Sweet Home California

Last week we made our first journey with 9 week old Emmett. Uncle Rob (my brother) and Aunt Kacie were getting married, so the three of us hopped on a plane to my beloved San Francisco Bay Area.  I say "hopped" jokingly.  Those of you who have travelled with an infant know that there is nothing speedy about preparing for a trip with an infant this young.  At one point while I was packing Todd asked if I would like to just bring the whole nursery.  Yes, actually dear...that would be great!  Our days of being able to travel with just carry-on luggage are long gone.

I will say that in all honesty, the preparation was the most difficult part of our trip.  Flying was actually not bad at all and thanks to some words of wisdom from our doula before our trip I felt like we were well prepped for how to manage the trip, the travel process and what to bring.  For us, the trick for flying was simply keeping Emmett under my "hooter hider" the majority of the flight.  He nursed when his ears were bothering him and slept the rest of the time.  On the way home, Hertz even gave us a special curbside drop off at SFO and the airline accomodated our request for an extra seat because the flight wasn't full so we were able to bring the car seat on the plane with us.  We brought our normal stroller but used the car seat adapter and were able to check all of this big gear at the gate. The hotel provided a pack n' play, and we brought unwashed bedding from home so that Emmett would feel like it was still his bed because of the smell.  Overall, it was a pretty successful experience!

The trip itself was wonderful.  The wedding was beautiful, tear jerking (damn you postpartum  hormones!) and a lot of fun.  We were able to leave Emmett with a babysitter for the first time since he was born and it was a completely nerve wracking yet wonderful experience!  We used a nanny service through the hotel and had Emmett and the nanny at the reception with us for the first few hours and then took him and the nanny back to the hotel while we went out to party with the rest of the wedding guests.  First off, the nanny was awesome!  So capable and sweet.  Secondly, I say "party" jokingly.  I think combined Todd and I finished three drinks but it was still nice to be out past 8 pm.  Long gone are the wild days of Todd and Heather!  Waking up to feed an infant with a hangover was just not appealing to either of us.

It was wonderful to be able to introduce Emmett to his family.  It was the first occasion that all four of the Castellano siblings had been together in over 4 years, so it was a really special time for so many reasons. My only complaint would be that there wasn't enough time to spend with everyone. It was also great to be able to spend time in the bay area with my husband and baby.  As Todd knows, my home is always with him and Emmett but I spent 31 years in California and when I go back there I feel oddly torn about calling any other place home.  So I spent a portion of the trip taking Todd to a bunch of different areas and continued showing (selling) him the east bay.  You never know what might happen one day.  :)

Before we left, Emmett had his 2 month check up and his first round of immunizations.  Our little guy isn't so little anymore!  He is measuring over 23 inches, over 13 lbs. and has a head circumference of over 16 cms.  He was over the 65 percentile for everything- not bad considering he was born a week early.  The immunizations weren't nearly as bad as I expected them to be.  I had Todd hold him and I looked away for the actual shots and then I nursed him in the doctors office for about 10 mins immediately afterwards.  Luckily, he skipped the fussy phase that some babies experience and went right to the sleeping for 3 days part.  It really wasn't bad at all.  Dr. Meyer also said that because he is so healthy (and fat) that he should start sleeping through the night soon and that we don't need to feed him if he wakes up less than 6 hours after he went to sleep.  As if by magic, last week he started sleeping 6.5-7.5 hours a night and even maintained this when on vacation sleeping in a strange crib!  Yay, sleeping through the night!

Our brave little tiger after his shots!

Emmett's first blazer wearing experience for the Rehearsal Dinner.

Aunt Kacie and her bridesmaids.

Emmett in his first tuxedo :)

The full tuxedo effect.

Mr. and Mrs. Castellano!

The Castellano women- Me, Melissa, Cousin Andrea and Michelle.

Nap Time??

