Pool Party at the Ostroms

Yesterday kicked off pool party season at our friend's house, Kerri and Chad Ostrom. Kerri and Chad had their first baby, Carter, on December 26th 2010. He is 2 weeks older than Noah. One of Kerri's friends' had a boy, Parker, that was born on November 26th 2010. He is 6 weeks older than Noah. It was so fun to see the boys together. Here they are.

From Left to Right: Parker, Carter and Noah

How cute, right? I can't wait to see what they will all be like next year at their pool parties.

Ava had a blast also. Unfortunately I did not get any pictures of her in the pool because I was holding Noah. She loved the pool, which is a far cry from where she was last year. I am excited for this summer! I bought a small blow up pool for the kids for the summer. Not as big as the one we had last year because Mike kept poo-pooing the idea. I think he may change his mind later. Since I will be home with the kids, I wanted to have something fun to do. Maybe next year we can get one of those pools that are around $300 and have a filter for the kids. (Just planting the seed, Mike!!).

Noah is 4 Months Old...

Happy 4 month birthday Bubba! I can't believe it has been 4 months. It has been a long and short 4 months.

We had our 4 month doctor appointment yesterday. Noah weighs 16 lbs 10 ozs, which is the 84th percentile and is 26 3/4" long, which is the 97th percentile! He is a BIG boy! I figured he had to have grown in length because I noticed that his 6 month onesie was starting to get a little tight. I put him in some 9 month onesie this week! Crazy, right?

Noah is still not a great sleeper. He still only naps 25 mins at a time. Some days I can get him to go back down for 40 more minutes, but that is it. He has slept through the night a couple of times, but wakes once to eat and usually wakes up at 4 am. Our friend, the swing, is the only thing that extends naps and gets him to sleep until I wake him up at 6 am.

He still hasn't rolled over. He will roll up onto his side from his back. That is mostly because he sleeps on his left side. He is grabbing at his toys and putting them to his mouth.

He loves to smile and laughs a little.

He has started recognizing different people and places. Last weekend we went to Mike's sisters house and he cried for a while. I couldn't console him. It was actually Mike that was able to calm him. The Doctor said that that usually doesn't happen until 6 months old, so he is developing fast. It is cognitive development. I hope this doesn't kick us in the butt when we want to go to other peoples houses. We are going to our friends house this weekend for a BBQ and I am praying that he will be ok.

He eats every 4 hours and takes an avg of 6 oz per bottle. We are putting rice cereal in his bottles to help with his reflux. He is still taking prevacid for his reflux as well.

He is ready to move onto size 3 diapers, but I still have lots of 2's left that I don't want to waste.

He is wearing 6-9 month clothes.

Mommy and Daddy and big sister Ava love you tons, Bubba!!!

Our Day at the Phoenix Zoo

For a while now Mike and I have been saying that we need to take Ava to the zoo. Every weekend we come up with a reason not to go. This weekend we decided that we were going to go and take Ava and Noah.

Ava had a BLAST!! All she kept saying is "Let's go see more animals"

Here are some pictures from our morning at the zoo.

Ava playing in the "tractor" at the Little People Play area

Mama and Noah

These Turtles were HUGE...At first I thought they were just fake ones in the area and then they moved..

Me and the kiddos!

We had such a good time at the zoo. We have a membership and it is so worth it because we can get in an hour earlier than the general public. The zoo is nice and empty. We usually only stay for an hour or two.

Now....after we got home from the zoo, it was meltdown central from both of them. Noah was overtired and probably overstimulated and wouldn't eat his bottle. Ava was upset because she wanted to watch Sid the Science Kid, but Mike was installing Noah's fan and had to turn off the power. I guess there is sometimes bad with the good. I am looking forward to when Noah is older and can enjoy the zoo as much as Ava does!

Sleep Update

Well, as you can see there is a pattern to my blogs, sleep or lack there of... It consumes me and frustrates me and I try not to let it, but it does. I have good days, where I say, the heck with it, and days where I am determined to get my kids to sleep.

