe phrased a little more politely. I didn’t want drugs to even be offered and I wanted no intervention or augmentation. Everything on mine leaned towards “j...

THIRD TRIMESTER Now begins the home stretch. It’s a little surreal to be in the third trimester because it suddenly seems very imminent that birth will happen. Obviously it’s got to happen eventually, but it’s suddenly very real and feels kind of like “omg it could happen any time” in your head. At least that’s how I felt. Oddly enough, transition from second trimester to third happened a lot quicker than first to second. It was like a switch was flipped. I started feeling more tired and achy, a little nausea (the 3rd trimester seemed to mirror the 1st in the fatigue and nausea department, only not as severe – thankfully!), and I felt like my belly grew even faster. I couldn’t get comfortable sitting, standing, or even lying down much at all. This baby loved to be in my ribs making it hard to bend or even breathe. The early movements from the second trimester, which felt like bubbles, are a lot more distinctive in the third trimester. You can mostly tell exactly what the...

BIRTHING CLASSES Birthing classes are another choice to be made, and one to really think about as they do cost money, but they’re also VERY helpful. As you consider it, you’ll want to look into the different types that are out there. The main three (that I know of) are Bradley, Lamaze, and Hypnobirth. Lamaze is the one that I’d always heard about and the one most often pictured in movies and shows. It has the same information, but different laboring techniques. I assume the same is true of Hypnobirth, though I honestly don’t really know much about that one. The class the hubby and I decided on was the Bradley Method. The deciding factor was that in our reading we learned that it was all about going completely natural. That was something that was very important to me. I’d always wanted to have the bragging rights, but once I became pregnant, it was more about what was best for baby (and my own healing). It’s hard to describe exactly what class was like, but I’ll do my be...

FINDING OUT THE GENDER The second trimester is the time to decide if you want to know the sex of the baby or not. I always thought I didn’t want to know, because there are few surprises like that in life and I figured that should be one of them. Once pregnant I crumbled under the idea of being able to focus on what names to think of, how to plan the nursery, etc. etc. It just makes it simpler, so that’s what decided things for us. Plus it was nice to call the baby “her” instead of “it” or a generic “he” that people might mistake for a definitive pronoun. When it comes to names, we’d always had at least one in mind for a girl, but we’ve never been able to really agree on a boy’s name. So we vowed not to discuss it (*cough* argue *cough*) until we found out if it was even necessary. Thankfully we didn’t have to go there. At 20 weeks, the doctor will do a sonogram, but this one will be a long one. They’ll do a full anatomy scan to measure the brain, look at the face, look...

SECOND TRIMESTER Everyone will tell you that the second trimester is the best, but you might think they’re full of crap for the first week or two. In my case, it took me almost a month. A friend of mine said she started feeling better at about 14 weeks, but I was still feeling exhausted all the time, though the nausea did start to dial back a little. It was pretty much gone by about 16 weeks and then I discovered that I loved food again (which was reflected in my weigh in at my doctor’s appointment when I had gained 6 pounds after having lost at every other appointment haha). In addition to the nausea going away, I also got an energy boost. I was able to do some household chores again, was not only willing but anxious to get out and run errands and things. It was nice not to feel so tired that I felt drugged! However, with my newfound energy and love for food also came a few new and stronger symptoms. The main one that got worse was the nosebleeds. It was no longer just ...