When you have an infant, sleep is a constant topic of conversation.  This applies to how much sleep the new parents are getting, and the quantity and quality of the sleep of the infant, as they are both inversely related.  Todd and I feel like we have gotten very lucky with Emmett.  He is a generally a "good" baby- he eats extremely well, doesn't fuss too much, likes being out in public and meeting new people and has been a pretty good sleeper at night since he was born.  To quote my Aunt Julie, "You guys won the baby lottery with him." In many ways, we really have- we never have to stress about him eating enough and we have been able to work out a system so we both get a decent amount of sleep every night. However, just because he is a good baby does not mean that after 8 weeks we have completely figured each other out yet.

Before Emmett was born, I read a lot about what to expect from our baby in terms of sleeping and eating.  The problem with reading a lot about this topic is that every book seems to offer a differing opinion or be ambiguous about how often your baby should sleep.  Most of the literature was consistent in stating that at 8 weeks, there is no point trying to create a schedule because it won't stick until the baby is around 3-4 months.  As a result, we haven't been enforcing a schedule with him but rather have been letting him call the shots on when he went down for naps and to bed at night.  Typically the nights we were at home have gone something like this:

8:00 pm- bedtime
10:30 pm- feeding (Heather), then back to bed
3:30 am- feeding (Todd), then back to bed
6:30 am- feeding (Heather), then back to bed
8:30 am- feeding (Heather), then up for the morning

After 8:30 am we would pretty much wake-up and go about our day and when Emmett fell asleep he would nap. Sometimes we would let him go 3 or 4 hours without putting him down.  This worked well for us, in terms of enabling us to be out of the house a lot and get things done.  However, the last few weeks we noticed that one day a week we would have a cranky baby who wanted to sleep almost all day long.  After a few weeks of noticing this pattern, we started trying to put him down for naps more intentionally every 2-3 hours. Most of the time he would refuse to sleep, even though he was clearly tired, unless he was cuddled up on my chest.  (As sweet as this was, spending all day cuddling with my adorable baby is not the most productive use of my time.) So we called in our wonderful doula to observe his sleeping/napping patterns and help us decipher what our little guy needed.

Naturally, the day that she came to work with us was a day that was not his cranky day.  That said, she almost immediately picked up on what our issue was- Emmett needed to nap A LOT more frequently.  She took one look at him and told me to swaddle him and put him in his crib.  I mentioned that he had escaped all forms of swaddling that we had tried. She smiled and said, "ok, then it's time for bat wings."  She proceeded to add an extra layer to our swaddle to reign in his crazy little arms that he loves to swing about wildly.  She then laid him in his crib and he was out!

I looked at her mystified.  How did she do that?  He hadn't even seemed tired!  I had spent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with my baby for the last 8 weeks and I did not pick up the fact that he was ready for a nap.  She proceeded to explain an infant's sleep cycles to me.  (Which I had read about, but had not known how to identify correctly and thus ignored.)  She explained that most new parents miss many of the cue's that help identify the window for when your child is ready to go to sleep- hiccuping, sneezing, jerky limb and head movements, a blank stare at the horizon, glassy eyes and of course, eye rubbing and yawning. Based on her day with us, we now know that Emmett is running on about 1 hr 15 min cycles, meaning that is typically how long he can be awake during the day between naps. Sometimes his naps will be a half hour, sometimes they will be 2 hours but regardless of this he needs to go down when we see those cryptic little signs that he is getting sleepy.  She explained that because we were missing them and his window to sleep, he was getting overly tired and stimulated making it harder for him to go to sleep because his body was in a sleep fighting mode.  We have been testing her theory for the last few days, and I have to say- it works. (So does her magic bat wing swaddle- Houdini is conquered!)  Our schedule at night is still the same great schedule but we have a lot more naps and a lot happier baby during the day now. Talk about feeling ill-equipped to take care of your baby!  He had been trying to tell us what he needed all along and we had just been missing it.

I have been so preoccupied with Emmett's sleep patterns, that most of the photos from this week have been with my phone camera (to update Todd while he's at work), so they are really poor quality.  Our little guy is now over 12 pounds and growing daily!

Houdini #1- I woke up to both arms free of a miracle sleep sack.

Houdini #2- Hi Mommy, you can't keep me contained! 

Happy baby!  His arms are contained and he is well rested.