Noah update.
Noah has good nights and ok nights and crap for naps. He is still pretty much only taking 25-35 minute naps. For his first nap, I try to extend it in the crib. It is still not working and I usually end up getting him up. For his second nap, depending on my attitude for the day, I either put him in his swing after he wakes up or get him up for 30 minutes and try to put him back down. It is frustrating. I don't think he will ever sleep in his crib. What will I do when he is too big for his swing???? Hopefully this nap thing starts to figure itself out. I am hoping by 6 months it will. Which is still a LONG. WAY. AWAY!!!

His nights are getting better. He actually slept in his crib from 6:30pm to 5:30 am on Thursday night (4/28/11). I was shocked and did not sleep well all night because I would hear him and kept thinking he is going to start fussing soon. He never did, he always put himself back to sleep. He had been stuck on a 12 am wake up too, but I am hoping that is gone. I figured the sleeping through the night was a fluke. Last night he slept from 6:30pm-1:30 am in which I fed him and then he woke up again at 4:15am. Not sure why, but I put him in his swing and he slept til 6am. So I can take 1-2 wake ups. He has been really good about going down to bed for naps and bedtime and after I feed him. I used to hold him 30 minutes until I knew he was asleep and then put him in his crib. Now that he can go back to sleep on his own, feeding him at night is only a 20-30 minute ordeal. I can handle that. I am hoping that he will consistently start sleeping through the night soon.

Ava on the other hand is having a rough go at her big girl bed. Not sure if I have updated you all on this or not (too lazy to go back and check), but she is now waking up 2 times a night. It is either 20 minutes after we put her down. She will call for us to get her up. She says," mommy I am ready to get up now" and if I don't come, she calls for daddy. Then she has been waking up around midnight or close to that. Sometimes we only have to go in once, but sometimes we have to go in a couple of times. I knew there would be growing pains with this transition,but we haven't had good sleep since Noah has been here, so it isn't a big shock to our systems.

What I DO love is having my room back. I can go in and watch TV and have MY time. I love, love, love it.

Noah had his first laugh this week (4/29/11). It was super cute. It is harder to get him to laugh then smile, but I love his laugh. He is overall a happy baby and you would never guess that he doesn't sleep. We are practicing rolling over with him. He seems to be content just being on his belly or his back. He is showing some signs that he wants to roll over, but nothing concrete yet. Ava didn't start rolling over until 6 or 7 months. All she ever wanted to do was walk. She was late on everything except walking. She went from crawling at 9 months to walking at 10 months.

Noah likes to hold onto his spit up rag and put it in his mouth. (gross, I know, but there is no harm). He is grasping onto to things good now. He will even put his hand on his bottle when I feed him. Ava never held her bottle until it was almost time to give it up.

We just got our double jogging stroller yesterday. I ordered it online and it came in. We took it out for a walk today and I love it. I am excited to start walking with the kids every day until it gets too hot. Since Noah doesn't nap in the morning, after he wakes, I will put him in the stroller and go. Today, he napped during our walk which was good.  It has speakers on it that I can plug my MP3 player into and I can listen to my music without one earplug in. (Mike didn't like me having them in because it is hard to hear things around you,but I need music to get a good walk or run in).

I started back up on Weight Watchers this past week. They have changed their program, so there is a little bit to get used to. I am excited to get my old body back. I am sick of not fitting into my clothes and with summer and pool parties, I really need to kick it into gear. Plus it is one of my New Year's Resolutions. I also started a Post Natal Boot camp video that I have. I am going to try to stick with it. It is a 12 week video and then you can pick and choose what segments you want to do. It starts out easy. The first 4 weeks are only 18 minutes long (warm up, core/abs, intervals, and cool down). I was sooooo sore the first day because I haven't worked out in over a year. I should post a before here, but I really don't want to yet. I will start posting "after" pictures once I get there, which is going to be a couple of months. This past pregnancy didn't treat me well or you could say, treated me too well...

We have been busy in home improvements here. We got new sink faucets for our master bathroom. I am really excited. The reason we got new ones is because on our old ones, if you didn't shut them off all the way, they would drip water down the shaft (for lack of a better word) and it would make a puddle on the counter top and then start dripping on the floor. We usually didn't catch it until there was a huge puddle on the floor. It was annoying. Here is a picture of the new ones...