Getting all dressed up for a day out shopping with the girls!

Mom Jeans

Emmett was born 6.5 weeks ago.  He currently weighs 11.5 lbs.  I love being his mother.  What I don't love is that after more than 6 weeks, I still weigh considerably more than I want to.  Rolls on Emmett are adorable, on me they are not! Ok, so I don't have rolls but every part of me seems to be WIDER than it was 11 months ago- my rib cage, my stomach, my hips, my thighs, my behind, my feet...Despite all of the widening I made the decision to pack up my maternity clothes- I am simply done with that part of this process and do not want to wear them anymore.  I have remained firm in this decision and have resisted the temptation of those forgiving elastic waist bands, despite a horrible afternoon of trying on all my pre-baby pants and having not ONE pair fit me.

My lack of pants, obviously created an issue for me.  We are approaching the end of dress or skirt season, and I live in Portland where even in the summer one cannot wear skirts every day.  I also have no intention of remaining this size and do not want to go out and buy myself a new wardrobe. After much internal (and external) debate I decided that buying one or two "larger" size pair of pants wouldn't kill me or my ego.  So one afternoon after Todd got home from work, our little family walked to a local store.  I literally pulled 15 pairs of pants off the rack to try on, all different sizes starting one size up from what I used to be up to sizes that I never in my wildest dreams thought I could get to.  The sales girl who helped me into the dressing room looked at me like I was nuts but dammit I was walking out of there with a pair of pants!  I started with the smallest size, and slowly started plowing through the dressing room full of jeans...with each size that I discarded my optimism and self esteem plummeted.  Finally, I found one pair that fit- the largest size the store had.  I simply started crying right there in the dressing room.  Then I heard Emmett fussing while he and Todd were waiting for me, so I got myself together and left the dressing room with my first pair of "mom jeans".

It would seem that for me "mom jeans" aren't going to be the high-waisted jeans parodied in Saturday Night Live sketches, but the same kind of jeans I always wore, just significantly bigger in size than I am used to.  I am now looking at the "mom jeans" as a source of motivation- I must escape them! And quickly!  I had my 6 week post-partum doctor's appointment and Dr. Ono cleared me for normal exercise again with these words of caution:  running is going to be excruciating because I am nursing and because of my age, the little pooch in my lower abdomen may not go away until I am done nursing, if at all, regardless of how many crunches I do.  Not awesome news, but it's still the green light to try to get my body back into a shape that I somewhat recognize!  I know these concerns all seem a bit vain, but I think that the process of letting go of this vanity and accepting the reality of my situation is part of being a new mother.  Prior to having Emmett, I was able to focus a lot of my time and energy on my diet, nutrition and working out.  Now that I have a baby, I can still pay attention to these aspects of my life but they will obviously take a back seat to focusing on making sure that I raise a happy, healthy, well adjusted little boy.

Over the last week Emmett has begun smiling and talking to us.  Talk about gratification!  There is nothing like walking over his crib when he wakes up and being greeted by a gummy grin of recognition!  He has also discovered his legs, which means that a lot of his smiles and grins are accompanied by uncontrollable leg kicking which is ADORABLE, unless you are holding him and those uncontrollable kicks land in your stomach.   Grandma Betsy and Grandpa Bob also made the trip up from California to meet the little guy- they got a few smiles and some good cuddling in with him before they headed back home.  Grandpa Bob also taught Todd how to make gnocchi using the "family" recipe, ensuring that his daughter and grandson can have it whenever they want!  Yay!

Also, we received the entire newborn photo session from our photographer, Kristen Honeycutt.  If you want images you can purchase them through her website, or we will be getting the electronic images in the next month so you can print them at the less expensive vendor of your choice.  Use this link, the password is "emmett":

DeCook Newborn Album

Grandpa Bob meets Emmett :)

Grandma Betsy gets her first smile.  It's his way of saying, "Thanks for feeding me!"

Happy Grandma!

Todd learning the art of gnocchi!  Much to my Dad's dismay, we only had whole wheat flour in the house, but they still turned out wonderfully!

Just because...

DeCook Newborn Album