We are installing a new fan in Noah's room that will have the remote control so I can dim the lights and can turn the fan on high when we are not in there to keep it cool.

Other than that, we have been just chugging along in this world trying to enjoy these moments with our kids as they do go so fast. Noah is almost 4 months old and Ava is 26 months going on 16...

With that, I leave you with a picture of my boy. (He is definitely not suffering from second child syndrome of me not taking pictures, that I now Ava..)

Noah's Room

We moved Noah out of our room into his room on Easter as well. It had been 15 weeks in our room. We mostly kept him in there so long because he woke up so much at night. We were down to 2 wakings a night, once to feed and once early in the morning, but lately he is waking a little bit more. It was actually harder on me that first night than it was for Noah. I thought I would be totally ok with it, but I guess I miss having him near me. I will get over it, just like I did with Ava and I will now be able to watch TV at night or talk in a normal voice with Mike...

Here is Noah's Nursery....



That is Noah's swing. It is our savior. I just hope he doesn't outgrow it before he learns how to sleep.

 He also slept in his room for his 2nd nap of the day on Easter. He did what he usually does, sleep 30 minutes and then I put him in the swing. I gotta stop doing that. Usually the first nap I will try to get him to go back to sleep and the 2nd nap will be half in the crib in half in the swing. That night he woke up 4 times. Once about 45 minutes after I put him down, once to eat, once at 2:30 and then again at 4:45, in which I put him in the swing until 6am.

When I put him down after his bottle, he talks himself back to sleep.It is the cutest thing. It makes me wonder why he can't do that other times he wakes up.

Speaking of talking, he is talking so much more now. If you make his cooing noise, he mimics you back. 

He has started to hold onto things, his spit up rag or a toy and really look at it. He also likes to put his hand on his bottle. I am hoping he learns how to hold his bottle earlier than Ava did. It will free me up a bit more because he is a lollygagger when it comes to eating. It takes him about 25-30 minutes to eat a 6 oz bottle.

Ava's Big Girl Bed!

Ava made the transition to a "Big Girl Bed" on Easter Sunday. (I don't know what we were thinking moving the rooms around Easter morning, but we did). It was time for Noah to go in his own room, which meant that Ava had to give up her crib. I was really nervous about how it was going to go. We got her mattress a week prior and I bought some bedding for her.We put the mattress in the office/guest room/craft room. She played on it all week and LOVED doing so. She would say, "follow me, I show you Ava big girl bed".

Here is a picture of her new bed in her room.

She slept in it for the first time at her nap time. I didn't want the first time to be at night because I was really not sure how it was going to go. I told her that she had to call for mommy when she wanted to get up. She is going through a "climbing/Ava do it" stage so she was climbing in and out of this bed at the head of it. We put a stool there to help her out. She still sleeps in a sleep sack and her nap time, one that doesn't have feet, so I really didn't want her getting out on her own. As I was reading her books before bed, I could see her look over at her bed a couple of times. After I was done, I put her in her bed, told her that I loved her and would get her up in a little bit and that she should call for me when she was ready to get up.  I turned off the lights and left the room. An hour and 45 minutes later, she was done napping and she called out for me. She did perfect. Nighttime came and again, I was nervous, but she did great. She called out for me as I closed her door and I went back in and told her that it was ok and that it was night night time and that I would come and get her in the morning. About 15 minutes later, she called out again and Mike went in. After that she slept through the night and called out for us in the morning. I hope that this is what it will be like going forward. Yay! yay! for Ava.

Easter 2011

Happy Easter 2011. Above are Ava and Noah's Easter Baskets! Noah didn't really get anything this year, but Ava made out like a bandit. Not a lot of candy, mostly toys and clothes. Holidays are so much more fun with kids. It just has new meaning and is so exciting to watch them. Each year and each holiday gets more fun too. Ava is able to understand things more and do more. She loved all her new toys and love hunting for eggs. We had the family over at our house. It was a beautiful day outside to boost.

Daddy and Ava checking out her Easter basket.

Noah sitting next to his Easter basket.

Ava hunting for Easter eggs. She could have done it all day long.

Ava and her cousin Sophie playing in the sandbox.

It was a great Easter and can't wait until next year when Noah is older.